more than 80 per cent. was owned in the Northern States. In the same year the tonnage registered in the foreign carrying trade was 576,675. In 1860 this registered tonnage had risen to 2,546,237, an increase of over 442 per cent. In the enrolled or coasting marine the increase was equally wonderful. When the Navigation Act of 1817 was passed and thereby American coasting trade was prohibited to foreign vessels, the domestic marine profited enormously. The enrolled tonnage at that time was 615,311. During the next thirty years it increased to 2,807,631, or 463 per cent. The grand total of all American shipping in 1860 was 5,358,868 tons. Between 1861 and 1865 the total tonnage of our merchant marine fell to 1,504,575. The blockading of Southern ports destroyed the shipping interests of the Confederate States, while at the same time the ravages of the Confederate privateers damaged the merchant marine of the North. Many vessels were captured and destroyed, and hundreds sought protection by registering under foreign flags. In 1864 the end of the war was marked by a sudden and large increase in ship construction, the tonnage that year amounting to 415,740, exceeding that of any year since 1855.

During the days of the sailing vessels inland transportation was carried on mainly by small sloops up and down the rivers of the North, the smaller streams of the South, and by big flat boats on the large streams, the Missis

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sippi and its tributaries. In the middle of the century steam tonnage, which had been slowly developing for some twenty-five years, began to displace sailing tonnage both in transAtlantic and in domestic transportation. tion. Between 1840 and 1860 over 4,000 steam vessels were constructed. This meant the almost complete displacement of the sailing vessel from the rivers of the country and the end of the picturesque, lumbering, flatboat of the Mississippi. In 1860 the tonnage of American steamships was 867,937, of which 97,296 was registered for foreign trade; the steam tonnage of our nearest rival, Great Britain, was 500,144. Nearly all the shipping engaged in ocean commerce was owned in New England and New York. In the South the steamboats of the Mississippi and other rivers became notable factors in the inland travel and transportation of that section. On the Pacific coast there was in 1849 a merchant marine of 722 tons of sailing vessels in San Francisco, and in the war period this had only doubled. Traffic on the great lakes developed slowly. It began with one small merchant vessel in 1797 and in half a century later amounted to only 89,000 tons.

Steam railroads did not come until the second quarter of the Nineteenth century. In 1827 there were two short roads in Massachusetts and in Pennsylvania run by horse power. In 1829 the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company ran an English built locomotive

The principles underlying the transmission of signals by wire and electric current were understood soon after the middle of the Eighteenth century, and experimental systems of telegraphy were in existence in Europe and America early in the following century.

But it was not until Samuel

F. B. Morse in 1832-1835 invented his famous alphabet of dashes and dots and made the practical application of it in the transmission of messages by a conducting wire, that modern telegraphy came into existence. The Morse invention was first publicly exhibited in New York in 1837 and letters patent were granted for it in 1840. The National Congress appropriated $30,000 for the construction of an experimental line, and in May of 1844 the first message sent by electric wire, the famous dispatch" What hath God wrought! was flashed from Baltimore to Washington, a distance of 43 miles.

In April of 1845 the experimental

- Its final success.

line was declared ready for business. Little interest in the invention as a business proposition was manifested.

* Willis J. Abbot, American Ships and Sailors (New York, 1902); C. F. Adams, Railroads, Their Origin and Problems (New York, 1888); William W. Bates, The American Marine (Boston, 1903); J. B. Crawford, The Credit Mobilier of America (Boston, 1880); John P. Davis, The Union Pacific Railway (Chicago, 1894); T. D. Woolsey (ed.), The First Century of the Republic (New York, 1876); Henry M. Flint, Railroads of the United States, Their History and Statistics (Philadelphia, 1868); Eighty Years' Progress of the United States (Worcester, 1861); Report of the United States Industrial Commission (19 vols., Washington, 1900-1902); A. B. Hulbert, Historic Highway Series (15 vols., Cleveland, 1902-1903); Henry Fry, History of North Atlantic Steam Navigation (New York, 1896); Emory R. Johnson, American Railroad Transportation (New York, 1903) and Ocean and Inland Transportation (New York, 1906); W. L. Marvin, The American Merchant Marine (New York, 1902); John H. Morrison, History of American Steam Navigation (New York, 1903); H. S. Tanner, A Description of the Canals and Railroads in the United States (New York, 1840); George G. Tunell, Transportation on the Great Lakes in Journal of Political Economy, vol. iv. (Chicago, 1896); H. K. White, History of the Union Pacific Railroad (Chicago, 1895).

