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N0KFQ > TODAY 24.10.12 19:12l 48 Lines 2252 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 30228_KB0WSA
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Subj: Today in History - Oct 24
Path: IZ3LSV<IW0QNL<JH4XSY<JE7YGF<N9PMO<KC5CNT<N0KFQ<KB0WSA
Sent: 121024/1656Z 30228@KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA BPQK1.4.53
...
Oct 24, 1861:
Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line
On this day in 1861, workers of the Western Union Telegraph
Company link the eastern and western telegraph networks of the
nation at Salt Lake City, Utah, completing a transcontinental
line that for the first time allows instantaneous communication
between Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Stephen J. Field,
chief justice of California, sent the first transcontinental
telegram to President Abraham Lincoln, predicting that the new
communication link would help ensure the loyalty of the western
states to the Union during the Civil War.
The push to create a transcontinental telegraph line had begun
only a little more than year before when Congress authorized a
subsidy of $40,000 a year to any company building a telegraph
line that would join the eastern and western networks. The
Western Union Telegraph Company, as its name suggests, took up
the challenge, and the company immediately began work on the
critical link that would span the territory between the western
edge of Missouri and Salt Lake City.
The obstacles to building the line over the sparsely populated
and isolated western plains and mountains were huge. Wire and
glass insulators had to be shipped by sea to San Francisco and
carried eastward by horse-drawn wagons over the Sierra Nevada.
Supplying the thousands of telegraph poles needed was an equally
daunting challenge in the largely treeless Plains country, and
these too had to be shipped from the western mountains. Indians
also proved a problem. In the summer of 1861, a party of Sioux
warriors cut part of the line that had been completed and took a
long section of wire for making bracelets. Later, however, some
of the Sioux wearing the telegraph-wire bracelets became sick,
and a Sioux medicine man convinced them that the great spirit of
the "talking wire" had avenged its desecration. Thereafter, the
Sioux left the line alone, and the Western Union was able to
connect the East and West Coasts of the nation much earlier than
anyone had expected and a full eight years before the
transcontinental railroad would be completed.
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: n0kfq@winlink.org
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