"Much of the inside story of American industry building its first great monopoly and its largest corporation is to be found in the unpublished papers of the key men in the development of the telegraph industry. This wealth of source material is here made the basis of a history of the telegraph in the United States during its first thirty years--from the time when a portrait painter built his canvas stretcher into a crude invention called the "magic wire" to the time when Western Union's great wave of consolidation swept over the last of the independent telegraph companies. The book is primarily an economic history which traces, behind the breathless race of uncoiling wire, the strategy of ledger and lawsuit that carried the American telegraph industry in two decades from a total capitalization of a few thousand dollars to one of more than $40,000,000. It follows the trend toward monopoly from Amos Kendall's original plan for organization of Morse patentees, through Henry O'Rielly's dream of a democratic council, to Hiram Sibley's famous Six Party Contract, and analyzes the delicate negotiations by which the "irrepressible conflict" between Western Union and the American Telegraph Company was resolved. Because the book's emphasis is economic, it has implications beyond the history of a specific industry. It reveals the general pattern of all industry in the United States in the nineteenth century and gives fresh insight into the whole problem of private versus government enterprise."--Dust jacket.

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