Hooper later recalled that officers exerted little control over wireless and, thus, that each operator was free "to send whatever he pleased. There were more personal than official mes­sages and more operator conversation than messages."

Lieutenant Stanford C. Hooper was assigned to observe the use of wireless during naval target practice and submit a report to the Navy Department. Hooper had many criticisms of the navy's failure to integrate wireless into its strategic operations

Many home­ made stations could transmit only up to fifteen miles and pick up mes­ sages from forty miles away

Between 1906 and 1910, the navy had installed wireless on many of its ships, and while the invention was still not well integrated into naval operations, it was being used more frequently.

In a culture that was becoming more urbanized, and whose social networks were becoming increasingly fragmented, many strangers became friends through wireless.

Through the popular culture, these youngsters witnessed, unhindered as yet by acquired disbelief, the unre­fined and unself-conscious aspirations of the culture, especially the hope that technology could serve as the vehicle for individual and societal progress. Businessmen and military men were not part of this world, and they no doubt considered such visions of wireless unrealistic.

Shortly after Marconi introduced his invention, the press predicted that eventually Americans would communicate with each other using their own apparatus and would not have to rely on the telegraph or telephone.

In this realm, in the "folds of the night," by mastering new technology while letting his imagination and his antisocial inclinations loose, he could be, simul­taneously, a boy and a man, a child and an adult. He could also straddle old and new definitions of masculinity.

In reality, being the master of one's environment, or having mastery over other men, was, for many, simply not possible.

Boys educated in both academic and corporate institutions learned that having a "forceful personality" was, in reality, often either unattainable or a liability.

On the other hand, it was clear that in the business world, physical strength mattered little: physical combat was a metaphor for other kinds of confrontations.

"flat­ chested cigarette-smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality,'' but to be "robust, manly, self-reliant."5 According to this ideal, it was not enough to be physically vigorous; men had to have forceful, commanding personalities, as well.6 All of these traits, it was believed, were best cultivated by a more active life in which men were more directly in contact with nature. 

Willenborg was the young man the press chose to represent the many other nameless boy operators in America. He was the perfect role model for young men facing the beginning of the twentieth century. His story embodied several trends: the increasingly important role popular culture and journalism were playing in identifying and reinforcing ac­ceptable norms of behavior, the boom in instructive hobbies· with their many "amateur" practitioners, and the rise of the boy inventor-hero as a popular culture archetype. His story also captured a more subtle yet profound process: the gradual redefinition of what it meant to be a man, particularly a white, middle-class man, in America.

"Only twenty and yet a man of science, an inventor and skillful operator in this new art. Could anything be more inspiring to every boy and man?"

In the hands of the Times reporter, Willenborg became a role model for other boys. His ordinariness and diligence were emphasized: "He is no prodigy. What he has done has been done by hard work. He began at fifteen in a little closet-like room on the top floor of his house."

Willenborg had tuned his apparatus and fitted the Times reporter with headphones so the reporter could listen in to the dots and dashes being exchanged between Marconi's two distant transatlantic stations at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and Clifden, Ireland.

Today, the telephone industry en­courages such calls;

Quarterly notes that "telephone usage for so­cial purposes in rural areas is fundamentally important."

20 percent of the calls were orders to stores and other businesses, 20 percent were from subscribers' homes to their own businesses, 15 percent were social invitations, and 30 percent were "purely idle gossip"-a rate that he claimed was matched in other cities.

"The fact that subscribers have been free to use the wires as they pleased without incurring additional expense [i.e., flat rates] has led to the transmission of large numbers of communica­tions of the most trivial character."

[T]he telephone ... almost brings [people] face to face. It is the next best thing to personal con­ tact. So the fundamental purpose of the current advertising is to sell the company's subscribers their voices at their true worth-to help them realize that 'Your Voice is You.'... to make subscribers think of the telephone whenever they think of distant friends or rela­tives.... "

In the 1920s, the advertising industry developed "atmosphere" techniques, focusing less on the product and more on its conse­quences for the consumer.

