A challenge to the long-held notion of close ties between the railroad
and telegraph industries of the nineteenth century.
To many people in the nineteenth century, the railroad and the telegraph
were powerful, transformative forces, ones that seemed to work closely
together to shape the economy, society, and politics of the United
States. However, the perception--both popular and scholarly--of the
intrinsic connections between these two institutions has largely
obscured a far more complex and contested relationship, one that created
profound divisions between entrepreneurial telegraph promoters and
warier railroad managers.
In The Train and the Telegraph, Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes
argues that uncertainty, mutual suspicion, and cautious experimentation
more aptly describe how railroad officials and telegraph entrepreneurs
hesitantly established a business and technical relationship. The two
industries, Schwantes reveals, were drawn together gradually through
external factors such as war, state and federal safety regulations, and
financial necessity, rather than because of any perception that the two
industries were naturally related or beneficial to each other.
Complicating the existing scholarship by demonstrating that the railroad
and telegraph in the United States were uneasy partners at best--and
more often outright antagonists--throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, The Train and the Telegraph will appeal to
scholars of communication, transportation, and American business history
and political economy, as well as to enthusiasts of the
nineteenth-century American railroad industry.
