Here is a joke our paper ran in 1906:
“A traveling man received the following telegram from his wife: ‘Twins arrived to-night. More by mail.’ He went to the nearest office and sent the following reply: ‘l leave for home to-night. If more come by mail, send to deadletter office.’”
The telegram was once the universal way of announcing news, enough so that this joke would have made complete sense to our readers at the time.
Generations before the first .com domain was registered in 1985, the world was linked by a system of wires that sent information whizzing to where it needed to go. The internet is a baby compared with the wired telegraph, the wireless telegraph and the telephone systems, all of which massively changed the way people dealt with communication and commerce.
They certainly made the world smaller.
“In 1805 the world had not a single steamer upon the ocean, a single mile of railway on land, a single span of telegraph upon the continents, nor a foot of cable beneath the ocean,” we wrote in a 1905 article. “In 1905 it has over 18,000 steam vessels, 500,000 miles of railway, and more than 1,000,000 miles of land telegraph, while the very continents are bound together and given instantaneous communication by more than 200,000 miles of ocean cables, and the number of telephone messages sent aggregates 6,000,000,000 annually, and one-half of them in the United States alone.”
The first telegrams in San Francisco were sent more than 170 years ago.
The city’s Telegraph Hill wasn’t named after a regular telegraph service, just so you know, but after a semaphore system built in 1849 that informed the city of ship arrivals.
Then in 1853 an electric telegraph system was introduced. A line was constructed that connected San Francisco and Marysville (near Yuba City). It ran through San Jose, Stockton and Sacramento on the way. In the East Bay, the Alta California Telegraph Company built a line along what would eventually be known as Telegraph Avenue.
The very first telephone line was installed in San Francisco in 1876 between a North Beach wharf and the Merchants’ Exchange — commercial reasons drove the decision. In fact, the desire to make money was behind much of this technological foment, just like the companies now scramble to make money with AI.
The number of telephones started to increase in the 1880s, but they didn’t replace telegrams for quite some time. In fact, they existed together.
A 1916 article was headlined “The Modern Telegraph.” In it, the reporter visited the Western Union office at Pine and Montgomery streets in San Francisco.
“He was more or less familiar with the historical Morse tape machine recording the dots and dashes as made by the sending operator; he was not prepared, however, to hear of the perfection of a mechanical contrivance called the multiplex, by means of which a message is written by the operator on a machine with a keyboard very similar to a typewriter. This punches a tape which is then run through an automatic machine, at the same time printing the letters of the message at the receiving end in readable form ready for delivery.”
In 1925, telephone and radio combined in one great proto-internet moment.
“By means of two of the outstanding scientific marvels of the age, San Francisco was able to see and hear the presidential inauguration on March 4th. Radio broadcast the voice of the President as he delivered the inaugural address and millions listened in on the ceremony. No sooner had he finished his speech than photographs of the ceremony in Washington appeared in San Francisco newspapers, scarcely three hours after the address…. This newest achievement of science known as telephotography makes possible the transmission over telephone wires of photographs at a speed of eight minutes for a distance of 3000 miles.”
The telegraph also played a role in Jewish life, especially around the holidays. Prewritten telegraph messages for Jewish holidays became common and were advertised in this paper.
“Again this year an especially decorated blank [telegraph form] and envelope in appropriate colors will be employed for all Jewish New Year messages, which will be delivered unsealed to conform to the rules of the Hebrew faith which prohibits orthodox Jews from opening a sealed envelope on this day,” we wrote in 1933.
“It is an interesting fact, according to the Telegraph Company, that an intensive study of non-business telegrams indicates that Jewish people send telegrams of congratulation and well-wishing much more frequently than members of any other group. It is a common occurrence for a popular Jewish couple to receive as high as fifty telegrams of congratulation and good wishes from relatives and friends on the occasion of their marriage, and births and christenings also are occasions for numerous messages of congratulations. Jewish people. too, are quick to express sympathy in time of trouble or bereavement.”
Two years later, the telegraph reached a special Jewish milestone.
“The first word in Hebrew script ever to be sent over a telegraph wire was flashed through Palestine as the government department of telegraphs established a Hebrew wire service to twenty towns and settlements,” we wrote in 1935. “The first word used was ‘Shehechiyanu,’ the traditional Hebrew blessing at inaugural occasions, which means ‘Blessed Art Thou Who Hast Preserved Us.’”
Technically the telegraph system was available until Western Union shut the service down in 2006. But it had been a long time since anyone in Northern California had sent a Rosh Hashanah telegram through Western Union.
Still, next time you hit send on an email or pull out your phone to text, spare a thought for the communication revolutions of the past.