[SKRIVA] Lincoln & the Victorian Internet
- From: Ahrvid <ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "fictionmags@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <fictionmags@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 08:33:06 +0200
Reviews:
Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, by David Homer Bates (The Century Co, 1907,
available for free download from eg
https://archive.org/details/lincolnintelegra00inbate )
Mr Lincoln's T-mails, by Tom Wheeler (Harper Collins, 2006,
http://www.mrlincolnstmails.com/ )
The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage (Walker & Co, 1998)
While the telegraph was used to some degree during the Crimean War (1853-1856)
the first national leader to make extensive use of this new technology to
conduct a war was Abraham Lincoln, during the American Civil War (1861-1863).
Here's a bundle of books that can tell us more. I've always been interested in
the history of science and technology, and I also did my military service as a
telegraphist - so for me at least this is exciting reading.
President Lincoln was always very interested in technology. During the Civil
War he'd often personally attend demonstrations of new guns and weapons and he
had the final word in approving Swedish-American engineer John Ericsson's
Monitor with the odd but revolutionary revolving gun tower. Despite being a
technophile, during the first months of the Civil War he didn't use the
telegraph. But as it didn't go well for the Union side he realised he needed to
take more personal control.
Initially the US War Department didn't even have a telegraph office. The
military had to stand in line in the commercial telegraph offices. Since that
was an unworkable situation the telegraph companies soon extended their lines
to the War Department (on their own expense, but they were later reimbursed by
Congress) which was situated in the next block to the White House. Lincoln soon
discovered the power of the telegraph and could be seen walking the short
distance to the War Department daily to check the latest war telegrams.
Lincoln in the Telegraph Office is a unique book in the way that it is
written by one of the WD's telegraph operators, as well as manager of its
telegraph office. Bates met the president daily and worked with him during the
Civil War. Many others who were active during the war were still alive when the
book was published (in 1907). The author had access to all the telegrams, spoke
with co-workers to get further details and had personal memories from many of
the dramatic events. It's an eyewitness account from people who were there!
During the war Lincoln sent over 1000 telegrams. It wasn't the only contact
he had with his generals, though. Sometimes he wrote ordinary letters, he'd
visit them near the front or they'd visit him in the White House. But the
telegraph was unmatched in speed when dramatic things happened. He would send
telegrams requesting news from different fronts. Lincoln would also read all
the military telegrams that went through the WD and get a constant bird's eye
view over war developments.
When he made his daily visits to the WD he would go to the drawer where the
latest telegrams were and when he came to the last new one he would remark
"Well, boys, I'm down to the raisins". He once explained this expression: a
story about a little girl who had eaten something that made her sick, and it
was topped with raisins. She puked and puked and finally the raisins came -
that was the last contents of her stomach. (Lincoln often had interesting
anecdotes to tell.)
One example of dramatic events was the second battle of Bull Run. (Lincoln
wasn't telegraph connected during the first.) Lincoln couldn't get in touch
with his commanding general, because the telegraph line hadn't been extended
that far or the enemy had cut the lines (the lines were usually extended to
follow the armies, but it could take time). But he got in touch with a colonel
Haupt who was a bit from the battlefield but sent out scouts and kept the
president informed - almost on a minute by minute basis. "What became of our
forces which held the bridge till twenty minutes ago, as you say?" Lincoln
telegraphed to Haupt. He learned they had been driven off but managed an
orderly retreat. For several days Haupt was Lincoln's eyes and ears near the
battlefield. The colonel was later rewarded by being promoted to brigader
general.
Lincoln was actually reluctant to micro-manage his generals. Sometimes it
could be weeks between his outgoing telegrams (though he kept an eye on ingoing
military messages, "down to the raisins") and he was very patient with even the
most incompetent general. His basic instint was to trust the general in the
field, but one day his patience ended with the not too successful general
McClellan. He was in charge of the army of the Potomac who had 60 000 men and
was ready to strike at the Confederate capital Richmond and possibly end the
war.
But McClellan, known for some reason as Little Napoleon, just sat there. He
sent excuse after excuse for not attacking, eg claiming that the Confederates
confronting him were superior in numbers. (They were about 13 000, but general
Lee had ordered some tricks to be employed to make it seem like a much bigger
force, including letting troops march and then come back in a circle, painting
logs black to look like cannons, etc.) Also, McClellans horses were fatigued!
Lincoln lost his patience and sent this message:
"I have just read your despatch about sore tongued and fatigued horses - Will
you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the
battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?"
