The Chair: Volume I

Chapter 2 Leann-3

Unfortunately, Alter’s plans went awry, his body found on a sandbar near the river three days later. Further, he was not sent down the river in a flaming funeral pyre, the ceremony he had recently read about, and dreamed for, being very popular in India. Positive identification was made after Kathryn Lochese, one of the chambermaids at the Morris House saw that Alter’s gold watch was in his vest pocket, the very same watch she saw placed atop his dresser drawer in his Room 501 on an eighteen inch by twenty-four-inch lace doily made in Ireland. Lochese later complained to the police, over a week later, “During his entire three-night stay at the hotel, he (Mr. Alter) left me five cents on the bureau as a tip for my work in cleaning his room, bringing him meals, and providing fresh flowers each day.”

The newly founded Philadelphia Public Ledger made little note, nor long remembrance of his death, nearly a week later, instead, amidst all the rumor and still ongoing investigation, adding his name on page 7 in the minor line obituaries with a small sentence saying he “was a designer and inventor of various items yet to be patented.” Local financier and banker Thomas Atkinson said nearly twenty years later “And there isn’t even a plaque, or a signpost, or a statue of him in that town! Someone put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order. I knew David, I knew he was head-strong, talking loudly, saying stupid things. So, when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself ‘This is the business we’ve chosen!’ I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!”

Further here for clarification, Samuel Morse independently developed and patented a recording electric telegraph in 1837. Morse’s assistant, Alfred Vail, developed an instrument that was called “The Register” for recording the received messages. It had embossed dots and dashes on a moving paper tape by a stylus which was operated by an electromagnet. Morse and Vail developed the Morse code signaling alphabet. The first telegram that early January 1838, across two miles of wire at Speedwell Ironworks near Morristown, New Jersey, although it was only later, in 1844, that he sent the message “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT” over the forty-four miles from the Capitol in Washington to the old Mt. Clare Depot in Baltimore.

In the United States, the Morse & Vail telegraph was quickly deployed in the two decades following the first demonstration. Vail is being mentioned here because he has somehow been left out of nearly all mention of the invention of the telegraph. He is a man worth remembering. The overland telegraph connected the west coast of the continent to the east coast by October 24, 1861, bringing an end to the Pony Express. It was a hell of a run, literally. The end signified the end of man and horse pioneering and exploring, and settling and conquering The Great American West, making way for the Iron Horse, the “powerful steaming steel smoking screaming locomotive on rails,” along with electric wire transmissions, and eventually, the automobile along with flying machines and steam contraptions to lead the way into an unknown, but exciting and hectic, future. Later, baseball’s Lou Gehrig would be known as the Iron Horse, and would also have a disease named after him. The Civil War began one hundred ninety-four days earlier with firing on Ft. Sumpter by rebels on Federal forces.

As well as the rapid expansion of the use of the telegraphs along the railways, they soon spread into the field of mass communication with the instruments being installed in post offices. The era of mass personal communication had just begun.

Up until it discontinued the service in 2006, Western Union was the best-known company in the business of exchanging telegrams. Everyone knew Western Union, although ninety percent of Americans never either sent or received a telegram.

Western Union has several divisions, with products such as person-to-person money transfer, money orders, business payments, and commercial services. They offered standard “Cablegrams,” as well as more cheerful products such as “Candygrams, Dollygrams, and Melodygrams.” You could have your pick.

Western Union, as an industrialized monopoly, dominated the telegraph industry in the late nineteenth century. It was the first communications empire and set a pattern for American style communications businesses as they are known today. A monopoly that created megolopolies along its path storming into the future and leaving the past in its wake. Later, Jay & The Americans, a rock ‘n roll band in the mid 1960s, would pay homage to this conglomerate with a song by the same name, “Western Union,”© its members imitating a telegraph message tapping sound with a melodic “ta ta ta-ta ta, ta ta ta-ta ta,” in the background as the chorus, filling up the airwaves from AM radio station broadcasts across the nation, in and of itself a lightning dispatch with an important message to both sender and recipient, along with the youth of America, this song being perhaps their first, and for many, only, especially if a little kid suddenly died of cholera, or in a car accident, or choking on a pizza, having failed to chew a pepperoni fully that would become lodged in a trachea at an early age, exposure to grand scope of the powerful impact of communication technology on them.

In 1851, the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company was organized in Rochester, New York by Samuel L. Selden, Hiram Sibley, and others, with the goal of creating one great telegraph system with unified and efficient operations. Meanwhile, Ezra Cornell had bought back one of his bankrupt companies and renamed it the New York & Western Union Telegraph Company. Originally fierce competitors, by 1856 both groups were finally convinced that consolidation was their only alternative for progress. The merged company was named the Western Union Telegraph Company at Cornell’s insistence, and Western Union was born. Yes, Cornell University in New York is named for Ezra, who also headed the New York Agriculture Society at one time.

