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Telegraph Messenger Boys: Crossing the Borders betweenHistory of Technology and Human Geography*

Greg DowneyUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison

Historians of telegraphy have traditionally focused on the system-builders who invented wire communicationstechnologies and incorporated them into profit-making enterprises. Geographers of communications havetraditionally traced the changes that the telegraph network wrought on the rank-size of cities and the speed ofbusiness. Both have ignored the history of the telegraph messenger boys and the ‘‘lived geography’’ of thetelegraph network. This article summarizes a study of telegraph messengers as both active components oftechnological systems and laboring agents within produced urban spaces, bringing together the fields of bothhistory of technology and human geography. Key Words: communications technology, historical geography,labor geography, telegraph network, urban geography.

Introduction

The story of America’s first electrical com-munications network, the telegraph, has

been told many times in heroic Zane Grey stylesince the first branch of that network waserected between Washington, DC, and thenearby city of Baltimore in the mid-1840s(Grey 1939). Early accounts described thegenius of inventor Samuel Morse in creatinga workable system of ‘‘communication at adistance’’ through wires and batteries, poles andcrossarms, and dots and dashes. Later taleswritten after the Civil War recounted thetelegraph’s effects on commerce and govern-ment, and the profit-making potential ofthe network, as evidenced by the rise of theWestern Union Telegraph Company to ‘‘nat-ural monopoly’’ power (Reid 1886). Thetwentieth-century histories that followed in thewake of two world wars still marveled atthe telegraph’s importance, but also describedthe telegraph’s ‘‘inevitable’’ decline in the faceof ‘‘superior’’ technologies such as airmail andthe telephone (Harlow 1936; Thompson 1947).And at the turn of the twenty-first century, withnew digital packet-switching computer net-works begging analogies to the dots and dashesof old, the telegraph continues to be reimaginedas ‘‘the Victorian Internet’’ (Standage 1998).

In most of these stories, telegraph messengerboys appear on the margins as colorful but

unimportant characters. From the start of thefirst commercial telegraph line in 1845, youngboys were employed to ferry handwrittenmessages into and out of the electrical telegraphsystem, to and from individual customers.About the same time such messages becameknown as ‘‘telegrams,’’ the boys started tobecome known as ‘‘messengers.’’ In the after-math of the CivilWar, messengers were clothedin military-style uniforms; at the turn of thetwentieth century, they were supplied withmodern safety bicycles. Thus has the whimsicalimage of the messenger survived in popularculture, still available today for rent onvideocassette in old movies from the 1930sand 1940s starring child actors such as MickeyRooney and Billy Benedict.But real messenger work had little in com-

mon with its Hollywood depiction. In 1901, aPhiladelphia ‘‘Western Union boy,’’ for exam-ple, actually would have worked for anothercompany called American District Telegraph,or ADT (the forerunner of today’s ADTsecurity systems). He would have been one ofover 150 ADT messengers in the city, amongtheir twenty-two branch offices. At 14 years ofage (assuming he had not lied on his jobapplication), he would have worked ten-hourdays, seven days a week, waiting on a bench inback of the district office with five other boysfor his turn at the next messenger call from anyof the 250 or so electric call-boxes on his local

* Portions of this article appeared in a different form in chapters 1 and 2 of the following work: Downey, Greg. 2002. Telegraph messenger boys: Labor,technology, and geography, 1850–1950. New York: Routledge.

