Stories From The Stacks

Hagley oral historian Ben Spohn interviews Ben Schwantes on his recent book, The Train and the Telegraph: A Revisionist History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). In the book, Schwantes argues that the relationship between the telegraph industry and the railroad industry is much more complicated than previously recognized. While the infrastructure for these two industries often accompanied each other, their business interests and goals did not. As Schwantes points out, Samuel Morse envisioned the telegraph’s primary customer as the postal service, that new railroads and telegraph lines went up together was a marriage of a business dealing rather than mutually held goals from the start. Telegraph lines operated alongside railroads from the 1840s, but railroads themselves didn’t fully adopt telegraph communication for their operations until after the Civil War, in the 1880s and 1890s. As railroads grew and lines became longer and more heavily traveled, more railroads adopted the telegraph as traditional