Western Union bought out smaller companies rapidly, and by 1860 its lines reached from the East Coast to the Mississippi River, and from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River. If you know American Geography you should have no real difficulty in envisioning this expanse of land. In 1861, it opened the first transcontinental telegraph. In 1865, the year Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, which is the name of a town, not a real courthouse, although there were various courthouses there over many years, Western Union formed the Russian–American Telegraph in an attempt to link America to Europe, via Alaska, into Siberia, to Moscow. This project was abandoned in 1867. Reports of that time point to a drunken brawl at a hotel and bordello in Calgary, Canada between Russian, American, and Canadian manufacturing reps, state officials, and local law enforcement, and a few indigenous “Chiefs of the Great Land” caused its demise, with money being stolen, official documentation being burned, and the mirror behind long bar saloon being shattered in the melee. Canada is always going to be Canada, and do Canada, no matter what. No need to really concern yourself with Canada. The company enjoyed phenomenal growth during the next few years. Under the leadership of its presidents Jeptha Wade and William Orton, Western Union’s capitalization rose from nearly four hundred thousand dollars in 1858 to forty-one million dollars in 1876. 1876, also was the Centennial of The United States of America. However, it was top-heavy with stock issues, and faced growing competition from several firms, especially the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company—itself taken over by financier Jay Gould in 1875. In 1881, Gould, a leading American railroad developer and speculator, portrayed as one of the “ruthless robber barons” of the “Gilded Age,” whose success at business made him one of the richest men of his era, but hated and reviled, with few defenders then or now, took control of Western Union.

Nearly eighty years later American actor Elliot Gould said “I sure wish I had inherited some of Jay Gould’s wealth, but actually my last name was originally Goldstein, so that’s that,” as he was drinking French Champagne and chomping on a Ritz cracker with Russian Black Sea caviar, never caring for the Black Sea sturgeon egg varietal, at his wedding reception after he married singer, actress, and eventual political activist Barbra Streisand on March 20, 1963 in New York City two hundred forty seven days before President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

The two met when leading man Elliott Gould was reading with actresses for the role of his secretary in the musical “I Can Get It for You Wholesale”© when an up-and-coming twenty-year-old named Barbra Streisand walked in. “She did three or four songs, and she was beyond brilliant, so amazing,” Gould recalled once during a film festival in Los Angeles years later. Though he almost never talks about his famous marriage to one of Hollywood’s greatest legends, Gould revealed how the “bold and brassy” Barbra gave him her number and asked him to come see her sing in a nightclub.

“I said, ‘I think you’re going to be in the show, and once you are, I’ll see if I can get to know you,’” he continued. And he was right. “She stole the show,” Gould said of her Tony-nominated role in “Wholesale.” “She is one of a kind!” The couple lived together in a small apartment over a seafood restaurant in Manhattan and got married in 1963. Three years later, they had a son, Jason. Their marriage dissolved in 1971, but it was obvious Gould still has fond feelings for the woman he sweetly called “my first girlfriend.” Though Barbra married actor James Brolin in 1998, he is being most noted for his role in the movie “Capricorn One,”© a story of a fake Moon landing broadcast on television worldwide which co-starred Sam Waterston and football star and murderer O.J. Simpson, Gould said he and Barbra “are still family and we love each other. We have a special relationship and kinship.”

As Barbra put it, “Once you have loved someone they become a part of what you were and therefore part of what you are. After all, how many people does one love in a lifetime?” She went on to say, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world” and then stopped, turned around, and said “On a clear day rise and look around you and you see who you are. On a clear day how, it will astound you that the glow of your being outshines every star. You’ll feel part of every mountain, sea, and shore. You can hear from far and near a world you’ve never, never heard before. And on a clear day, on that clear day, you can see forever, and ever, and ever and ever more.”

It should be further noted that Barbra called him “hubbie,” Elvis Presley called him “crazy,” and Groucho Marx once called him “to change a lightbulb.” Gould, much later, once asked and answered his own question in front of a group of reporters in Scotland while attending an international film festival. “You know what the definition of ‘career’ is, in Webster’s dictionary?" he asks. “It’s defined as emanating from a Spanish word meaning an obstacle course, like a racetrack. I appreciate that.”

Western Union introduced the first stock ticker in 1866, and a standardized time service in 1870. The next year, 1871, the company introduced its money transfer service, based on its extensive telegraph network. In 1879, the year also that the Isandhlwana and Rork’s Drift attack took place in late January, when seventeen hundred English troops were slaughtered having held off twenty thousand Zulu warriors, and made into a motion picture starring Stanley Baker, who produced it in 1964, and newcomer Michael Caine, called “Zulu.”© essentially signalling the beginning of the end of English colonial rule, Western Union left the telephone business, settling a patent lawsuit with Bell Telephone Company. As the telephone replaced the telegraph, money transfer would become its primary business.