The electric telegraph and the undersea cable were significant adaptations of one of the major technological advances of the nineteenth century the application of electricity to communication. Prior to this development, communication in Canada had been inseparably linked with techniques of transportation. The use of steam power in ships and in a rapidly expanding railway system brought about new and dramatic changes to transportation in mid-nineteenth century Canada and these advances were matched by equally spectacular growth in the field of communication. The electric telegraph was used to coordinate the transportation system and it also generated an entirely new telecommunication industry. Virtually every aspect of Canadian life was touched or altered by the telegraph: its application improved the immediacy of reporting in newspapers, permitted increasing centralization of government and business, and initiated the modern era of inexpensive, personal communication for every level of society. The importance of these changes to Canada cannot be over stressed for, as C. P. Stacey has noted, "more than in most countries the history of the building of the state is the history of the development of communications."
Growth of the Telegraph System
Several different systems of telegraphic communication resulted from experiments with electricity carried out in several countries during the early 1800s. The first Canadian telegraph line, established between Toronto and Niagara Falls in 1846, utilized the equipment and dot and dash code system perfected by Samuel B. Morse (1791-1872) in the United States. The Canadian owned Toronto, Hamilton, Niagara and St. Catharines Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Company operated a single line which connected with an early American line at Lewiston, New York. This link replaced slow lake steamers for communication between centres on Lake Ontario, and gave access to American and European news available from New York City.
Destined to dominate the industry in Canada, however, was the Montreal Telegraph Company. Organized in 1847 with capital of $60,000, this Canadian company sought to connect the major commercial centres in the Province of Canada. Its symbol, a mailed fist grasping lightning bolts, would become a familiar symbol in ensuing decades. During the early years of the company, as lines were developed between Montréal and Toronto, the expertise employed in its direction and in construction was supplied largely by Americans such as O.S. Wood, the first telegraph pupil of Samuel Morse. Materials used in the construction of the company's lines cedar poles, white oak brackets, glass insulators and no.9 English galvanized or zinc-covered iron wire, the first of its type used on the continent became standard for the entire industry in North America. With superior construction materials and adept management, especially after Montréal capitalist Hugh Allan became president in 1851 and added the company to his extensive investments in shipping and railways, this company managed to absorb virtually every competitor over the next two decades, including the original Toronto to Niagara Falls line. Canadian operators trained by the company subsequently became involved in the forefront of telegraphic development and expansion in British North America and the United States.
Frederick N. Gisborne (1824-1892), a Montreal Telegraph Company operator, was employed in 1848 by the British North American Telegraph Association to garner financial support in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for its proposed linking of Québec City and Halifax by telegraph. With characteristic independence, and inducements from the United States, neither colony would cooperate and the project's only immediate result was a line as far east as Rivière-du-Loup. Having rejected the overtures of the British North American Telegraph Association, the Nova Scotia government had constructed a telegraph between Halifax and Amherst by 1849, while a private group of New Brunswick capitalists financed a line from Amherst, via Saint John, to the United States border at St. Stephen. The main incentive for this construction was the American Associated Press which desired to have prompt transmission to New York City of European news brought to North America by Cunard steamers docking at Halifax. In 1851 Samuel Cunard used his influence to form the Nova Scotia Electric Telegraph Company and to purchase the government telegraph lines, thus providing yet another example of the integration of transportation and communication interests.
Québec and the Maritime colonies were linked by telegraph in 1851, but the unprofitable line was eventually taken over by the Montréal Telegraph Company. The Province of Canada passed a general Telegraph Act in 1852 and as a result numerous short lines were built. These combined with earlier lines to provide additional American connections to Troy in New York state, to Vermont, and to Detroit via Windsor. Smaller Canadian centres, such as Bytown and Peterborough, now had ready access for the first time to current European and American news. This had a very direct impact by increasing the prominence and importance of newspapers, several of which adopted the term telegraph in their names to denote the current nature of the information presented. Canadian business and banking institutions made greater use of the telegraph in conducting their affairs, beginning a trend to centralized decision taking which would grow as the century progressed. Railway activity was entirely coordinated by telegraph by the mid-1850s and the telegrapher took a prominent place in every small community served by a railway. The advantages of instant communication were not missed by politicians, who began to utilize the new technology to assist in the formation of party organizations.
The Atlantic Cable
Similar expansion and utilization took place in New Brunswick and in Nova Scotia where lines were built on Cape Breton Island and around the southern shore to Yarmouth and Annapolis Royal. Connection with the island colonies of Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland was effectively blocked until techniques were developed in Britain to insulate wire against water, rock, tide and biological damage. The first successful undersea cable was laid across the English Channel in 1850 and this opened the way for similar feats in the Maritimes.