The Professional Geographer, 55(2) 2003, pages 134–145 r Copyright 2003 by Association of American Geographers.Initial submission, May 2002; revised submission, November 2002; final acceptance, November 2002.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

circuit out of the more than 5,000 call-boxesscattered throughout the city. This one mes-senger would have handled about twelve tele-grams a day, both pick-ups and deliveries,receiving a piece wage of 2b for every call—barely enough money to cover his weeklybicycle and uniform rental fees, let alone hismeal, maintenance, and mending costs. Withthe telegraph company hiring him out for otherodd service jobs that paid by the hour (or theminute), his overall wage might come to a littleover U.S.$2 a week—almost exactly what hewould have been making at the same occupa-tion in the same city a quarter-century before.(In contrast, an adult telegraph operator wouldhave earned from $10 to $15 a week during thesame time period, and a telegraph office clerkmight have made between $5 and $10 a week.)1

That such work existed at the birth of electriccommunications is not surprising, but the factthat messenger work not only persisted, butthrived for more than a century from the 1850sto the 1950s—through a tumultuous period ofurban, technological, cultural, social, political,and corporate upheaval in America oftenreferred to as the heyday of ‘‘modernity’’—poses many historical questions. Consider thesimple quantitative data available from thegovernment on the number of telegraphmessengers employed from 1870 to 1950(U.S. Bureau of the Census 1904, 1931–1933,1942–1943, 1952–1957; Edwards 1943). Rather

than declining with the invention of the tele-phone in the 1880s, or even with the increaseduse of the automobile in the 1910s, messengeremployment peaked around 1930 and only reallybegan to drop off after World War II (Figure 1).Such a pattern can be interpreted in many ways:were messengers highly efficient workers whowere hired in greater numbers because theycould never be replaced even by ‘‘remarkableimprovements in mechanisms’’ (Gray 1924, 24),or were they an ever-growing bottleneck intelegraphy, ‘‘a problem beyond the graphicchart of the engineer’’ (Telegraph and TelephoneAge 1923b, 270)? (See Figure 2.)This historical question is complicated by a

geographical one. Plotting telegraph messen-gers per one hundred square kilometers by stateshows a bias toward the eastern, urbanized states,with New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts,Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois leading thenation in the industrialized northeast (Figure3). Plotting telegraph messengers per tenthousand inhabitants, on the other hand, showsthat when adjusted for population density, areasof the far west actually had more messengersper capita than some eastern areas, a necessarycost of moving messages great distances fromrural telegraph offices to small, dispersedpopulations (Figure 4). Unlike contemporarymaps of physical and mechanical telegraphoffices and telegraph lines—used at times byWestern Union to argue how fairly it served the

U.S. telegraph messengers (estimated at 8%-9% of all messengers)

U.S. telegraph messengers (counted)

20,000

15,000

10,000

5,000

01870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950

Mes

seng

ers

Figure 1 U.S. telegraph messengers, 1870–1950. Figures from 1870–1900 are conservative census

estimates based on the category of ‘‘Messenger and errand and office boys.’’ Source: U.S. Bureau of the

Census 1904, 1931–1933, 1942–1943, 1952–1957.

Telegraph Messenger Boys 135

entire nation—these maps of telegraph mes-sengers illustrate that the uneven geography ofthe national-scale telegraph network estab-lished in the nineteenth century persisted wellinto the twentieth century.

When followed through time and space inthis way, the story of the messengers is animportant part of the history of ‘‘white-collar’’office work in the early twentieth-century U.S.corporation (Mills 1951; Strom 1992). Tele-graph messengers were merely the most publicexample of a widespread youth courier occupa-tion that existed in other information networkssuch as the post office and the Bell System, notto mention the growing number of large private

corporations that set up internal messengerservices in ‘‘scientific’’ efforts to support thenew ‘‘visible hand’’ of capitalist business man-agement (Leffingwell 1917; Chandler 1977).From 1850 to 1950, the patterns of increasingurbanization, migration, and industrializationthat generations of historians have alreadyidentified clearly indicate a shift to a qualita-tively different and diverse ‘‘modern’’ Americansociety (Berman 1982; Ward and Zunz 1992).Yet U.S. business displayed a striking conti-nuity in the construction of this mostly young,mostly male, mostly ‘‘white’’ low-wage laborforce over such a long and transformativeperiod of time and technology.

Figure 2 Three views of tele-

graph messengers: (A) Postal

telegraph advertisement, 1923;

(B) Cartoon of dozing messenger,

1906; (C) Reformer photo of

messenger, 1915. Sources:

Telegraph & Telephone Age

(1923a, i); Commercial Telegra-

pher’s Journal (1906, 371); Na-

tional Child Labor Committee

(1915, 8).