They stressed that the telephone was impressive to cus­tomers and saved time, both at work and at home, and often noted the telephone's convenience for planning and for keeping in touch with the office during vacations.

Industry magazines ea­gerly printed stories about the telephone being used to sell prod­ucts, alert firefighters about forest blazes, lullaby a baby to sleep, and get out voters on election day.

They of­fered special services over the telephone, such as weather reports, concerts, sports results, and train arrivals. For decades, vendors cast about for novel applications: broadcasting news, sports, and music, night watchman call-in services, and the like.

As to getting paying customers, the first question vendors had to ask was, Of what use is this machine? The answer was not self-evident. For roughly the first twenty-five years, sales campaigns largely em­ployed flyers, simple informational notices in newspapers, "news" stories supplied to friendly editors (many of whom received free serv­ ice or were partners in telephony), public demonstrations, and per­sonal solicitations of businessmen.

In these uses, the telephone directly competed with­- and decisively defeated--attempts to create telegraph exchanges that enabled subscribers to signal for services and also efforts to em­ploy printing telegraphs as a sort of "electronic mail" system.

"Educating the public" typically meant advertising, face-to-face so­licitations, and public relations. In the early years, these efforts in­cluded informational campaigns, such as publicizing the existence of the telephone, showing people how to use it, and encouraging courteous conversation on the line.10 Once the threat of nationaliza­tion became serious, "institutional" advertising and publicity encour­aged voters to feel warmly toward the industry.

The telephone industry believed, as President Vail testified in 1909, that the "public had to be educated ... to the necessity and advantage of the telephone."8 And Bell saluted itself on its success in an advertisement entitled "Blazing the Way": Bell "had to invent the business uses of the telephone and convince people that they were uses.... [Bell] built up the telephone habit in cities like New York and Chicago.... It has from the start created the need of the telephone and then supplied it."

AT&T bought out competitors where it could and ceded territories where it was losing. With tighter fiscal control, and facing capital uncertainties as well, AT&T's rate of expan­sion declined.

occasional head-to-head competi­tion drove costs down and spurred rapid diffusion

As long-distance communication, telephony quickly threatened te­legraphy. Indeed, in settling its early patent battle with Western Union, Bell gave financial concessions to Western Union as compensa­tion for loss of business. As local communication, telephony quickly overwhelmed nascent efforts to establish signaling exchange sys­tems (except for stock tickers).

Yet, the telephone industry did not always promote such sociability; for decades it was more likely to discourage it.

Feminist activism laid the basis for women’s suffrage. As for previous generations of Americans—rich and poor, black and white—wartime service secured it. 1663646399 09/19/2022 11:59pm Description Long Description Cancel Update Criterion Additional Comments: Cancel Update Comments Additional Comments: Rating Score Rating max score to > pts Rating Title Rating Description Cancel Update Rating Rubric                     Can't change a rubric once you've started using it.   Find a Rubric Title: Find Rubric Title You've already rated students with this rubric. Any major changes could affect their assessment results. Title Criteria Ratings Pts Edit criterion description Delete criterion row This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Description of criterion Range threshold: 5 pts Edit rating Delete rating 5 to >0 pts Full Marks blank Edit rating Delete rating 0 to >0 pts No Marks blank_2 This area will be used by the assessor to leave comments related to this criterion. pts   / 5 pts -- Edit criterion description Delete criterion row This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Description of criterion Range threshold: 5 pts Edit rating Delete rating 5 to >0 pts Full Marks blank Edit rating Delete rating 0 to >0 pts No Marks blank_2 This area will be used by the assessor to leave comments related to this criterion. pts   / 5 pts -- Total Points: 5 out of 5 I'll write free-form comments when assessing students Remove points from rubric Don't post Outcomes results to Learning Mastery Gradebook Use this rubric for assignment grading Hide score total for assessment results Cancel Create Rubric Previous Previous: W4 Telephony Crosses the Threshold (AO) Next Next: Text Annotation: Fischer "Touch Someone: The Telephone Industry Discovers Sociability"

Signal Corps reports emphasized the stakes. “The importance of intercommunication in warfare can not well be exaggerated,” Brigadier General George Squier later wrote. “The element of time is a controlling one in strategy and tactics.” Without communications for even an hour, “the whole military machine would collapse.” The Signal Corps needed good telephone service, which was superior to all other technologies “for the fundamental reason that . . . it permits the language directly in signaling.”19 And for that system to function, the Corps needed trained specialists.