Prepared for this history by Herbert N. Casson, author of American Telegraph and Telephone Systems; etc.

by the public and it was with difficulty that the New York and Boston Magnetic Telegraph Company was organized and money secured for the construction of a line between Philadelphia and New York. This line was completed in January of 1846, but its eastern terminus was Fort Lee on the New Jersey bank of the Hudson River. It was not until ten years later that a cable service under the Hudson River was successfully instituted, so that messages could be sent direct from

and to the New York office of the company.

In 1846 the telegraph began its uninterrupted career of success. Wires went up all over the country; the steadily increasing public demand outran the efforts to add to facilities; competing companies, contesting the validity of the Morse patents, sprang up. Every section of the country demanded and was provided with the telegraph before 1850. Among the early telegraph companies, the principal ones, with the dates of their organization, were:

New York and Boston Magnetic Telegraph
Co.

1845

1848

1849

1850

1856

1851

The com

The history of the first decade of the telegraph is a record of marvellous expansion, of keen competition between rival interests, of litigation, failures and bankruptcy. panies already enumerated were not alone in the field. Scores of others were organized, and many lines were so hastily and imperfectly erected that they went to pieces in a few years. The country was telegraph-crazy," and promoters and contractors were in fierce competition with each other. The companies working under the Morse patent did not have a monopoly. Companies were organized and successfully conducted under the House and Hughes patents, both of which were for the transmission and recording of messages by the Roman letter characters and not by the Morse dots and dashes; and also under the Bain patent, which was for a method of recording the message on a chemically-prepared paper.

As a natural result of this intense rivalry and remarkable development, the business was greatly overdone and

in many instances was weakly begun. Movements toward combination and consolidation set in early, especially on the part of the smaller and financially weaker companies. In the decade after 1845 the Magnetic Telegraph Company took over many of these lines as fast as they sprang up. Other powerful companies companies notably the American and the Western Unioncame into existence, however, in this

period. The American was owned by Peter Cooper, Abram S. Hewitt, and Cyrus W. Field, and in 1858 it absorbed various New England, Newfoundland, and Southern lines, and in the following year the pioneer Magnetic Company.

From its beginning in 1851 the Western Union Company was preëminently successful and its extension was rapid. In a few years it secured control of the Atlantic and Ohio and also the New York, Albany and Buffalo Magnetic Electric Telegraph Company, then one of the strongest corporations. It moved its headquarters from Rochester to New York City and entered upon a National career. Presently it reached out and secured lines in the South and West, and when the Civil War began it held a position of supreme importance. Its work during the Civil War, and especially in the service of the United States government, was sound and brilliantly serviceable, adding much to its prestige. In 1866 it absorbed the American Telegraph Company, and

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became the great company of the United States.

In California many small companies were started between 1852 and 1856, but most of these were ultimately merged in the California State Telegraph Company. A transcontinental line was considered as early as 1857. The necessity of bringing the East and the far West into closer touch was em

The phasized by the Civil War. Government realized the importance of the proposed line, especially in its military advantage affording means of quick communication with the forts of the West and the Pacific Coast. A government subsidy was granted in 1860 and the Western Union Company, in coöperation with the California State Company, successfully accomplished this work. At the same time an overland line to Europe, by the way of Behring Strait, Siberia and Russia, was projected. Surveys were made and work was begun, but the successful laying of the Atlantic cable caused the abandonment of the project, after more than $3,000,000 had been spent upon it.

In 1851 the first attempt to lay a cable from Newfoundland to the American continent was made. It failed then, but was executed five years later by the New York, Newfoundland and London Electric Telegraph Company, in which Cyrus W. Field, Marshal D. Roberts, Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, and Chandler