What We Did Waaay Before Twitter
There was another medium where characters were precious
If you’re at all tech-minded, you’re aware that Twitter is going through some questionable changes under its new leadership. I won’t go into them here because things are happening so fast that by the time you read this, whatever I write will surely be outdated and there will be a new ridiculous thing everyone’s talking about.
Amidst all the chaos, people are looking around to see what other platforms can fill the role that Twitter has played in their online life. For some people, that platform is Substack. For others, it’s Mastodon (and if you’re Mastodon-bound, you can find me there).
It got me thinking about what people did before Twitter. I’m talking way before Twitter. Like, 100+ years before Twitter. There was another platform where jokes went viral, where people made new connections, and where the number of characters you could use was limited.
I’m talking about the telegraph.
In popular culture, we’ve seen telegraphs used in movies to send important messages across long distances. In Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln, Adam Driver played a telegraph operator translating morse code into messages for Abraham Lincoln. In The Three Amigos, a telegraph operator suggested that it would be less expensive to use the word “infamous” instead of “horrible, evil, murdering, villainous” to describe the villain El Guapo in order to save money. I’m sure you can think of other notable examples.
In movies like this, the telegraph operators are minor characters. But in reality, they were the ones using the tech day-in and day-out. To everyday people, the telegraph was a novelty. But to the telegraph operator, it was their Twitter.
See, telegraphs weren’t busy around the clock. There was downtime for the telegraph operators, especially at night. And when they weren’t sending messages for customers, they were free to chat amongst themselves, using morse code. They got to know each other, share jokes, and get into fights, just like we do on Twitter. Well, maybe not just like. But pretty close.
Characters Count
Communicating in morse code could be tedious, so telegraph operators developed shorthand to make things easier. In 1890, the New York Times reported on how telegraph operators welcomed each other using some familiar-looking abbreviations:
In their conversations telegraphers use a system of abbreviations which enables them to say considerably more in a certain period of time then they otherwise could. Their morning greeting to a friend in a distant city is usually “g. m.,” and the farewell for the evening, “g. n.,” the letters of course standing for good morning and good night. The salutation may be accompanied by an inquiry by one as to the health of the other, which would be expressed thus: “Hw r u ts mng?” And the answer would be: “I’m pty wl; hw r u?” or “I’m nt flg vy wl; fraid I’ve gt t mlaria.”
They even had an equivalent of LOL:
Operators laugh over a wire, or rather, they convey the fact that they are amused. They do this by telegraphing “ha, ha.” Very great amusement is indicated by sending “ha” slowly and repeating it several times, and a smile is expressed by sending “ha” once or perhaps twice. Transmitting it slowly and repeating it tells the perpetrator of the joke at the other end of the wire that the listener is leaning back in his chair and laughing long and heartily.
“Ha” is much easier to send in morse code than LOL or ROFL:
HA: •••• •−
LOL: •−•• −−− •−••
ROFL: •−• −−− ••−• •−••
And what would they have been laughing at? Jokes, of course. A joke could go viral from coast to coast just because some telegraph operators had downtime. In 1910, the Times covered how a good joke gets passed along the wire:
[The reporter asks] “Do you mean to say that there are people so anxious to spring a new joke that they will go to the expense of telegraphing it to their friends?”
[The telegraph operator responds] “No; no one goes to the expense — that’s on the telegraph company. You see, it’s this way: The operators at all the big telegraph centres over the country have a speaking acquaintance with each other. They call each other by first names, though the chances are that they haven’t the slightest idea of each other’s appearance. During the night the wires are often quiet. Now, suppose a message has just been sent from New York to Buffalo; for the time being there is nothing more to be dispatched, and no other operator is trying to get the wire. In this case the telegraph instrument in Buffalo is very apt to click off, ‘Say, Jim, I just heard a new story. It’s a good one,’ and the story follows.
“When Jim at Buffalo gets Jack at Chicago or Pete at St. Louis on an idle wire, the new story is passed along. And so in a single night a cracking good story may be passed from New York to San Francisco.”