But the problem in France went beyond running complicated switchboards under pressure. There was the special problem of toll calls in a foreign language. It would take months to convoy all the machinery needed for an autonomous AEF network.

“Would you believe it? They actually recognized my voice in London before I told them who I was!”13 If the United States was going to field its armies effectively, it needed experts to handle this lethal—as well as lifesaving—technology.

In the Great War, commands to advance or retreat, fire or cease firing, were given primarily by telephone. Telecommunications were then the only military technology in which America enjoyed superiority over its allies and enemies.

Planes had replaced horses.

Parents, the Navy, and the general public had mixed reactions to women’s service, but opposition soon turned into pride. The women’s gumption, hard work, and stateside assignments mitigated criticism. So did government propaganda. In World War One, governments commu- nicated directly with their peoples through posters. Many showed pitiful females in need of rescue or aproned mothers skimping on bread to save food for soldiers. But another genre emerged, too: confident uniformed women embracing military service.

Volunteers had to prove little beyond their age (18 to 35) and health, as verified by an exam. Some started the very day they walked into a recruiting office. When one young woman called her mother in Virginia with the startling news, she later recalled, her mother “was stunned into silence for a moment, then asked weakly, ‘Oh, Sister, can you ever get out?’”

$28.75 per month, the same as men. The Navy provided no housing for females, so it paid women an additional $1.25 per day for billeting. Fe- male recruits received free uniforms and medical care, and were eligible for war risk insurance. Most worked ten hours per day, six days a week, including night shifts. They wore the same insignia as men

Other countries had already expanded the franchise. “Are we alone to refuse to learn the lesson?”, the president asked the recalcitrant Senate. Most peoples had accepted a new interpretation of democracy. “We cannot isolate our thought or our action in such a matter from the thought of the rest of the world,” he argued. “We must either conform or . . . resign the leadership of liberal minds to others.”

The United States could not hold itself aloof from world opinion and women had amply earned the privileges of citizenship.

But how could it lead the free world if it was behind everyone else?

America was not alone. Indeed, it was tugged along by global trends.

Homosexuality, along with female promiscuity, incest, infanticide, rape, and all manner of sexual sins were outcomes of poor living conditions and the attendant collapse of “natural” human sentiment.

By early January of 1877, the telegraph boys’ kitchens were explicitly linked to homosexual practices, though what exactly went on is obscured by Victorian propriety.

They were usually hired at age fourteen and were the lowest-paid employees at the GPO, earning five shillings a week at the outset.

As more post offices and telegraph boys began to appear, actual telegraph wires began to vanish.

Telegraph boys reportedly developed their own language to describe their experience of delivering and what to expect from their customers: a “lag” was an unusually long distance to cover; a “cop” was a house or business that tipped

On the other hand, telegraph boys were risky investments.

the days of adventurous King’s Messengers were long over—and while the telegraph boy was incorporated into the exoticism of high-speed communications technology

In some ways, telegraph boys occupied a similar place in the city as guardsmen. Their uniformed presence on the London streets radiated both the most reified and the most troubling versions of late Victorian masculinity.

Nineteenth-century information technology, before the rise of the telephone and wireless, depended on face-to-face human contact.

The contours of technological innovation depend on the type of labor available to produce the intended outcome. In the telegraph’s case, the much admired scientists and engineers of the later nineteenth century who designed the British Telegraph system and debated, among other things, whether to string telegraph wires over or under London in order to best maintain the free, efficient flow of electrical communication, also constructed a system dependent on the availability of specifically gendered, and affordable, workers.

