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By Root 8132 0

and department stores. However, the city’s metamorphosis could be measured as well by its production and distribution of something less tangible than clipper ships or steam boilers. In the 1840s and 1850s Manhattan became the nation’s information center, a fountain from which news and novels, stock quotes and lithographs flowed in ceaseless profusion. A mountain of printed matter, generated by a growing army of publishers and printshops, was delivered by rail. But data was also dispatched, almost magically, through an expanding latticework of wires, itself the progeny of New York’s scientific and commercial cultures.

WIRING UP

After painter Samuel F. B. Morse returned from Europe in 1832, the renaissance New Yorker devoted himself, more or less simultaneously, to art, politics, and science. He served as professor of the literature of the arts of design at the University of the City of New York. He joined the crusade against popery and ran for mayor on the Native American ticket. And he set out to design a device that would “transmit intelligence by electricity.”

Morse was no theorist, though he had picked up the rudiments of electromagnetism at New York Athenaeum lectures. But in 1837, after years of dogged experimentation, he and his colleagues succeeded in transmitting signals through the hundreds of feet of wire Morse had looped around his university rooms overlooking Washington Square. Patenting their “telegraph,” the inventors developed a dot-dash code system and set out to convince a skeptical public the machine was practicable.

In October 1842 Morse insulated two miles of copper wire with tar, pitch, hemp, and India rubber, put it on board a rowboat, and paid it out, one moonlit night, while a boatman paddled him over to Governors Island. In the morning the New York Herald announced that at noon Morse would transmit a message back to Castle Garden. The receiver worked for a bit, then died when the wire snagged on a departing ship’s anchor and was hauled up and sliced apart by puzzled sailors. The crowd, believing itself hoaxed, dispersed with jeers.

Morse had better luck in 1844 when, having convinced Congress to underwrite a telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, he inaugurated the hookup with an exultant “What hath God wrought!” Morse, a good republican, offered to sell his invention to the government for development as a public network, but Congress in its laissezfaire wisdom declined to accept. Some businessmen shied away too, thinking Morse’s device too risky an investment. Jacob Little, worried that vandals would make short work of poles and wires, preferred carrier pigeons. But scores of other entrepreneurs plunged with gusto into developing a new industry.

Morse himself rounded up enough backers, including the owner of a Nassau Street beanery, to establish the Magnetic Telegraph Company and begin service between New York and Philadelphia (actually, the line ended at Jersey City and messengers rowed telegrams across to Manhattan). In 1846, when speculators used stock and commodity news relayed from New York to manipulate prices on the Philadelphia exchange, even Jacob Little became a believer.

By 1846, also, independently owned telegraph lines were converging on New York from Washington, Boston, and Albany. Less than a decade later, better than fifty companies had sprung up around the country, and thousands of miles of wire coupled New York to such far-away places as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.

The city’s commanding position in the new communications web was bolstered by establishment of a telegraphic link with Europe—the project of Cyrus West Field. A Massachusetts migrant, Field had worked as an errand boy at A. T. Stewart’s store, then gone into paper manufacturing. Given the explosion of the penny press, the market for bank notes and bonds, and a surge in long-distance letter writing, Field’s firm flourished, making him one of the city’s richest men. At thirty-four he retired, bought a house in Gramercy Park, and turned to telegraphy.

In 1854, encouraged by the recent discovery of a shallow