[THS] Trains and Telegraphs

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 03:36:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: delanceyplace <daily at delanceyplace.com>

In today's excerpt - some commentators say that trains and telegraphs were the two
most profound inventions of any age, since they collapsed time and distance more
 than any invention before or since. The telegraph also almost immediately brought
with it the age of mass media:
"Samuel Finley Breese Morse was a painter, inventor, professor, unsuccessful
politician,
philanthropist, and entrepreneur. In 1832, as he sailed home to America from
Europe,
he occupied himself with the idea of a device that could communicate over great
distances by sending electrical signals through wires. A bit more than a decade
later, by 1844, he had a design, and he then coaxed the U.S. Congress to bankroll
his invention. On Friday, May 24, of that year,
Morse gathered with assorted Washington muckety-mucks in the U.S. Supreme Court
chamber to show how his contraption worked. Using his homemade code of dots and
dashes, he transmitted a sentence, which was miraculously received by his colleague
Alfred Vail in Baltimore, more than sixty kilometres away. A friend's young daughter,
Miss Annie Ellsworth, had been given the honour of composing the historic message,
and she had opted for the fashionably biblical 'What hath God wrought?' From the
 Book of Numbers, it describes God's blessing of the Israelites. In the context
of Morse's invention,
however, it might be taken with a whiff of irony. ... Morse's telegraph machine
is rightly hailed for helping shrink the world, form enabling instant communication
across entire continents, and a few decades later, for allowing messages to be
transmitted
around the world by transoceanic cable.
"It also revolutionized marketing. The telegraph followed on the heels of the
European
industrial revolution, and in North America, manufacturing had mechanized and
expanded.
Rural families had gravitated to cities to work in the fast-growing factories, which
in turn churned out products for burgeoning urban populations. With the rise of
railways through the nineteenth century, goods could be transported overland, en
 masse, to distant markets, resulting in more product choices in stores. And how
 did the telegraph fit into the picture? It allowed manufacturers to communicate
 instantly with newspapers in distant cities and towns, buying advertisements to
 attract thousands
of potential new customers.
"Barely a year after Morse dotted, dashed, and dotted his way into history,
Philadelphia
businessman Volney Palmer opined, quite rightly, that many manufacturers had
neither
the time nor the inclination to place ads in dozens - or even hundreds - of
newspapers
on a regular basis. Palmer offered his services as a sort of middleman, buying large
amounts of space in several newspapers and then parceling and selling it to
businesses,
who would have to create their own messages. And so ... the advertising agency was
born. ...
"Inspired by Palmer's success, like-minded advertising agencies sprouted up like
 daisies, buying and selling vast amounts of advertising spacein distant markets
 to expansion-minded manufacturers. Big business and 'mass' advertising had come
 together in a union whose rumblings would be felt throughout the nineteenth
century.
Outfits like Proctor & Gamble and, later, Coca-Cola were pioneers in early mass
advertising and rapidly grew to become international icons. Morse's gizmo did more
than shrink the world; it set in motion a new era of big-league consumerism and
allowed marketing to blossom into a full-blown industry."
Author: Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant
Title: The Age of Persuasion
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Date: Copyright 2009 by Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant
Pages: xv-xvi