In British North America, Frederick Gisborne directed the first successful venture and in 1852 an undersea cable was laid between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. He conceived this as the first of a series of steps which he had outlined in 1851 when he approached the Newfoundland government for financial assistance in surveying a telegraph route across the island. The plan, again motivated by the financial rewards promised for supplying European news to New York City even more rapidly, called for a trans-Newfoundland telegraph, a cable to Cape Breton, and a connection to Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and the existing lines to New York. The New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company was formed by Gisborne in order to carry out the scheme, but by 1853 the company faced bankruptcy and the work was far from completion.
Gisborne found financial assistance for his scheme in New York City, but the personal cost was high as he surrendered direction of the project to the American financier Cyrus Field. From the Newfoundland government Field obtained a new company charter which granted a fifty-year monopoly on telegraphs and cables in return for Newfoundland becoming a link in the proposed undersea cable connection between Britain and America. Despite the fact that no undersea cable in the world had ever been laid for a distance greater than 140 miles (225.4 kilometres) Field rushed to complete telegraphic connection between St. John's and New York City in 1856. The following year an attempt to lay an Atlantic cable failed. In 1858, two ships beginning in mid-Atlantic successfully laid an undersea cable across that ocean. The great public celebrations on both sides of the ocean marking completion of the cable soon gave way to equally great pessimism; damage caused by the crude cable laying equipment combined with other factors to cause a rapid deterioration of the cable and its complete failure after only one month of service. Investors who had been anticipating enormous profits on the basis of $100 per word messages were faced with huge financial losses.
It was not until 1862 that Cyrus Field was able successfully to renew interest in the idea. Improvements had been made in cable manufacturing techniques and in cable laying equipment, and by 1865 the Great Eastern, the largest ship afloat, was able to carry the entire 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometres) of telegraph cable and lay it as a single, uninterrupted line. Despite this, the cable broke during a storm and the effort was abandoned for the year. Still another new company, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company was organized to renew the attempt in 1866. Equipment was further perfected and a new cable was manufactured and successfully laid between Valentia, Ireland and Trinity Bay, Newfoundland in fourteen days during July. By September, the first broken cable had been recovered and also connected in Newfoundland. This project was to be the forerunner of dozens of other major successful undersea cables in other parts of the world. The cooperation of electrical, mechanical, and marine engineers, hydrographers, and many other specialists made the Atlantic cable a landmark in the modern era of great engineering accomplishments.
The West
The success of the Atlantic cable resulted in the end of another visionary project the Collins Overland Telegraph, which first introduced the electric telegraph to British Columbia. This plan, a bold one in an era of adventurous projects, called for construction of a telegraph line from North America to Europe by way of the Bering Strait. This scheme, conceived by Perry McDonough Collins, appeared to be a logical, if difficult, connection between existing continental telegraph systems.
Collins's original plan, for which he received a Canadian charter for the Transmundane Telegraph Company in 1859, was to build through Canada from Montréal, across Hudson's Bay Company lands, through British Columbia and the Yukon before crossing from Russian Alaska to Asia. The Western Union telegraph to California in 1860 and opposition to Collins's scheme on the part of the British Colonial Office were factors which altered the plan. A Western Union subsidiary, the California State Telegraph Company extended its lines north to New Westminster, British Columbia in 1864. A charter was obtained from the British Columbia government and special "Russian Extension" stock was issued by Western Union which now controlled the project. Collins, like Gisborne, dropped from involvement as those who provided the funds took over directing the work. Surveys were carried out in 1865 in British Columbia, largely by ex-Union army personnel, and materials for construction were assembled. The hardships and physical obstacles faced by the construction and survey crews were awesome and winter forced a temporary halt to the work. The news that the 1865 Atlantic cable had failed spurred activity which continued until mid-summer of 1866. The success of the Atlantic cable brought an end to the project in British Columbia, with a line completed north of Hazelton and men and supplies at various, more northern points on the route.
Although the main objective failed, the Western Union Russian Extension Telegraph was valuable to British Columbia: communication was established via California with the rest of the world; Victoria and New Westminster were no longer solely dependent upon ships for communication; the interior was more adequately explored; and a line of communication existed to the gold fields of the interior. North of Quesnel the lines were abandoned, but the route would be revived again at the time of the Yukon gold discovery. Western Union had little interest in operating unprofitable telegraph lines within British Columbia and these lines were leased to the colony in 1871, later assumed by the Dominion government under the terms of Confederation entry and finally purchased outright in 1881.
