Editing Telegraphy (section)

== Social implications ==

Optical telegraph lines were installed by governments, often for a military purpose, and reserved for official use only. In many countries, this situation continued after the introduction of the electric telegraph. Starting in Germany and the UK, electric telegraph lines were installed by railway companies. Railway use quickly led to private telegraph companies in the UK and the US offering a telegraph service to the public using telegraph along railway lines. The availability of this new form of communication brought on widespread social and economic changes.

The electric telegraph freed communication from the time constraints of postal mail and revolutionized the global economy and society.<ref>Downey, Gregory J. (2002) ''Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850–1950'', Routledge, New York and London, p. 7</ref><ref name="eh.net">Economic History Encyclopedia (2010) "History of the U.S. Telegraph Industry", {{cite web |url=http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/nonnenmacher.industry.telegraphic.us |title=EH.Net Encyclopedia: History of the U.S. Telegraph Industry |access-date=14 December 2005 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060502202633/http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/nonnenmacher.industry.telegraphic.us |archive-date=2 May 2006 }}</ref> By the end of the 19th century, the telegraph was becoming an increasingly common medium of communication for ordinary people. The telegraph isolated the message (information) from the physical movement of objects or the process.<ref name="Carey, James 1989 p. 210">Carey, James (1989). ''Communication as Culture'', Routledge, New York and London, p. 210</ref>

There was some fear of the new technology. According to author [[Allan J. Kimmel]], some people "feared that the telegraph would erode the quality of public discourse through the transmission of irrelevant, context-free information." [[Henry David Thoreau]] thought of the Transatlantic cable "...perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." Kimmel says these fears anticipate many of the characteristics of the modern internet age.<ref>Allan J. Kimmel, ''People and Products: Consumer Behavior and Product Design'', pp. 53–54, Routledge, 2015 {{ISBN|1317607503}}.</ref>

Initially, the telegraph was expensive, but it had an enormous effect on three industries: finance, newspapers, and railways. Telegraphy facilitated the growth of organizations "in the railroads, consolidated financial and commodity markets, and reduced information costs within and between firms".<ref name= "eh.net"/> In the US, there were 200 to 300 stock exchanges before the telegraph, but most of these were unnecessary and unprofitable once the telegraph made financial transactions at a distance easy and drove down transaction costs.<ref name= "Phillips"/>{{rp |274–75}} This immense growth in the business sectors influenced society to embrace the use of telegrams once the cost had fallen.

Worldwide telegraphy changed the gathering of information for news reporting. Journalists were using the telegraph for war reporting as early as 1846 when the [[Mexican–American War]] broke out. News agencies were formed, such as the [[Associated Press]], for the purpose of reporting news by telegraph.<ref name= "Phillips"/>{{rp|274–75}} Messages and information would now travel far and wide, and the telegraph demanded a language "stripped of the local, the regional; and colloquial", to better facilitate a worldwide media language.<ref name="Carey, James 1989 p. 210"/> Media language had to be standardized, which led to the gradual disappearance of different forms of speech and styles of [[journalism]] and storytelling.

The spread of the railways created a need for an accurate [[standard time]] to replace local standards based on local [[noon]]. The means of achieving this synchronisation was the telegraph. This emphasis on precise time has led to major societal changes such as the concept of the [[time value of money]].<ref name="Phillips"/>{{rp|273–74}}

During the telegraph era there was widespread employment of [[women in telegraphy]]. The shortage of men to work as telegraph operators in the [[American Civil War]] opened up the opportunity for women of a well-paid skilled job.<ref name="Phillips"/>{{rp|274}} In the UK, there was widespread employment of women as telegraph operators even earlier – from the 1850s by all the major companies. The attraction of women for the telegraph companies was that they could pay them less than men. Nevertheless, the jobs were popular with women for the same reason as in the US; most other work available for women was very poorly paid.<ref name= Beauchamp/>{{rp|77}}<ref name=Kieve/>{{rp|85}}

The economic impact of the telegraph was not much studied by economic historians until parallels started to be drawn with the rise of the internet. In fact, the electric telegraph was as important as the invention of printing in this respect. According to economist Ronnie J. Phillips, the reason for this may be that [[Institutional economics|institutional economists]] paid more attention to advances that required greater capital investment. The investment required to build railways, for instance, is orders of magnitude greater than that for the telegraph.<ref name="Phillips">Ronnie J. Phillips, [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00213624.2000.11506266 "Digital technology and institutional change from the gilded age to modern times: The impact of the telegraph and the internet"] {{Webarchive|url= https://web.archive.org/web/20200808010633/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00213624.2000.11506266 |date=8 August 2020 }}, ''Journal of Economic Issues'', vol. 34, iss. 2, pp. 267–89, June 2000.</ref>{{rp|269–70}}