The Young Telegraph Operator - 5

The Young Telegraph Operator - 5

The list of well-known Americans who have been graduates of the key is indeed an

extraordinary one, and there is no department of our national life in which they have not

distinguished themselves. The contrast, in this respect, between them and their European

colleagues is highly significant. In Europe the telegraph systems are all under

government management, the operators have strictly limited spheres of promotion, and at

the best the transition from one kind of employment to another is not made so easily as in

the New World. But in the United States we have seen Rufus Bullock become Governor

of Georgia, and Ezra Cornell Governor of New York. Marshall Jewell was Postmaster-

General of President Grant's Cabinet, and Daniel Lamont was Secretary of State in

President Cleveland's. Gen. T. T. Eckert, past-President of the Western Union Telegraph

Company, was Assistant Secretary of War under President Lincoln; and Robert J.

Wynne, afterward a consul-general, served as Assistant Postmaster General. A very large

proportion of the presidents and leading officials of the great railroad systems are old

telegraphers, including Messrs. W. C. Brown, President of the New York Central

Railroad, and Marvin Hughitt, President of the Chicago & North western Railroad. In

industrial and financial life there have been Theodore N. Vail, President of the Bell

telephone system; L. C. Weir, late President of the Adams Express; A. B. Chandler,

President of the Postal Telegraph and Cable Company; Sir W. Van Home, identified with

Canadian development; Robert C. Clowry, President of the Western Union Telegraph

Company; D. H. Bates, Manager of the Baltimore & Ohio telegraph for Robert Garrett;

and Andrew Carnegie, the greatest ironmaster the world has ever known, as well as its

greatest philanthropist. In journalism there have been leaders like Edward Rosewater,

founder of the Omaha Bee; W. J. Elverson, of the Philadelphia Press; and Frank A.

Munsey, publisher of half a dozen big magazines. George Kennan has achieved fame in

literature, and Guy Carleton and Harry de Souchet have been successful as dramatists.

These are but typical of hundreds of men who could be named who have risen from work

at the key to become recognized leaders in differing spheres of activity.

But roving has never been favorable to the formation of steady habits. The young men

who thus floated about the country from one telegraph office to another were often

brilliant operators, noted for speed in sending and receiving, but they were undisciplined,

were without the restraining influences of home life, and were so highly paid for their

work that they could indulge freely in dissipation if inclined that way. Subjected to

nervous tension for hours together at the key, many of them unfortunately took to drink,

and having ended one engagement in a city by a debauch that closed the doors of the

office to them, would drift away to the nearest town, and there securing work, would

repeat the performance. At one time, indeed, these men were so numerous and so much in

evidence as to constitute a type that the public was disposed to accept as representative of

the telegraphic fraternity; but as the conditions creating him ceased to exist, the "tramp

operator" also passed into history. It was, however, among such characters that Edison

was very largely thrown in these early days of aimless drifting, to learn something

perhaps of their nonchalant philosophy of life, sharing bed and board with them under all

kinds of adverse conditions, but always maintaining a stoic abstemiousness, and never

feeling other than a keen regret at the waste of so much genuine ability and kindliness on

the part of those knights errant of the key whose inevitable fate might so easily have been

his own.