"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inside story of American industry building its first great monopoly and its largest corporation is to be found in the unpublished papers of the key men in the development of the telegraph industry.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.

A complete history of how the telegraph revolutionized technological practice and life in America. Telegraphy in the nineteenth century approximated the internet in our own day. Historian and electrical engineer David Hochfelder offers readers a comprehensive history of this groundbreaking technology, which employs breaks in an electrical current to send code along miles of wire. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 examines the correlation between technological innovation and social change and shows how this transformative relationship helps us to understand and perhaps define modernity. The telegraph revolutionized the spread of information—speeding personal messages, news of public events, and details of stock fluctuations. During the Civil War, telegraphed intelligence and high-level directives gave the Union war effort a critical advantage. Afterward, the telegraph helped build and break fortunes and, along with the railroad, altered the way Americans thought about time and space. With this book, Hochfelder supplies us with an introduction to the early stirrings of the information age.

Traces the development of the weather map and its ability to make the atmosphere visible and predictable, and examines the interaction and relationship between technology and weather forecasting.

Assesses the influence of worldwide media coverage on political decisions, and discusses how the political process adapts to new technologies

Part of a series of detailed reference manuals on American economic history, this volume traces the development and rapid growth of transportation across the USA in the mid-1800s.