136 Volume 55, Number 2, May 2003

Were these messengers lazy and slow, asderisive cartoons would suggest, or were theyindustrious and efficient, as advertisementsdeclared? Were messengers exploited children,as the child-labor tracts argued, or up-and-coming young businessmen, as vocationalguidance manuals suggested? And were mes-sengers a throwback to preindustrial commu-nications, as telegraph engineers lamented, orwere they a textbook example of the crucialneed for—and improved situation of—theskilled worker in the modern industrial age, asunion leaders proclaimed? This article presentsan overview of a larger research project thatdraws on the disciplines of both history andgeography to argue that, because of theirtechnological role, their symbolic value, and

their creative energies, understanding the tele-graph messenger boys is crucial to explainingthe historical geography of the telegraphsystem in America (Downey 2000b, 2002).2

A Multidisciplinary Methodology

Studying the role of messengers in producingand reproducing the spatial/temporal para-meters of the telegraph requires what mightbe called an interdisciplinary or multidiscipli-nary approach, in two senses. First, it reliesupon a diverse array of sources, both quantita-tive (such as census records and wage reports)and qualitative (such as personal recollectionsand literary works). Traditional histories ofthe telegraph, focusing on communications

Figure 3 Messengers per one hundred square kilometers by state, 1910–1950. Source: U.S. Bureau of

the Census 1904, 1931–1933, 1942–1943, 1952–1957.


technologies and their inventors, typically citelaboratory sketches, patent agreements, andengineering notebooks. But a study of tele-graph labor must instead include hiringrecords, work rules, union contracts, manage-ment minutes, and employee interviews (not tomention popular advertisements, dime novels,and muckraking news reports).

But besides new sources, a multidisciplinaryhistory of telegraph messenger work demands anew interpretation of these sources, usingseveral different analytical frameworks at once.After all, facts and figures—not to mentionmemories and moments—amount to littlewithout some sort of context. Especially in a

study of a national communications networksuch as the telegraph, not just technologies andlaborers, but institutions and localities musttake the stage. Two theoretical frameworks—one drawn from the subfield of historyof technology (Staudenmaier 1985; Cutcliffeand Post 1989; Smith and Marx 1994), andone drawn from the subfield of human geog-raphy (Gregory and Urry 1985; Peet andThrift 1989; Agnew, Livingstone, and Rogers1996)—are crucial to understanding the storyof the telegraph messengers: the idea of asocially constructed technological system andthe concept of socially produced space andtime.3

Figure 4 Messengers per ten thousand inhabitants by state, 1910–1950. Source: U.S. Bureau of the

Census 1904, 1931–1933, 1942–1943, 1952–1957.


Take the concept of a socially constructedtechnological system first. To conceive of a‘‘technological system’’ is to treat individualtechnologies—be they physical devices orscripted procedures—not in isolation fromeach other, but together in the service of largergoals. In this view, individual inventors are lessimportant than ‘‘system builders,’’ those inno-vators and entrepreneurs who are able tocombine particular technologies, sources ofcapital, and management expertise into cohe-sive institutions serving some wider purpose(Hughes 1983, 1987). For example, the varioustechnologies that made up the telegraph net-work in America—senders and receivers, print-ers and repeaters, lines and poles, typewritersand pneumatic tubes, batteries and dynamos—each ‘‘coevolved’’ with the others, under theconscious control of communications providersand equipment manufacturers. But these arenot the only groups of people who shapetechnology. Other actors, such as governmentregulators or individual consumers, influencethe evolution of technological systems as well(Cowan 1987). Thus, such systems can be saidto be ‘‘socially shaped’’ or ‘‘socially con-structed,’’ taking both their form and thepopular understanding of their purpose at anygiven moment through negotiations amongthese different groups of actors. Yet evensocially constructed systems are still bound bythe physical constraints of each individualtechnology’s capacity to affect thematerial world(Berger and Luckmann 1966; MacKenzie andWajcman 1999).