For these scholars, liberalism is not so much a set of political ideologies or affiliations as a flexible, somewhat amorphous term that deliberately evokes more conventional meanings in order to describe how notions of freedom are used strategically to actualize and monitor political subjects.

Useful as is the telegraph, we should not forget that it is the boys who connect its wires with our offices and our homes. Electricity will transmit our messages across a continent or beneath an ocean, but the aid of the boys must be called in to bridge the gap that remains between the instrument and the final destination. The telephone and the phonograph, which already have done what seems to be almost miraculous work, may in time be made the means of conveying a message directly from the telegraph instrument to the person to whom it is addressed. But, until this is accomplished, we must acknowledge our dependence on the messenger-boys and fairly recognize them as person of business.

The uniforms of the District boys are made of blue cloth, manufactured expressly for the company, with red trimmings. Each uniform costs $12, and to pay for it $1.25 is deducted from each boy's weekly wages as long as is necessary. If a boy is discharged, he may keep his uniform, if it is paid for, or, if he so wishes, the company will purchase it of him, if it is in good condition. The same rule applies in this company about leaving the uniforms at the office after the day's work is over, as I mentioned in connection with the Western Union boys. 

The school has since been moved to the new head-quarters of the company at No. 699 Broadway. The school-room is provided with wooden benches, like those found in old-fashioned country district schools, but the instruction given is entirely in regard to the business of the company. Every candidate for a place must know how to read and write before he can be put into the school. It is of course necessary for the boys to know the situation of every street in the city. A large map of the city is therefore placed before them, with the streets marked on it, but without their names. The teacher points out different streets to his pupils, and they are required to name them.

In this way a messenger-boy soon acquires a more complete knowledge of the city's thoroughfares than many an old resident can boast of.

American District Telegraph Company. The boys in this company's employ have many duties to perform which are not required of the Western Union boys, and they therefore have a great many things to learn before they can be provided with work. When the hirer of a District instrument calls for a messenger, the boy can never know what he may be wanted for. He may be told to hurry for a physician, he may be given a package for delivery, or a bill to collect, or he may be sent by a broker to deliver stock or to have a check certified,--in fine, his duties are too varied for me to name them all.

The distribution of the messages among the boys is made as follows: Each boy, as he comes into the office in the morning, receives what is called a "delivery sheet,"--that is, a sheet of paper with blanks in which to write the numbers of the messages, the time of leaving the office, the name and address of the receiver, and the time of the messenger's return.

If the average time becomes greater than this, the superintendent at once concludes that some of the boys are becoming dilatory, and he examines the whole record to find out who are the lazy ones, and calls them to account.

The number of boys employed by this company varies with the season of the year; for with telegraph companies as with other kinds of business, there are busy times and dull times. The largest number is employed in the main office in the spring and autumn, when it sometimes reaches one hundred. In February, I found about eighty boys on the pay-roll

So in New York we find that there are two classes of telegraph companies, one principally employed in sending messages between distant places, and one which works only in the city.

Now, however, inventors have so applied it that it can, in a large city, be made to do a multitude of services at a very small cost.

Not many years ago, the use of the telegraph was very costly, and it was employed only for important business.

When it comes to broadcasting, we will see that the same issues of inclusion and exclusion, of fact and fiction, of borders and identities, of empowered and silenced voices that play such a vital role in the making of history also form the significant forces in the development of radio and television.

Jenkins points out the many logical reasons why we can never know anything about the past without the intervention of some kind of writing or telling: The past is such an infinitely immense body of events that our consciousness could never encompass it all; the past is infinitely variable, depending on the perceptions of each discrete participant or observer. The past cannot be directly experienced, but only hinted at through what Jenkins calls traces of the past— documents, records, memories passed on through verbal or visual means, monuments, artifacts, or television shows. Some traces are more closely connected to the past than others (the courtroom transcript of a trial, say, rather than a news story or a docudrama about it); some we call reliable whereas others are flawed (but why?); all must go through a process of interpretation and validation to mean anything.