Verified Accounts
A telegraph operator didn’t have an avatar or a profile pic or a blue checkmark by their name, but they got to recognize each other based on their style of transmitting morse code. Really!
No two operators send alike. The click of the instrument is always the same to the ear of a man who does not understand it, but one operator recognizes the sending of another if he has ever heard it before for any length of time, just as a familiar face is recognized. Operator “Tommy” Snaggs leaves New-York, and, after roaming from one city to another, finally lands in the Galveston (Texas) office and goes to work. He is put down to work a wire running to Kansas City. The man in Kansas City begins to send. Mr. Snaggs pricks up his ears and interrupts the sender. “Ain’t tt u Billy Robinson?” he asks, and the other man says, “Yes, tts me, & ur ole Tommy Snaggs.” Mr. Snaggs returns, “tts wo I am, I thot I reconized ur sendin.” Then they devote a few moments to telling of their travels. The last time they worked on the same wire one was in Boston and the other in Montreal.
They could also supposedly tell if a stranger sending morse code was a man or woman by how they transmitted. (Of course, we know now that gender expression isn’t quite that simple, but I guess nobody was transmitting their pronouns over the wire.)
It is a peculiar fact also that an experienced operator can almost invariably distinguish a woman’s sending from a man’s. There is nearly always some peculiarity about a woman’s style of transmission. It is not necessarily a fault. Many women send very clearly and make their dots and dashes precisely as they were intended to be made. It is impossible to describe the peculiarity, but there is no doubt of its existence. Nearly all women have a habit of rattling off a lot of meaningless dots before they say anything. But some men do that too. A woman’s touch is lighter than a man’s, and her dots and dashes will not carry so well on a very long circuit. That is presumably the reason why in all large offices the women are usually assigned to work the wires running to various parts of the cities.
Don’t •− − Me
And of course, just like on Twitter, not everyone always got along. When two operators fight across the telegraph, it’s called a “fight circuit” and it’s pretty futile because it’s impossible for two operators tapping at once to tell what the other is saying. The article tells a humorous old story of one operator who set up the equivalent of a bot to fight for him:
They fought for some time. Neither would yield. The man at Albany, who was old and astute, saw that the man at Syracuse, who was young and stubborn, was in for an all-night struggle. The Albany man looked around for a proxy. He found it in the clock wire, which was a wire attached to the clock’s pendulum, the swaying of which acted to open and close the circuit. He connected the Syracuse wire with the clock wire and went home to bed, leaving the Syracuse man valorously battling with the tick-tick, tick-tick of the clock. The old story concludes with the veracious statement that when the Albany man reached the office the next morning he heard the Syracuse man still fighting the clock, and that when the former disconnected the clock wire and closed the circuit the latter snapped out triumphantly, “I downed you at last, did I?”
Eventually the telegraph companies realized that if they make it cheaper to send telegraphs at night, they’d eliminate some of that down time where the operators were chatting. And then telephones came along, and faxes and emails and the need for telegraphs became less and less, and certainly they didn’t need manual telegraph operators anymore.
One day, Twitter will be gone, too. And something else will take its place. In the meantime, here’s an interesting fact to ponder:
In February 2006, Western Union delivered the last telegram. And just one month later, Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet.
And that’s it for another newsletter. I guess since the communications of telegraph operators were one-to-one rather than one-to-many, it makes the analogy more akin to text messages than Twitter. Or maybe Twitter DMs at best. But Twitter is on my mind this week, so forgive the imperfect comparison. It was really just an excuse to tell you some interesting stuff about telegraph communication.
But tell me what you’re doing about the Twitter takeover. Maybe you don’t care? Or you don’t use Twitter anyway? Maybe you’re starting your own Substack? Or you’re moving to Mastodon or somewhere else?
Maybe the comments section of this very newsletter will be the next big social network. We’ll see!
Thanks for reading,
David
Really excellent article, thank you. As for my feelings on Twitter, I only use it in a cursory way for professional purposes, so I can't say I care too much what happens with it. Like you say, they'll be something else along eventually.
Very interesting. But weren't the first tweets sent by the birds in your wood engravings?