Information networks are inevitably sociallyconstructed technological systems ( John 1994;Abbate 1999). The technological network ofthe telegraph was more than just a combinationof electromechanical systems; it was a combi-nation of systems of labor, in which messengerboys served different functions at differentmoments—sometimes working as technologi-cal components themselves, sometimes beingsold as commodities along with the telegramsthey carried, and sometimes acting as agents ofchange within the technological network itself.Messengers were not simply rendered ‘‘obso-lete’’ by the slow and steady advance oftechnology—whether in telegraphy, telephony,or airmail. Instead, over the course of a century,they both cooperated in maintaining theirusefulness to the telegraph and fought to

change their relationship to the telegraph in away that would ultimately bring about theirown exit from the industry.Like the notion of a socially constructed

technological system, the idea of sociallyproduced space and time sounds counterintui-tive at first, but is actually a very usefultheoretical tool. Both ‘‘space’’ and ‘‘time’’ aresomewhat paradoxical concepts, for while theystand as abstract and absolute resources avail-able in finite quantity, they are also part of asocially constructed reality, with differentcultures in different times and places havingentirely different conceptions of what it meansto be ‘‘near’’ or ‘‘far,’’ to move ‘‘quickly’’ or‘‘slowly.’’ Different societies have also installeddifferent technologies to alter their experiencesof both space and time; thus, both space andtime themselves can be thought of as commod-ities that are ‘‘produced.’’ For example, in theearly twentieth-century telegraph, fitting morefloors on a building produced more office spacefor operators and machinery; speeding up themachines that controlled telegraph trans-mission and reception produced more timefor additional messages to be sent. But just asspace and time are both physical and socialphenomena, the production of space and timemay have both physical and social implicationsas well, with space arranged specifically toexclude certain disempowered persons, or timearranged specifically to accommodate certainpowerful persons. In all of these ways, thespatialities and temporalities that societiesconstruct through their technologies—again,both physical artifacts and social practices—have real effects on how citizens live their lives(Harvey 1990; Lefebvre 1991).Information networks are inevitably involved

in the social production of space and time(Abler 1968; Kellerman 1993; Graham andMarvin 1996). The telegraph industry pro-duced certain spaces of control over informa-tion at both national and local scales. Besidesproducing wired ‘‘virtual’’ spaces for the trans-port of electrical information, the telegraphcompanies had to produce specific physicalspaces for the transport of written information,spaces that were necessary to the messengerservice. From numbered benches and uniformlockers in the back rooms and basements oftelegraph offices where messengers waited outof public sight, to parade grounds, lecture halls,


vocational classrooms, and ‘‘vice-free’’ businessdistricts in the wider city where messengerswere displayed before the public, the industryattempted to control the very urban space thatgrounded each local telegraph office.

Taken together, these two theoretical frame-works from history and geography suggest thatanalyzing social relations is essential in trying tounderstand the production of human innova-tions, whether those innovations are techno-logical systems or spatial/temporal patterns. Tospeak of the ‘‘social production’’ and ‘‘socialconstruction’’ of innovation, then, is really tospeak of the social relations of human labor(Scranton 1988). Many historians of the tele-graph industry have investigated the telegraphoperators, those laboring men and women whomoved telegrams electrically, whether workingalone in country offices at simple mechanicalMorse keys (as was usually the case in the mid-nineteenth century) or working side-by-sidewith hundreds of others in noisy urban sky-scrapers at expensive ‘‘Simplex’’ telegraphprinters (as was more likely in the earlytwentieth century). Such studies have focusedon a few key elements: unionization amongthese skilled office workers, the rise of a newcategory of ‘‘white-collar work’’ to describesuch labor (with ‘‘white’’ often referring to theethnicity of the workers as well), and thefeminization of that white-collar work, mean-ing both the entry of more and more womeninto such occupations and the cultural redefini-tion of those occupations themselves as ‘‘wo-men’s work.’’ Thus, class, ethnicity, and genderanalyses have all been successfully brought tobear on the problem of telegraph labor in theproduction of both telegraphic technologiesand telegraphic spatiotemporalities (Ulriksson1953; Craypo 1979; Gabler 1988; Andrews1990; Israel 1992).

