What the Internet can teach us about the past - Part 1

We are all used to searching the Internet for information about what is happening today. And without the Internet to train on we wouldn’t have the current LLMs like GPT and BARD. But have you ever used the Internet to study the distant past? Well, I have, and want to tell a few stories I have uncovered. Part 1 will cover "the telegram", part 2 "the grammar book", and part 3 "my grandfather".

My first story goes back all the way to 1873, but from my point of view it commences in 1970. One day in that year I went with my father to Manhattan to take my Advanced Class amateur radio exam. We stopped first at his office where he had to do some work, and he handed me over to some old guy (whose name I unfortunately don’t remember) to watch me for an hour or so. I remember my father saying that was alive during the US Civil War; this was probably an offhand exaggeration, but if taken at face value this guy would have been over 100 years old.

I told him that the exam I was about to take included sending and receiving Morse telegraphy, in addition to electronics and radio operations. Before I left for the exam he gave me a present and told me that it was old and that I should hold onto it. It was a slightly brown piece of paper with a picture of Benjamin Franklin at the top and some hard-to-read scribbling.

I passed my ham exam, and when I got home I took a close look at the piece of paper. It was a telegram. Apparently, he thought I should have it in as much as I knew Morse code. And it was dated April 15, 1873, three years before the invention of the telephone.

I took the folded telegram and placed it into a wooden puzzle box that I had received for my birthday. This kind of box can only be opened by the correct sequence of sliding carefully camouflaged side pieces, and this particular one has a main compartment, but also a second drawer which can be overlooked. It was into this small drawer that I placed the telegram, and retrieved it only a handful of times over the next 50 years.

A few weeks ago, I decided to see if my grandson could open the puzzle box. After a few hints he managed to open the main compartment, and was confident that he was done. With a smile on my face, I opened the secret drawer and pulled out the telegram! It had been years since I had last seen it, and the paper was separating at the folds. But the writing was still clearly visible and I noticed that the telegram was now exactly 150 years old. I decided, for the first time, to earnestly try reading it.

It was easy to read the telegram’s letterhead:

??Opposition Line! Prices Reduced!

??Franklin Telegraph Co.

??Lines East, West, North & South.

A few minutes of Internet searching turned up several similar telegrams available on eBay, and even a few unused blanks, for under $50. And I discovered that The Franklin Telegraph Company was incorporated in Massachusetts and ran a telegraph service between Boston and Washington DC. It was one of many competing telegraph companies at the time, with names such as the National Telegraph Company of New York, The Insulated Lines Telegraph Company of Boston, The Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, The Globe Telegraph Company, The Great Western Telegraph Company, American Union Telegraph Company of NY, and Western Union Telegraph Company. The reasoning behind the first line declaring “Prices Reduced” was now clear.

Competition between these companies eventually led to consolidation. In 1867 Franklin Telegraph had purchased the Insulated Lines Telegraph Company and in 1869 The Massachusetts Senate passed bill 0195 of that year authorizing Franklin to issue bonds.?Three years after my telegram, in June of 1876, Franklin Telegraph Company leased all its property and franchises to the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company of New York. But then in January of 1881, the latter corporation sold and transferred all its property and franchises to the Western Union Telegraph Company. Franklin Telegraph had appeared, flourished, and been absorbed in less than a decade.

Furthermore, Franklin Telegraph had missed out on its greatest business opportunity. In 1867 Joseph Barker Stearns was elected president of the company, and towards the end of his stint there he invented duplex telegraphy, enabling two messages to be sent over the same telegraph wire at the same time. This invention enabled major reduction in expenses and Stearns unsuccessfully tried to sell his invention to his own company. He eventually sold it to Western Union.

Thomas Edison had been working on duplex telegraphy too, and was devastated when Stearns beat him to it. The invention made Stearns a millionaire. In 1885 he retired to Maine, and built himself a huge estate and an astronomical observatory. His obituary mentions that he had the largest collection of ivory carvings in the world.

Now let’s turn to the contents of the telegram itself. It was easy to make out the first three lines.

?? April 15 1873

?? By Telegraph from Phila

?? To AD Lockwood

but then came an undecipherable location name. To read it correctly I needed to find out who AD Lockwood was.

Luckily, Mr. Lockwood has his own Wikipedia entry. Amos DeForest Lockwood (1811–1884) was an American manufacturer and engineer based in Providence, Rhode Island. He was self-trained as a mechanical engineer, and gradually expanded his scope to all areas of textile mill construction. He was a cofounder, in 1882, of Lockwood, Greene & Company, which would later become one of the largest engineering firms in the United States in the twentieth century. In 1851 Amos and his brother Moses bought into the?Quinebaug Mills?at?Brooklyn, Connecticut, taking over management. That was the name! Quinebaug Co (Co for either Connecticut or Company).

So, my telegram was addressed to a preeminent textile mill engineer. But who was it from?

I could make out the name Simpson, but not what was before or after. Was that Mm or Hm before, and perhaps family afterwards? The letters were not consistent with their form in other more readable parts of the telegram. But telegrams most often had to do with business, and AD Lockwood was a textile engineer – could our Mr. Simpson be in the textile business too?

So, I searched for Simpsons in Philadelphia in the textile business and Bingo! I found the logo of William Simpson and Sons, a textile mill in Philadelphia. It was Wm! A little more searching and another notable person had been discovered.

William Simpson and John Halliday built a textile mill in 1836 at the "Falls of Schuylkill" (near Philadelphia). Simpson was a British citizen from a family of textile printers, and had emigrated to America in 1818. Textile mills at the time were powered either by water or by steam, and this new one exploited a water fall to produce cotton prints. This fall no longer exists due to a dam having been built in 1822, but the name remains in the area. In 1869 the textile mill was renamed William Simpson & Sons. Unfortunately, this mill had to be shut down after the entire area was nationalized to become Fairmount Park.

William had sent his son Thomas to Europe to learn the latest in textile mill design. On his way home, Thomas passed the Eddystone Lighthouse in Cornwall, UK, and was most impressed by its construction. In 1873 (the year of my telegram!) William opened new, much larger, steam powered, textile mill which they called Eddystone Print Works. This factory was truly high-tech, producing complex prints in multiple colors. William Simpson built houses for the workers on the site, and later added a school, a park and a library. This developed into a town known today as Eddystone Pennsylvania. ?In 1929 the Eddystone mill was acquired from William Percy Simpson (William’s grandson) and became the Print Works Division of Joseph Bancroft Sons & Company. Bancroft itself was sold in 1961 to Indian Head Mills of New York City. The Eddystone Plant closed in late 1963 and the building was torn down.

Now I could finally read the text of the telegram.

Have stopped payment of draft & will remit duplicate soon.

Notify us if first received yet.

Wm Simpson & Sons

replied Draft not yet received

A draft is, of course, what we now call a check (although these are disappearing from common use). William Simpson and Sons had sent a check to AD Lockwood, but the check never arrived, and so had cancelled the check and were preparing a new one.

I can only surmise why William Simpson would send a check to AD Lockwood in 1873, but I think that designing the new Eddystone textile mill is a safe bet. I couldn’t find any documents on the Internet to verify this (yes, sometimes one comes to a dead end, even on the Internet) but I did find that there is a trove of Eddystone documents that must contain the definitive answer . In any case the dates are more than suggestive, and we can safely say that AD Lockwood at very least provided some consulting services on the technology of steam powered mills.

This is where my search comes to its conclusion. I carefully folded the telegram and placed it back into its secret drawer. Maybe I’ll continue my research a few decades from now. If my telegram could wait 150 years, it can wait a bit longer.