A comparison of the average division of messages in every state would afford a very fair index of the nature of the occupations of their peoples. We have attempted to obtain materials for this purpose in vain; foreign governments, as well as English companies, being very jealous of giving any information relative to their messages. The history of the telegraph in Switzerland is an evidence of what patriotic feeling is capable of accomplishing. Although by far the best and most extensive, for a mountainous country, in the world, it was constructed by the spontaneous efforts of the people. The peasantry gave their free labour towards erecting the wires and poles, the landlords found the timber and gave the right of way over their lands, and the communes provided station room in the towns. Thus the telegraph was completed, so to speak, for nothing. The peculiarity of the Swiss telegraph is that, like the great wall of China, it proceeds totally regardless of the nature of the ground. It climbs the pass of the Simplon in proceeding from Geneva to Milan; it goes over St. Gothard in its way from Lucerne to Como: it mounts the Splugen, and again it goes from Feldkirch to Inspruck by the Arlberg pass, thus ascending the great chain of the Alps as though it were only a gentle hillside. The wires course along the lakes of Lucerne, Zug, Zurich, and Constance; sometimes they are nailed to precipices, sometimes they make short cuts over unfrequented spurs of the mountains, going every way, in short, that it is found most convenient to hang them. The completion of the telegraphic system of this little republic, which stands in the same relation to Southern as Belgium does to Northern Europe, was of great consequence, as it forms the keystone between France, Prussia, Austria, Piedmont, and Italy.
In Prussia the lines are insulated in gutta percha, and buried in the ground in leaden tubes, a very costly process, but with many great advantages, in freedom from injury and atmospheric influences, over the more usual method of suspending them in the air on poles. Upwards of 4,000 miles of wire have already been laid down in this kingdom. Although Austria only commenced operations in 1847, she already possesses 4,000 miles of telegraph, which puts the greater part of her extensive empire in communication with Vienna.
Whatever injury the Eastern war might have inflicted upon the world, it at least infused fresh vigour into the telegraphic system, as, independently of the lines planned to put Constantinople in communication with the Danubian frontier, Russia has been stimulated to complete a line between St. Petersburg and Helsingfors, in the Baltic, and a continuation of the line already extending from the capital to Moscow, down to Bucharest, Odessa, and Sebastopol. One feature distinguishes the management of continental telegraphs over those of England and America: they are all, with the exception of the short line between Hamburg and Cuxhaven, possessed and worked by the different governments, who seem afraid of the use they might be put to for political purposes, and accordingly exercise a strict surveillance over all messages sent, and rigidly interdict the use of a cipher.[39] The Anglo-Saxon race, however, has far surpassed any other in the energy with which it has woven the globe with telegraphic wires. The Americans in the West and the British in the East alike emulate each other in the magnitude of their undertakings of this nature. The United States, although she came into the field long after England—her first line from Washington to Baltimore not having been completed until 1844—has far outstripped the mother country in the length of her lines, which already extend over 16,729 miles. Every portion of the Union, with the exception of California and the upper portion of the Mississippi, is covered with a network of wire.
New York and New Orleans communicate with each other by a double route—one skirting the seacoast, the other taking an inland direction by Cincinnati. These lines alone, following the sinuosities of their routes, are upwards of 2,000 miles in length.
Other lines extend as far as Quebec, in Upper Canada, so that messages may be forwarded in the course of a couple of hours from the freezing north to the burning south. The great chain of lakes which form the northern boundary of the Union is put in communication with the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, and the great valley traversed by the latter will, ere long, interchange messages with the Pacific coast,—Congress having under its consideration a plan to establish a telegraph across the continent to San Francisco, as the precursor of the proposed railroad.
This we suspect is the project of Mr. O’Reilly, the engineer who has already executed the boldest lines in America. In constructing such a line, man, not nature, is the great obstacle to be encountered. The implacable Indians inhabiting this portion of the States certainly would not pay any respect to the telegraphic wire; on the contrary, they would in all likelihood take it to bind on the heads of their scalping tomahawks. To provide against this contingency, it is proposed to station parties of twenty dragoons at stockades twenty miles apart, along the whole unprotected portion of the route; two or three of these soldiers are also to ride from post to post and carry a daily express letter across the continent.
When this project is executed, it is asserted that “European news may be published in six days on the American shores of the Pacific, on the shortened route between the old and new world.” “The shortened route,” it should be mentioned, lies between Cape Race, in Newfoundland, and Galway, in Ireland, a passage calculated to take, on the average, only five days.
It may be asked how is it that such lengths of wire, carried through thinly settled parts of the country, and sometimes through howling wildernesses, can pay? The only manner that we can account for it is the cheapness with which the telegraph is built in America, the average price being 150 dollars, or about 31l. a mile—less than a fourth part of the cost at which the early lines of the English Electric Telegraph Company were erected. Again, the low prices charged for the transmission of messages produce an amount of business which the lines running through thickly-inhabited England cannot boast. For instance, let us take the following advertised “specimen message,” of the latter Company, and compare the price charged for it here, with what it could be sent for in America:—
“FromTo
James Smith,S. R. Brown,
London,Exchange,
Liverpool.
“I will meet you at Birmingham to-morrow, 3 P.M. Don’t fail me.”