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 their uniform costs 3 weeks of pay, their pay doesn't sound like it would be comparable to an adult's salary which is maybe why children are preferred for the job. Also it could be their energy and willingness to travel up to 19 miles to deliver a single telegraph.
You can see, by what you have read, that a telegraph-boy does not lead a lazy life. His hours of duty, if he is a day boy, are from 7 A.M. until 6:30 P.M. Of course, only a few boys are required to deliver messages at night, as a rule. But there are times in the year when a great many message come in for delivery between 1 and 7 A.M
The described hours would not be permitted during today's labor laws. Also, there is no mention of any meal breaks during this time.
In the first place, the boys are not paid by the day or week, but so much for each message delivered. This gives every boy an incentive to deliver every message as promptly as possible, and to hurry back for another one.
This reminds me of amazon workers nowadays who are incentivized with money to deliver packages quickly, although for Amazon it often leads to inferior service.
But one is apt to forget that all these boys, and many others not so well known, are really "in business," and that they are entitled to be so regarded.
Much like the adults working together to progress business in New York City, the telegraph and news boys work together to spread the news across the streets.
The first is as a war of national borders: Germany’s attempt to take control of other countries and those countries’ defense of their national sovereignty. The other is as a war of interior borders, or identity: the attempt of a nation to assert a superior Aryan national identity and to wipe out its Jewish citizens and others who did not conform. Borders and identities—these are the stuff of nations. And so they are the stuff of history. Equally, they are the stuff of broadcasting.
Here Hilmes explains how the same historical event can be interpreted two different ways. In this case WWII can be interpreted as a war of national border or a war of interior border/identity.
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.
Some historical texts are given more credibility than others but they all have to be interpreted to determine their validation.
This book is predicated on the premise that such a stance is false and misleading.
Hilmes text is not intended to serve as a reiteration of facts from primary sources but takes into account the fact that historical texts are created with an agenda.
This ambiguity at the heart of progress—the push–pull tension that says as one thing is gained, another might very well be lost—forms the core of Forster’s vision in Howards End and also informs the history of broadcasting in our century.
In the word of Hilmes, Forster's novel focuses on the tragedies that can happen through the progression of technology as well as miscommunication and misconceptions which propel societal views through the media.