However, studying the telegraph messengersdemands several additional tools as well,because messenger work was fundamentallydistinct from operator work in both space andtime. Telegraph managers, engineers, opera-tors, and clerks—the classic actors in mostbusiness and technology histories—dealt with atime-pressure production floor of electrome-chanical senders, routers, repeaters, and receiv-ers of all kinds. But telegraph messengersworked literally outside of the production floor,as service workers in the customer location,

mediating between the customer and the rest ofthe telegraph network. As in other service jobs,then and now, issues of class, ethnicity, gender,and age became all the more important, as theability of a messenger to move inconspicuouslyin different urban settings and to speak intel-ligibly to different groups of consumers madeall the difference in getting the messagethrough (Benson 1986; Leidner 1993). Thus,while the telegraph network had the spatial andtemporal characteristics of both a high-tech,white-collar production industry and a low-tech,‘‘blue-collar’’ service industry, those character-istics were embodied hierarchically in differentgroups of employees. This tension makes thehistory and geography of the telegraph mes-sengers an important topic of study in thehistory and anthropology of waged work itself(Burawoy 1979; Hodson 1995; Barley and Orr1997).4

Messengers in theMultiscale, UnevenGeography of the Telegraph

The story of the growth of the telegraphnetwork in the mid-nineteenth century from aregional to a national scale, as a service movinginformation electrically between cities, is well-known. The telegraph in the U.S. was unusualin that it was privatized under the all-but-monopoly control ofWesternUnionmanagers,rather than nationalized under the governmentpost office, as in most other industrializingcountries of the time. But, private or public, thenetwork was useless without a growing army ofoperators, clerks, and messengers. The over-lapping maps of labor markets, customermarkets, technological infrastructure, and in-stitutional control resulted in an ‘‘unevengeography’’ of telegraph service in the youngindustry, with each institution facing a some-what different time/space environment (Smith1984).5

The telegraph continued to grow, not only asa system of electrical communication betweencities, but also as a system of written commu-nication within cities. Again, rather than beingsubcontracted to the civil-service post office asin other countries, this intracity system wasinstitutionalized under hundreds of privatefranchise agreements between national firmssuch as Western Union and district tele-graph companies such as American District


Telegraph, and was enabled by a nationwidelegion of young telegraph messengers, reflect-ing more the vibrant diversity of their localcommunities than the discriminatory monot-ony of a single national employing agency. Anunderstanding of the value of local messengersto the national telegraph reveals how thedistrict companies became key resources inthe industry’s ‘‘Gilded Age’’ competitive battles.

Key to such battles were the physical move-ments of messenger boys through the spaces oftelegraph production and consumption, fromtheir wheeled freedom through the dangerousstreets to the precise discipline of their hiddenoffices. While operators were physically en-meshed in an electrical communications sys-tem, messengers extended this communicationssystem to a system of transportation. In such arole, time, for the messenger, took on newsignificance for the space of the telegraphnetwork. Telegraph companies were fond ofclaiming that their technologies ‘‘annihilatedspace through time,’’ but those companies werephysically trapped within an urban system ofbuildings and roads, elevators and corridors—technologies that, instead, annihilated timethrough space (Graham and Marvin 1996,115) and could only be traversed by messengerboys. Messengers became the scapegoat for anydelay in the ‘‘speed of light’’ telegraph, pre-senting an incongruous premodern figure thatsomehow did not fit with the idea of ‘‘lightningwires’’ and scientific progress. Yet messengerskept in their heads complex virtual maps, notonly of the urban landscape, which theytraversed every day, but of the national land-scape, which demanded that telegrams ofdiffering lengths and differing destinations bepriced differently as well. Thus, messengersoccupied a key position in this informationnetwork at what might be considered theboundary between the virtual and the physical.

