had never known wrung her nerves. His whole manhood seemed to be shaken, as if by regular pulsations of intensest misery. She stood in awe of the sight till her limbs failed her, and then staggering to him she fell on her knees, clasping his, passionately kissing them.
TELEGRAPH REPORTING IN CANADA AND UNITED STATES.
It is not surprising that an agent so useful as electricity should, at an early period of its application to telegraphic purposes, have been forced into requisition by the conductors of newspapers. “The ordinary channels of information,” as it is the custom in another place to term the newspapers, would, without the aid of the electric telegraph, present a very different appearance from that which they do at present. Electricity has, in fact, done for the press of our day what the art of printing accomplished for knowledge in the middle ages.
The agency of the electric telegraph was first employed in a regular and systematic manner by the newspaper press on the other side of the Atlantic. Ever on the look out for means of saving time or labour, the astute Americans saw when the first line of telegraph was erected between Washington and Baltimore, what facilities the new system would afford for the collection and transmission of news, and they at once set to work to discover some mode by which they might obtain the maximum amount of information for a minimum charge. To accomplish this task a vast amount of ingenuity was displayed, and some of the bitterest controversies which have distracted the Union have been those which have been carried on between “the gentlemen of the press” and the managers of the various telegraphic lines in the United States.
Persons of sanguine disposition, who believe that every great discovery in science is always made in the interest of peace, will be disappointed to find what an important part the electric telegraph has played in connection with war; and it is somewhat curious that the earliest news conveyed by telegraph to the press of America was the launch of a sloop of war at the Brooklyn Yard, and that the first regular organisation for the purpose of telegraph reporting was formed for obtaining news of the progress of the war in Mexico. A daily horse-express was run between Mobile and Montgomery, a distance of 200 miles, in order to anticipate the arrival of the mail, and forward the news by telegraph to New York and other places. In 1847 the complete and efficient organisation of what is termed the “Associated Press of New York” was established, with “telegraph reporters” and agents in every important city or port in the United States, as well as in Canada, England, and other countries. The charge for sending messages by telegraph was at first much higher than is at present the case, and the great object of the associated reporters was to devise some means of getting as much as possible for their money from the telegraph companies. As the result of much anxious deliberation and forethought, they at length prepared a complete system of short-hand or cipher which, while it was perfectly unintelligible to the clerks of the telegraph, was, when translated by those possessing the key, found to possess remarkably elastic properties. A message of ten cipher words would expand to fifty or sixty, or even a hundred, when translated. Some of the words sent were of enormous length, and made up of syllables, each of which had a hidden meaning, and when in combination defied all the dictionaries of the civilised world. There came, however, a limit to human endurance on the part of the managers of the telegraphs, and they ordered that no word sent by the Associated Press should contain more than five letters, that the letters in every message should be counted, and the whole divided by five for the number of words, and charged accordingly. The new society did not rest content with protesting against the tyranny of “Fog Smith,” as they nick-named the manager of the New York and Boston line, but they ransacked the dictionaries for the purpose of finding a sufficient number of words of five letters to serve the purpose of a new cipher system, and some thousands of short words were very speedily selected, and were sent over the line, possessed of even greater expanding powers than those under the former system.
From the many thousands of cipher words which were adopted we will extract a few, in order to convey an idea of the system as adopted by the “telegraph reporters.” It was required to send to different parts of the Union the particulars respecting the flour or wheat markets. The first word of the message which would be sent commencing with a consonant would express the “condition” of the market; the second word beginning with a different consonant would indicate the “price,” while a third word which began with a vowel would tell the “quantity sold.” Every word sent had, of course, its distinctive meaning attached to it; thus “babe” signified “western is firm with moderate demand for home trade and export;” “back” told that “the market is a shade firmer, but that owing to absence of private advices, buyers and sellers do not meet;” for “bake” we read “markets dull; buyers do not enter freely at the higher rates demanded;” “bacon” was “dull, but if anything a shade firmer,” and “basin” meant “there is a speculative demand at better prices.” The prices were required, and for these words commencing with the letter “C” were used. Thus “camp” stood for 5.18, “car” 5.75, “carp” 6.31, meaning, of course, dollars and cents, and when it was required to add half cents to the quotation, the letters “ed” were added, so that “camp ed” was made to stand for 5.18½, and so on. The quantities of corn or flour sold were stated by words commencing with the letter “A,” as abaft, abuse, above, abash, abate, abide, and others, each of which had its correlative numbers assigned to it in the system. One instance will suffice to show how rapidly these cipher messages expanded when translated. A message of nine words, “bad, came, aft, keen, dark, ache, lain, fault, adopt,” told the following interesting facts: “Flour market for common and fair brands of western is