“Things were better” because the government stayed out of people’s private lives, and families were self-sufficient and right-thinking.

For instance, one popular way of explaining the domestic sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s is that they simply reflected the reality of people’s lives during that conservative, family-oriented, rather dull period of history

Are we ever influenced in our thinking without our conscious knowledge, persuaded of the fact of something without being totally aware of it

I believe that the best way to understand how broadcast media work in our society is to look at them as conduits for social and cultural power. This includes the power to create understandings about the world and the people who live in it, the power to direct our attention toward some things and away from others, the power to influence how we see ourselves and our potential in life, the power to ensure that certain kinds of things get said over and over, while others remain silent, on the margins, without a voice.

it is not just a historian in a room surrounded by books and musty documents, writing out some true and self-evident story of the past “as it really happened,” but a process by which both writers and readers activate a certain perception of their culture, past and present, and put it into use in their daily lives and shared understandings.

With each new marvel of communication—promising so much progress and improvement in quality of life—came worry about the negative effects of the new connections. For each utopian hope, there was a corresponding dystopian fear, and many of them, as we shall see, revolved around the barriers that new forms of communication and connection both knocked down and, in other places, built up.

Why begin a book about the history of broadcasting with a quote from an author who wrote before radio, and most certainly before television, were even invented? For one thing, Forster’s novel is about the tragedies that occur when connections fail, or are mishandled. Sometimes it’s communication that fails— the telegram arrives too late, a dying woman’s will is ignored, or two conversations overlap in a way that confuses them both.

Experience in Assessing Past Examples of Change. Experience in assessing past examples of change is vital to understanding change in society today—it's an essential skill in what we are regularly told is our "ever-changing world." Analysis of change means developing some capacity for determining the magnitude and significance of change, for some changes are more fundamental than others. Comparing particular changes to relevant examples from the past helps students of history develop this capacity. The ability to identify the continuities that always accompany even the most dramatic changes also comes from studying history, as does the skill to determine probable causes of change. Learning history helps one figure out, for example, if one main factor—such as a technological innovation or some deliberate new policy—accounts for a change or whether, as is more commonly the case, a number of factors combine to generate the actual change that occurs.

The Ability to Assess Conflicting Interpretations. Learning history means gaining some skill in sorting through diverse, often conflicting interpretations. Understanding how societies work—the central goal of historical study—is inherently imprecise, and the same certainly holds true for understanding what is going on in the present day. Learning how to identify and evaluate conflicting interpretations is an essential citizenship skill for which history, as an often-contested laboratory of human experience, provides training. This is one area in which the full benefits of historical study sometimes clash with the narrower uses of the past to construct identity. Experience in examining past situations provides a constructively critical sense that can be applied to partisan claims about the glories of national or group identity. The study of history in no sense undermines loyalty or commitment, but it does teach the need for assessing arguments, and it provides opportunities to engage in debate and achieve perspective.

The Ability to Assess Evidence. The study of history builds experience in dealing with and assessing various kinds of evidence—the sorts of evidence historians use in shaping the most accurate pictures of the past that they can. Learning how to interpret the statements of past political leaders—one kind of evidence helps form the capacity to distinguish between the objective and the self-serving among statements made by present-day political leaders. Learning how to combine different kinds of evidence—public statements, private records, numerical data, visual materials—develops the ability to make coherent arguments based on a variety of data. This skill can also be applied to information encountered in everyday life.

More important, studying history encourages habits of mind that are vital for responsible public behavior, whether as a national or community leader, an informed voter, a petitioner, or asimple observer.

"History teaching by example" is one phrase that describes this use of a study of the past—a study not only of certifiable heroes, the great men and women of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, but also of more ordinary people who provide lessons in courage, diligence, or constructive protest.

History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be

Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings.

Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization—a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline.

History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.