The Night Telegraph Editor

Jack Binnes, wireless operator, 1909 from US government archives.

Bob Greene at the Wall Street Journal has a sort of curmudgeonly grouse about boys of summer in our time staring at their gadget screens -- instead of keeping their ear to radios.

I found this a touching image, even so:

The news will find you when it needs to.

Today, though, we can't seem to stop ourselves from incessantly searching for it, stalking it. All those screens that have come to dominate our lives—it is as if we have assigned ourselves to be night-telegraph editors on some mythical newspaper, nervously surveying the wires full-time, fretting that being a few minutes or even a few seconds late discovering the latest smidgen of information will put us at a disadvantage. Genuine news, entertainment news, news of our acquaintances that they post obsessively online: Because the news of the wider world, and of our considerably narrower personal worlds, is so ceaselessly available to us, we seem unable or unwilling to look away.

I couldn't help thinking that the engrossment in the little screens in fact does enable us to look away from situations like Syria.

But yes, we are all busy breathlessly editing our own mythical newspapers, with our green caps screwed on our heads to keep out the glare of the lamp.

I was struck by the imagine of that night telegraph-editor. If you do a search of that phrase, all you find are obituaries of old newsmen now.

You can find pictures then of telegraph operators, which is a step removed from telegraph editor.

That got me to thinking further of my great-grandfather on my mother's side. For some reason I never understood, he picked up stakes at his Columbus, Ohio farm and came to New York City when the stock market was crashing on Wall Street, bringing his large family. Maybe he already though the Great Recession was going to come to his farm. He got a job, probably through some Irish friend or something, as a telegraph operator on Wall Street and supported his family -- I think they lived in New Jersey. Maybe he looked something like this young fellow in the picture, but that was 20 years before the crash. In any event, stocks may crash but they would still need telegraph operators to report it all, it was probably a secure job to be in.

Then I started reading about the early days of radio and Wall Street and found this:

The Work of Wall Street, Sereno S. Pratt, 1909, pages 133-139:
CHAPTER  X
TOOLS  OF  WALL  STREET
    "OUR current political economy," wrote Walter Bagehot thirty years ago, "does not sufficiently take account of time as an element in trade operations." It can not be said, however, that Wall Street does not take account of time. Speed with accuracy, promptness in all things--this is the cornerstone of modern finance. Most of the tools of Wall Street are time-savers. The six most important are:

    The stock indicator.
    The telegraph.
    The cable.
    The telephone.
    The news slips.
    The market reports.

The issue of speed of news affecting stock transactions is back, of course, if it never left, as the hyper-speed of the Internet and computers has affected the market.

The rest of the history there is fascinating, including the bit about lawsuits involving competitors trying to publish the stock ticker information jealously guarded by the company the stock market owned itself -- and the eventual settlement with both news to subscribers and publication for the general public. The business newspaper in part evolved as the wrapping around the stock ticker in a way.

New York Times telegraph room. Photo by Marjory Collins. Copy boys are chatting in the background and in the back room you can see the wire service tickers as well.