The messenger’s position here was notarbitrary. The socioeconomic class of themessenger worked together with cultural un-derstandings of both gender (Rothschild 1989;Lerman, Mohun, and Oldenziel 1997) andmaturity (Hawes 1997; Macleod 1998)—inother words, the assumptions and limits ofmasculinity and femininity, childhood andadulthood—both to broaden messenger dutiesand to limit the scope of their urban access.Telegraph managers chose young men as their

messengers (as opposed to, say, adult men oryoung women) for very particular reasons.Messengers had to be low-wage and control-lable, but diligent and trustworthy. Theyneeded to be instantly recognizable, but alsounobtrusively invisible. Messengers had to beable to access places and activities in the citythat most urban women could not, but unableto demand the wages and respect of an urbanman. Thus, changes in the cultural meaningsbehind both sex and age were important aspectsof ‘‘messenger technology,’’ aspects illustratedwell in the urban ‘‘vice’’ battles of the 1900s and1910s, which attempted to draw temporal andspatial boundaries around saloons and brothels,gambling rooms and pool-halls, keeping youngmessengers (and the information they carried)at bay (Downey 2000a).6

These temporal and spatial boundaries werecrucial to the maintenance of a culturalboundary between ‘‘child’’ and ‘‘adult’’ in thetelegraph labor force for over fifty years,through a period of controversial messengerinvolvement with labor unions from the 1870sto the 1940s. Messengers were clearly thoughtto be ‘‘unskilled’’ laborers, and—especially incities—came from poor or working-class fam-ilies. The abstract Marxian class relationbetween worker and employer—seller of laborpower and purchaser of it—was never mademore concrete than with the messengers, whoremained subcontracted, piece-wage workersfor nearly a century (Marx [1867] 1976; Braver-man 1974; Harvey 1982). But telegraph opera-tors were seen as white-collar laborers, andmessengers might have been granted some ofthis status, too, especially when the publicimagined messengers advancing to operatorpositions.Telegraph companies were forced to pay

close attention to such messenger career andeducation prospects in the 1920s and 1930s.Even as real chances for messenger careeradvancement dwindled with the increasing(but geographically uneven) feminization andmechanization of telegraphy, a ‘‘myth ofmessenger advancement’’ had to be upheld atall costs: to public-school officials, to child-labor reformers, to telegraph customers, and tothe messengers themselves. By the 1920s, thismyth had become so important that it attained amaterial and spatial expression in a quasipublicschool run by Western Union in New York


City.Thus, theworld’s largest telegraph companyfound itself in the education business, in astriking example of the historical shift fromapprentice training to ‘‘vocational education’’that accompanied turn-of-the-century urbani-zation, immigration, and industrialization(Nasaw 1979; Perlmann 1988). Such were thepolitical costs of continuing to employ thenation’s single largest child-labor army.

But preserving such a large urban concentra-tion of messengers had unintended conse-quences for the telegraph companies as well.Through the changes in the telegraph ‘‘appren-tice’’ relationship, one part of the telegraphyworking class—the operators—eventuallycame to see their interests as bound up withanother part of the telegraphy working class—the messengers. The sheer number of messen-gers, their concentration in urban nodes, theyouthful eagerness of the boys to strike, and thepotential for union-friendly messengers togrow into fully-unionized operators all madethe boys attractive to the telegraph labormovement. But again, the timing of eventsand the spatiality of messenger employmentwere both crucial: messengers were onlybrought into a union when that union felt itselfunder attack, and messengers were most crucialin New York City, where their numbers weregreatest and their career opportunities the least.