McClellan was replaced. (An later he ran as the Democrat presidential
candidate against Lincoln, and lost.)
The president was of course Commander-in-Chief, but many daily military
matters were managed by his Secretary of War named Stanton (who Bates gives a
lot of praise). Lincoln would set up the broader strategies and intervene
during crises. But as the war wore on he tended to get more and more involved.
He would often look over the shoulder to the operator as a message was
deciphered. Sometimes he'd stay all night during some crisis and wait for news;
he had a backroom with a bed where he could take a nap.
It's a fascinating book full of episodes and details, and it is from people
who where there as it happened! (It's out of copyright so you can download it
for free.) We can even follow the assassination. The author Bates wasn't on the
Ford theatre but heard about what had happened as he had the watch in the
telegraph office. We can follow how the telegraph sprung into action to send
out orders to catch J W Booth and the co-conspirators, and how news came in
about how the chase progressed.
If you're the least bit interested in the subject Lincoln and how he used the
telegraph, it's well worth reading.
Mr Lincoln's T-mails, by Tom Wheeler, on the other hand basically just repeats
what Bates already told us in 1907. Some of Wheeler's story-telling seems
almost like plagiarism of the earlier book. It's not like someone could sue
him. The 1907 book is in the public domain and I guess he can borrow as much as
he wants, it's just that his book is unnecessary when we have an earlier much
better book from an eyewitness.
Except for one thing. Of course Lincoln's telegrams were sent in cipher.
Bates mentions this but doesn't go into any details. The enciphering system was
perhaps still a military secret in 1907? Wheeler has some details about this,
though.
It was easy to tap telegraph lines. You just needed to know where the line
was and you could send out a party and connect to it. Prior to the war some 80
000 km of telegraph lines had been built in America alone, and as said
temporary lines were set up to follow the troops. You couldn't guard all of
this.
Several encryption and/or coding systems were used, but sometimes messages
were also sent in the clear. We read:
"Important messages were sent in a cipher that was never broken by the
Confederates. This unbreakable code was known as the Route Code, so called
because the message contained within it instructions for the route to be used
to piece it together.
To use the Route System the operators followed several steps. First the number
of words in the original message was counted. That count was then looked up in
the cipher book where it corresponded to a code word. A 32-word message, for
instance, was signaled by the cover name "Guard." The cover word was sent
first, telling the operator at the other end that the next 32 words were the
message and that the route corresponding to the code word "Guard" should be
used to decode the message. In the case of the "Guard" code word, it told the
receiver that the original encoder had broken the message into a grid with five
columns across and seven rows down. In each cell created by the column/row
intersection there was one word. The "Guard" cipher told both the coder and the
decoder which "route" to follow through that matrix (e.g., up column 1, down
column 3, up column 5, down column 2, etc.)."
It is said that the Confederates became so frustrated with this cipher that
samples were published in Southern newspapers and the readers were challenged
to crack it (which no one did). Here's another example, and I guess the NSA
laugh their pants off:
"President Lincoln developed his own simple code that he used for messages that
werent of the utmost security. Here is the transcript of a Lincoln-encoded
telegram that he sent from the front in 1865:
...
To Charles A. Tinker, War Department, Washington, D.C.A. Lincoln its in fume a
in hymn to start I army treating there possible if of cut too forward pushing
is he is so all Richmond aunt confide is Andy evacuated Petersburg reports
Grant morning this Washington Secy War. (Signed) S.H. Beckwith
Reading this message backward rapidly, phonetically, and understanding that S.
H. Beckwith was General Grants telegraph operator, the true text of the
presidents message emerges:
...
Washington Secy War: This morning Grant reports Petersburg evacuated and is
confident Richmond also. He is pushing forward to cut off if possible their
retreating army. I start to him in a few minutes. (Signed) A. Lincoln"
By this time you may have acquired a taste for knowing more about the
development of the telegraph in general. The Victorian Internet, by Tom
Standage, is a good start. This book hasn't much of technical details (there
are better books for that; I have read some) but you'll get a good historical
overview.
We learn about the first optical telegraph systems (in France, late 18th
Century, developed by Claude Chappe; optical telegraphs later came in eg
Britain and Sweden) and then we move to Samuel Morse, who in a way invented the
telegraph. What he actually did was to take components from other inventors and
put them together into a system that actually worked. There was an earlier,
competing system developed by Cooke and Wheatstone in England that used needles
to point to letters, but it was a bit unpractical.