The 1860s saw other developments take place which resulted in attempts to improve communications between East and West in British North America. Canadian expansionists considered the potential of the vast western lands controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company and officials at the Colonial Office looked with interest at telegraph and cable schemes which could be justified for imperial purposes. The Hudson's Bay Company was acquired in 1863 by British investors who sought to expand the exploitation of the region's resources beyond the fur trade. This ambition led to a survey of western lands between Fort Garry and Jasper House by Doctor John Rae in order to determine, among other things, if a telegraph would be feasible. The report was indeed favourable and telegraph construction material was assembled at Fort Garry in order to begin work on a line. The project was delayed indefinitely, however, by negotiations which eventually led to the acquisition of the company's western lands and the telegraph materials by a newly organized Canada. During the same period, Canadian-born financier Edward Watkin employed his Grand Trunk Railway interests and the support of the Canadian government to secure a charter for the Atlantic and Pacific Transit and Telegraph Company. The company was to provide communication from Canada to the Pacific, first by telegraph and then by road. Despite all of these efforts the Dominion of Canada acquired Rupert's Land and the North-West Territories in 1870 with no form of telegraph communication in existence.
The Riel uprising at Red River, continued threats by Fenians, and a desire for effective control over the western lands led the Canadian government quickly to establish a telegraph link to the East. The result was a line between Minnesota and Manitoba which the Northwestern Telegraph Company completed in November 1871, using materials assembled earlier by the Hudson's Bay Company. Until the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway the only telegraph links between British Columbia, Manitoba, the North-West Territories and Eastern Canada existed through the United States and American telegraph companies.
Internal communication by telegraph was established in the North-West Territories between 1874 and 1879 as the Canadian government worked through private contractors to establish a single telegraph line between Edmonton and Fort William, roughly along what was intended to be the route of the long-awaited Pacific Railway. The surveys for the Dominion telegraph line were directed by Sandford Fleming, a determined advocate for the orderly development of communication facilities to undeveloped regions through the successive construction of telegraph, wagon road and railway. Originally intended also to connect Kamloops and Edmonton, a link which was never built, the Dominion telegraph line broke the complete isolation of western communities such as Battleford and Edmonton. However, the tremendous distances, difficult weather conditions, and inferior construction materials combined with lack of effective maintenance to make the line woefully unreliable. Effective telegraphic communication was not established in the West until the 1880s.
Consolidation
A general consolidation of telegraph lines owned and operated by the Canadian government began in 1881 with the creation in one department of a Government Telegraph and Signal Service under the energetic direction of Gisborne. Western Union assets in British Columbia were purchased and extensive sections of ineffective lines in the North-West Territories were either abandoned or turned over to the newly organized Canadian Pacific Railway. The government embarked on an extensive programme of reconstruction and expansion in areas where private telegraph companies considered it unprofitable to operate. This renewal or expansion brought the telegraph to new settlements and Indian reserves in the North-West, communication to resource industries and islands in British Columbia, cables and land lines to communities along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, and cables to islands and lighthouses in order to assist navigation and weather reporting. These services, along with lines to such government agencies as North West Mounted Police posts and immigration and quarantine stations, were operated for the general benefit of the population and were never commercially profitable.
Canada's first coast to coast telegraph service was established by the Canadian Pacific Railway and was opened to the public in January 1887. This system encompassed lines acquired from the government under a general agreement, lines constructed by the company and lines leased from other companies. The result, for the first time, was full of commercial service across Canada, with additional access to Britain and Europe via a CPR agreement with the Commercial Cable Company. At the time of its completion the CPR had only one major business rival the Great Northwestern Telegraph Company. This telegraph giant was primarily the creation of Erastus Wiman (1834-1904), who had failed in the 1860s to establish a telegraph between Canada and the Pacific. Working from New York City, Wiman in 1881 became president of the Manitoba-based Great Northwestern Telegraph Company which had been chartered in 1880 to operate lines into the North-West Territories, but whose charter permitted extraordinarily broad amalgamating and leasing powers.
Operating on the basis of a friendly alliance with the huge Western Union Telegraph Company, Wiman was able to acquire from it the Dominion Telegraph Company, a firm created in 1871 with extensive holdings in eastern Canada. Wiman was unable to secure the CPR's telegraph rights when the decision was made to operate a separate commercial company, but by exerting pressure he did lease the Montréal Telegraph Company. Through all of these companies' holdings a telegraph system was assembled which in 1884 had 1,992 offices, 3,027 employees and 22,507 miles (36,236 kilometres) of telegraph line. The Great Northwestern Telegraph Company operated telegraphic lines in connection with over thirty-five different railway companies.