While these developments are important, thespatial and temporal access of messengers to thesites of urban information affected more thanjust the history of the telegraph industry.Messenger geographies also affected the linksbetween the three contemporary informationnetworks of the telegraph, telephone, and postoffice from the 1870s to the 1930s—the larger‘‘internetwork’’ of competing and cooperatingcommunications systems that the messengersnegotiated in the course of their daily labor.The fact that a telegram sold by the telegraphnetwork could actually be shepherded bymessengers (or in defiance of messengers)through the other two networks on its way tothe final consumer illustrates well that the threeinformation networks constituted a sort ofmultimodal information internetwork that be-gan and ended with young boys but encom-passed a variety of technologies and institutionsin between—even as those technologies andinstitutions shifted over time, with the tele-phone controlling the telegraph from 1910 to

1914 and the post office controlling both thetelegraph and telephone during World War I.In the continually reproduced internetwork ofcompeting and cooperating technological sys-tems, messengers and other ‘‘boundary work-ers’’ like them were crucial (Edwards 1998;Downey 2001).

Conclusion

Today, just as a century ago, a new breed ofbicycle messenger plies both the physicalboundaries of streets and buildings betweendigital information networks in ‘‘postmodern’’cities (Culley 2001) and the metaphoricalboundaries between contradictory realms inpostindustrial society—the seen and the un-seen, the indoor and the outdoor, the virtualand the physical, the child and the adult, theentrepreneur and the employee, the public andthe private, the local and the global (Harvey1989; Giddens 1990; Castells 1996). By follow-ing the telegraph messengers historicallythrough the complex and uneven spaces ofyesterday’s analog information internetwork, itwill be easier to perceive those same boundaries(and boundary workers) in the digital informa-tion internetwork we are building today.’

Notes1 Figures drawn from: American District TelegraphCompany, Philadelphia, minute books and annualreports (1878–1907), 1996 addendum, box 4, folder2, Western Union Archive, Archives Center, Na-tional Museum of American History, SmithsonianInstitution, Washington, DC;Western Union Tele-graph Company, Harrisburg, office ledgers (1864–1902), series 3, box 11, folders 2–3, Western UnionArchive.

2 This article was prepared as an overview of a largerPh.D. dissertation project as an entry in the J.Warren Nystrom dissertation competition held bythe Association of American Geographers in 2001–2002. For more detailed arguments and citations ofarchival sources, please see the original dissertation(Downey 2000b) or the subsequent book (Downey2002).

3 ‘‘History of technology,’’ as used here, refers not justto the history of artifacts, but also to the relationshipof artifacts to social context. ‘‘Human geography,’’as used here, refers to approaches that consider thedimensions of spatiality and temporality to befundamental to all political-economic social pro-cesses of production, consumption, and reproduc-tion (as opposed to other subfields of geography,such as cultural or humanist geography).


4 Key to the best work in this field is the recognitionthat the idea of ‘‘work’’ itself is a socially constructedpractice, not a problem-free universal economiccategory; work produces values and social relations,not just commodities.

5 Here, the term ‘‘uneven geography’’ means thatvarious differences between local sites of a nationalnetwork—involving consumer populations, labormarkets, environmental conditions, and urbaninfrastructure, for example—inevitably affect howthat network functions as a whole.

6 In the terminology used here, ‘‘gender’’ is a socialcategory, dependent on historically contingentnotions of what behavior is considered ‘‘masculine’’and what behavior is considered ‘‘feminine’’ byparticular social groups, while ‘‘sex’’ is a biologicalcategory. Similarly, the use of ‘‘maturity’’ is alsomeant to indicate a social category, as opposed to thebiological category of ‘‘age.’’ Maturity is defined byideas of what behavior is thought appropriate for an‘‘adult’’ versus what behavior is considered appro-priate for a ‘‘child.’’ Around the turn of thenineteenth century, such ideas were further compli-cated by the introduction of the new category of‘‘adolescence’’ into the mix.

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GREG DOWNEY is an assistant professor at theSchool of Journalism and Mass Communication andthe School of Library and Information Studies,University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI53706. E-mail: [email protected]. He is alsoaffiliated with geography and science/technologystudies. He is currently researching the history andgeography of audiovisual text captioning technologyand labor in an environment of digital convergence.


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