The progress of the world can be inferred from facts like the following:
In 1798 the entire business of the Post-office Department was conducted by the Postmaster-General, one assistant, and one clerk. In 1833 it required forty-eight hours to convey news from Washington to Philadelphia. In 1834 New York Saturday papers were not received in Washington until the following Tuesday afternoon. In 1835 the mails were carried between Philadelphia and Pittsburg daily in four-horse coaches, two lines daily, one to go through in a little more than two days, the other in three and a half days. In 1833 a contractor named Reeside carried the mail between Philadelphia and New York, ninety miles, in six hours, making fifteen miles an hour. The railroad, as a factor in the mail service, did not have a beginning before 1835. August 25 of this year the formal opening of the road between Washington and Baltimore took place. Amos Kendall, then Postmaster-General, at first objected to having the mails carried by rail over this road, since it would, as he feared, disarrange connections with existing lines of stages. In October, 1834, a writer in the Boston Atlas says: “We left Philadelphia on the morning of the sixth in a railroad car, and reached Columbia, on the Susquehanna, at dusk—a distance of eighty-two miles.”—John M. Bishop, Magazine of American History.
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Communication of Disease—See [Contamination].
COMMUNICATION, PRIMITIVE
Many explorers have commented on the speed with which news travels among savage tribes, says Amateur Work. A curious observation as to a possible solution of the problem of their methods has been made by the Rev. A. Rideout, who, as a missionary among the Basutos, has noticed their method of sending messages from village to village by means of a signal-drum or gourd. This gourd, covered with the dried and stretched skin of a kid, gives out a sound which travels and can be heard at distances from five to eight miles. The transmission and reception of messages on these drums is entrusted to special corps of signalers, some one of whom is always on duty, and who beat on the message in what is practically a Morse alphabet. On hearing the message, says Mr. Rideout, the signaler can always tell whether it is for his chief or for some distant village, and delivers it verbally or sends it on accordingly, and it is thus carried on with surprizing rapidity from one village to another, till it reaches its destination. All that took place in the Boer War, victories and reverses in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, were known to us by gourd-line message hours before the news ever reached us by field telegraph. The natives guarded the secret of their code carefully. To my knowledge, messages have been sent a thousand miles by means of it. This is probably one of the earliest forms of wireless telegraphy.
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COMMUNICATION, PSYCHICAL
Having discovered that we are immersed in the ether, and that it responds instantly, and to untold distances to electric vibrations, the daring inventor said, if I can set the ether ajar with a certain kind of vibration by shooting up into it strong electric impulses, then I can plant yonder in the distance another instrument keyed to that particular kind of vibration, and it will pick out its own from the ether, quivering, as it is, with an infinite number of vibrations. Just as when you run the scale of the piano in a room, each object responds to its own note. When you touch D a certain lampshade will shiver in answer. That is its note. It knows its own vibration, and is silent to all others.
This, then, is what is transpiring now among men. A code of signals being arranged, one here sends up his request or prayer into the heavens, speaks into space. The whole hemisphere of ether is set quivering. Another yonder, a thousand miles distant, picks out of space the syllables of that prayer, one by one, and then throws back through space the answer. Nothing so marvelous as this, so near spiritual conditions, has ever before entered the heart of man. It is not surprizing that the air is full of prophecies, dreams and visions. One says we will yet be able to carry in a pocket, like watches, little vibrators, so that we can communicate with our distant friends without wires or towers, or skilled operators, as readily as we take out our watch and tell the hour of the day. Others, in this prophetic madness, say we may yet learn the vibration of the planets, and fling off into space our “All hail” to Mars and Venus.—James H. Ecob.