By the mid-1880s Canada was served by an extensive telegraph system linking the major provincial centres and Ottawa, as well as providing communication to the North-West and the major islands off both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. It was only after Confederation that regional indifference and physical barriers were overcome, permitting a break from earlier complete dependence upon American telegraph facilities for inter-colonial communication. Despite some early efforts, the primary incentive for internal expansion of the electric telegraph in the Maritimes and British Columbia came from efforts to provide telegraphic communication between Europe and the United States.
The tendency toward amalgamation of existing companies, encouraged in later years by more liberal charter provisions, produced a Canadian telegraphic communication system based upon two large competing companies, a few small regional companies, and government telegraph lines and cables in isolated areas. In Canada the commercially profitable communication links were privately owned and closely integrated with American telegraph and cable companies. This country was an exception within the British Empire where internal telegraphs were very largely government owned and normally associated with the post office. The existence of the Canadian telegraph system was a significant contribution to national unity during the late nineteenth century when strong, regional divisive forces were often at play.
Impact of the Telegraph
The press in Canada was the first major feature of the communications system to be changed significantly by the introduction of the electric telegraph. A selection of current news from around the world now appeared on the front page of newspapers which had previously emphasized local events or news items from elsewhere that were weeks or even months old. Individuals across Canada had access to the same news on nearly the same day. Such immediate service created a popular demand that could be quite outspoken if the telegraph lines were out of service for any length of time. Telegraphers in the early years served as unofficial news sources, often sending the first word of significant local events. Similarly the great occurrences of the day were first known in the telegraph office and in times of political crisis, elections, war, or natural disaster it was normal in mid-nineteenth-century Canada for large crowds to gather around the telegraph offices to obtain the latest news. The medium of transmission had effects on language, literary style and even on subject matter.
Advertising is, of course, another form of news. The existence of a national telegraph system permitted the creation of large mail-order firms such as those operated by the Hudson's Bay Company out of Winnipeg, the T. Eaton Company out of Toronto, and Woodward's out of Vancouver. All of these were based on the model established by R. W. Sears in the United States and utilized the telegraph to coordinate effectively the mass movement of goods from production areas to distribution centres.
Production was similarly affected by the telegraph system as orders placed in regional centres could be rapidly communicated to production facilities, thus permitting improved planning and scheduling of production in a variety of industries from flour milling and brewing to manufacturing of farm equipment. Physically isolated natural resource industries such as mines, lumber mills, and canneries were always in the forefront seeking support for the extension of the telegraph system to permit more centralized control and efficient operation. The financial institutions which supported that activity were similarly affected. Money "by wire" became a standard method of transacting business. Credit could be extended or denied on the basis of immediate background checks. To ensure complete privacy, Canadian banks adopted complex telegraph codes to handle all financial communication. Commodity and stock markets became larger and more efficient as regional centres were connected by direct private telegraph wires used solely for the transaction of these affairs.
Coordination of railway activity in Canada by telegraph had become standard by the mid-1850s, after an initially sceptical introduction based upon the unreliability of early lines and equipment. The coordination and scheduling of trains were major services performed by telegraph and the result was safer and more reliable transportation. In turn, greater speed of operation was possible and this led to demands for the reconciliation of the nation's many different time keeping systems. Movement of trains before the adoption of standard time was a much more difficult operation than it is today. The railway system was a major force in the move for the adoption of standard time and the telegraph system made it possible.
Numerous less obvious developments and innovations were made possible in the mid-nineteenth century by the electric telegraph system. Surveying and mapping employed the telegraph to provide accurate time signals which in turn permitted exact positioning of prime meridians and international and provincial boundaries. Weather data was gathered, often through observations made by telegraphers, over a wide area, permitting the establishment of patterns and formulation of predictions for the first time. Life saving stations were linked by telegraph at a very early stage on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in order to expedite assistance for the numerous, nineteenth-century shipwrecks. A similar system existed along the St. Lawrence River and on the Great Lakes. These services were usually provided by the federal government.
Use of the telegraph in law enforcement meant that criminals could no longer travel faster than the word of their crimes, resulting in the apprehension of criminals at border crossings and the prevention of known criminals entering this country. Military use of the telegraph in Canada was effectively demonstrated during the Fenian invasions and threats of the 1860s and the later Riel Rebellion of 1885. On these occasions central coordination of military strength was made possible by utilization of the telegraph system.