The first line was built by Morse and opened in 1844 between Washington and
Baltimore. Morse didn't actually invent the morse code as we know it. He
invented the principles behind it, you know the dats and doshes...sorry, I was
distimed there for a moment: dots and dashes, of course. Morse originally
intended to rely on a code book in which words would be indexed. You wouldn't
send the text itself but only numbers pointing to the code book. It was one
Alfred Vail who developed the morse alphabet (and originally the US railways
used a different morse alphabet, BTW).
A sidenote is that our first author (Bates) in his 1907 book is rather
negative to Morse and says he tried to grab too much of the glory from the
telegraph and that the real invention was the electro-magnetic relay, invented
by Joseph Henry, which made it at all possible to send signals over longer
distances. But it is also the case that Bates wryly notes that Morse hated
Lincoln, so that may explain his critique.
In a very short time 10 000's of km of telegraph lines spread. We hear about
the attempts to cross the Atlantic. A first cable was laid down in 1858, but
only worked for two days. The problem was that they had relied on a
self-appointed "expert" on telegraph cables, a Dr Whitehouse, who was a moron.
He thought that "the signal will always get through" if you pump up the
voltage, and he fried the insulation - that was bye-bye, dear cable.
There were other problems too. How electricity worked wasn't really clear at
this time. The resistance of the cable made pulses "smeared". It therefore took
16 hours (!) to send a 100 word message from Queen Victoria to the then US
president Buchanan! Lord Kelvin came to the rescue. With better cables and low
voltage, signals could be registered with the mirror galvanometer that he
invented. The new cable that came 1866 worked. And from then on, people began
laying cables all over the ocean floors.
Shortly all parts of the world were connected. We began to be globalised.
Business and finance were quick to take advantage of the new wonder
technology. Prices of different commodities, stock markets, all kinds of
business information could be spread incredibly fast. You could make business
deals over the wire.
Private messages were only a minority of the traffic. Sending a telegram
wasn't cheap - a typical price in the US in the 1800s would be 25 cents for 10
words (maybe a quarter of a day's pay for a worker). People employed different
coding systems to "compress" the messages and save money. The author has a
chapter about that and how the International Tele Union tried to regulate what
kind of codes one could use. Complicated messages were slower to send and
telegraph companies lost money if people could use too efficient coding.
Another subject covered is the pneumatic tube systems created to connect
telegraph offices or entire cities - the system in Paris was particulary well
developed.
Telegraphists became the new heroes, a guild of demi-gods, who would forge
friendships over thousands of kilometres. The most godlike where those who
could tap the key the fastests. Love were sometimes born through the cables (in
some telegraph companies up to 1/3 of the operators were women) and there were
even marriages performed via telegraph. The operators of the "Victorian
Internet" were somewhat like the original hackers of the early computer age -
wild, odd, self-assured.
Then someone invented "duplex", ie to be able to send both back and forth on
one line at the same time. Thomas Edison invented "quadruplex", ie four
messages at the same time! Edison was a very competent and fast telegraph
operator and soon invented a stock market telegraph that laid the foundation
for his invention empire. (BTW, he proposed to his future wife in morse
code...) The slow downfall of telegraphy came with the attempts to develop the
"harmonic telegraph", to squeeze even more through the wire. One Alexander
Graham Bell worked on it when he happened to notice that his experimental
equipment could transport sound itself.
In the coming decades the telephone would surpass the telegraph in
popularity. A big blow to the fraternity of telegraphists was the automatic
telegraph. You prepared a strip of paper with holes in it and then you could
rush messages through the wire at speeds maybe ten times higher than the
fastest telegraph operator. And those strips could be produced on keyboards by
unskilled operators - the demi-gods were no longer needed! This developed into
the teleprinter and the telex system.
The Victorian Internet ends its history here, sometime in the beginning of
the 20th century.
There's an important piece of history the book thus doesn't cover: wireless
telegraphy. This actually created a second chance for the skilled telegraphist.
When you send morse code over the air the quality of the signal varies a lot
and sometimes it's so weak that only a human ear can make it out. This meant
that automatic signalling in most cases wouldn't work, and the manual telegraph
operator was once more needed. And one day in 1904 a guy from Luxemburg landed
in New York harbour, and already in 1905 he had created the world's perhaps
first low cost wireless transmitter/receiver, called Telimco (see
http://earlyradiohistory.us/1905teli.htm ).
And then Hugo Gernsback went on doing a few other things too.
--Ahrvid
Ps. Crossposted to SKRIVA also.
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