It is nearly impossible to calculate the impact of the telegraph on personal communication. High rates and a limited system initially restricted personal use to messages of great importance, but by the 1880s rates had been lowered to the point where nearly anyone could afford to use the telegraph. Statistics regarding messages document the tremendous increase in popular use. Until the telephone began to make inroads on the use of the telegraph for personal communication, first locally and then regionally by the 1880s, the telegraph remained the standard medium for exchange of anniversary congratulations, for notifications of births and deaths, for requests for money, for complaints to the government, and even for Christmas greetings. These and a vast array of other forms of messages helped to overcome the barriers in Canada of distance and terrain which had worked to maintain regional societies.
Telegraphers
The first telegraphers employed in Canada came either from the United States or were trained by men from that country in schools such as the one set up in 1847 by the Montreal Telegraph Company. Telegraphers began work at an early age, usually between thirteen and nineteen, and tended to be highly mobile as standard conditions of employment prevailed virtually everywhere in North America and sometimes beyond. The hours were long and except for certain highly-skilled areas such as cable operators or commodity or stock exchange operators, the pay was usually low. Telegraphers were subject to an incredible amount of stress due to responsibilities associated with routing trains, handling coded messages involving great sums of money, or having to work under the strain of terrific speed in the case of press work. Their working environments were often isolated and could be noisy. The result was an apparently high incidence of alcoholism and suicide. However, the mystique of the profession and the fact that working conditions in other nineteenth-century jobs were often far worse meant that there was never a shortage of aspiring operators willing to work for the fifty to ninety dollars per month paid in the 1880s for a nine-hour day, twenty-six-day month.
The technology employed in the earliest Canadian telegraph lines was based on the Morse pattern, with the electric impulses recorded on a reel of paper tape by a recording register. The operators until the late 1850s usually read the paper tape and translated the messages in longhand. Gradually operators became aware that the letters of the message could be distinguished by the sound produced as the message was recorded. This "reading by sound" became standard by the late 1850s and a sounding box was positioned at the level of the operator's ear to amplify the signals. Sending keys were frequently owned by the operators and taken from place to place. Many operators could send messages with either hand to ease the strain caused by long hours on the key. In the early 1870s typewriting machines were adopted by a few operators to record messages as they arrived. These machines normally were owned by the operators and did not become standard until the turn of the century.
After the first decade of the telegraph in Canada, telegraph operators tended to emerge either from the ranks of the messenger boys who had gradually learned the codes and turned operator, or from families where all members would be operators because the children had an early opportunity to learn the codes and to practise with the key. As a result, there were several Canadian operators who began full-time employment at age ten. Sara Ann Maclure, acknowledged as the first woman telegrapher in British Columbia, was the daughter of a telegrapher at Matsqui who taught every member of his family. She began work in 1869 at age fourteen. By the 1880s another common route to becoming an operator, especially for women, was to be taught by another operator or to attend a telegraph school. Some schools were legitimate while others were little more than confidence schemes promising high pay in return for expensive lessons. During industry-labour disputes in the 1880s efforts were made with little success to limit the number of operators entering the field, as certain companies used telegraph schools to turn out increasing numbers of women operators in order to maintain lower rates of pay.
Attempts to unionize telegraphers never met with widespread success and were actively discouraged by telegraph companies. A series of ineffective strikes seeking to improve industry conditions and pay in the United States in the 1870s had a measure of support in Canada. In 1881 the Brotherhood of Telegraphers of the United States and Canada was organized under a charter granted to the Knights of Labour. By July 1, 1882 the Brotherhood claimed to have a membership of 15,000, including operators, linemen, battery men and clerks. Among the objectives sought by the Brotherhood was the prohibition of instruction in telegraphy to all except immediate family members and the organization expressed vigorous opposition to all telegraph schools. Equal pay was sought for both sexes, an eight-hour day, a seven-hour night shift, overtime for Sunday work and other benefits. A widespread strike in July of 1883 failed generally and was followed by wholesale firings of Brotherhood supporters by companies. Many skilled telegraphers were forced to accept low-paying jobs at isolated railway telegraph offices. Industry-wide support for the Brotherhood never emerged in Canada and the union organization served more in the capacity of a professional organization with a monthly newspaper and an annual convention.
Telegraphers in Canada could number among their ranks an array of ambitious individuals, many of whom by the turn of the century emerged as leaders in business, finance or politics. The work experience of the telegrapher could provide a basic education in business and a broad familiarity with current affairs. The profession certainly engendered a staunch feeling of pride and comradeship.
Telecommunications
at the Turn of the Century
The turn of the century saw a culmination and a new technological beginning for telecommunications in Canada. Technological innovation by 1900 had resulted in the capacity to send more than one message in opposite directions over single wires. Sending and receiving speeds of operators increased to a turn of the century peak of nearly a word a second a feat demonstrated at popular public contests and never surpassed.
