This is Post #14 in the new Series “Going to Afghanistan”.

Western Union telegram - Kabul via Mackay:

Kabul via Mackay Oct 2 1630

Mrs. Fred W. Clayton
405 North Roop St Carson City Nev

:Arrived safely in Kabul Wednesday =
Fred ==

(received) 1958 Oct 3 AM 8 29

It was uncertain how long it would take an air letter to make its way from Kabul, Afghanistan to Carson City, Nevada in 1958.  There may have never before been an air letter from Kabul to Carson City.  Foreign travel, especially by air and especially to the less visited nations was not assumed to be essentially safe as it is now.  Airplane crashes were much more numerous per passenger mile.  The Hollywood production of “Around the World in 80 Days” reinforced the notion that travel disaster may be as close as a mickey in ones drink while they drank in Hong Kong or Singapore, if not Calcutta or even Delhi; although “New” Delhi was supposedly much safer.

It must be remembered that you as a reader know much more about Fred and Fred’s whereabouts during these last several days, perhaps the last week, than did his own wife and family.  International telephone calls then were expensive (say $50 per minute by today’s standards) and so were not generally used.  There was no such thing as a sense of entitlement regarding telephone conversations.  The alternative to the telephone for almost instant communication was the telegram, although as you see by the above example the telegram traversing half the world was hardly instant.

How instant can easily be ascertained by finding out the time zone in Kabul and comparing it to the time zone in Carson City and subtracting (or adding) the hours between; make sure to note what day it is in Kabul when you think you know the date in Carson City - the International Dateline thing.  P.S. note that Afghanistan has no “standard time” (or did not in 1958).  These things make comparisons difficult.  I did a post once on the theory of “Mecca time” without going into the political implications and religious issues that make the discussion of time so important and may make the questions about, “how instant are telegrams” seem a little less important.

Telegrams come in two forms, “wire” and “wireless”.  The end result was a piece of paper 5½ x 8 inches in size with the Company Name and Logo at the top and a box below where strips of teletype paper were glued to the cheap Kraft paper that constituted the form.  Telegraph messages were always in ALL CAPS and the message had dozens of numbers and letters preceding each message that had to do with routing and transaction identifications  and payment codes, not unlike the credit card slip of today, but much more cryptic.  One paid by the word, each word was expensive, talk was not cheap and so the goal was clarity in brevity.

In the best of all worlds a telegram would be received at the telegraph office and after it was cut out by hand with scissors and pasted to the form a Western Union operator would then telephone the recipient and read them the message; this assumes that the recipient had a telephone and that Western Union could find the number.  In either event the hard-copy message would then be dispatched by delivery truck (or bicycle) to the actual address where the recipient lived or worked as stated in the telegram itself.  The message was always enclosed in an envelope with a cellophane window that showed the name and address.

People alive then (adults) were used to sending and receiving telegraphic messages most commonly regarding deaths, second was births, third was probably marriages, and forth was the “arrived safely” telegram.  One never knew what the message was until the envelope was torn open; which is why so few envelopes survive in relation to the surviving telegrams themselves.

There were other telegraph companies besides Western Union and there had been still others before them.  Communication systems have always been the natural domain of the engineer.  Roads and railroads and even airplanes were first made feasible and profitable by carrying the mails.  In America it began with the “Boston Post road”.  By 1860 the United States was connected together in its parts only by the horse delivered letter, the Pony Express; but in October of 1860 Carson City was connected to the outside world by telegraph; it was Fred Bee’s telegraph line; it traversed the Sierras with a line running to Sacramento, California.  Actually the line went a little further east than Carson City, it ended in Fort Churchill just a few miles more down the Carson River below the Dead Camel hills.

I don’t know when Lincoln was elected, but I do know when word of the election reached Carson City.  It was November 14th in 1860; and word came by telegraph from Fort Churchill where “Pony Bob” Haslam had just got off his horse to report the news that no one in California yet knew; “Lincoln elected president”.  Of course the “Fred Bee” line changed that in a hurry; no horse drawn delays between Nevada and California then, but it would take another year for the wires west to reach Fort Churchill and connect with the wires east already in place and thus connect the nation with the miracle of the telegraph.  It was a lesson not lost on Mackay.

“Mackay was a miner,” goes the old saw from University of Nevada days.  Fred graduated in Engineering from the University of Nevada, in Reno, in 1939.  A lot of his classes were held in the Mackay Mining Building located at the north end of the Quad; out front was the Gutzon Borglum statute of “Mackay” holding a pick in case you might forget the “miner” part of Mackay’s life; the riches he found on the Comstock Lode, the silver and the gold.  He gave the University its mining school, and gave the school money for many other things too, now mostly forgotten.

Forgotten too was the bigger part of Mackay’s life.  The part that had nothing to do with mining, except that his endeavors called for a lot of copper; copper for wire and zinc for casings and lead to make things waterproof and engineering things that could extend the telegraph under the seas and around the world and make even Kabul, Afghanistan as connected as Carson City was to San Francisco and later to New York even.  That’s where Mackay went after he made his millions, to New York.

The story gets all entangled with the likes of Gould, the exploits of the great failed ship the Great Eastern, the efforts of robber barons to control all communication and Mackay’s efforts to make the world free; but perhaps I exaggerate or pontificate a bit but there is a reason why the man that made Mount Rushmore possible also made this one statute in honor of a miner, a Nevadan, a person alive when only the horse carried communications efficiently.

Perhaps the greatest contribution that Mackay made was to bring the miracle of Marconi’s wireless to a world dominated by the notion of transoceanic and transcontinental wires and cables.  While Gould and Western Union were still stuck in the mentality of land-lines, cables, and sea-cables Mackay went wireless.  The telegraph company that bears his name was the first to set up a system of wireless transmitters and receivers around the world to transmit telegrams where wires had not, nor easily could not be laid.

When Fred walked into the Mackay office in Kabul at 4:30 PM that Thursday afternoon he certainly must have felt at home.  Another Nevadan had been there before him, at least in spirit - Mackay himself never went to Kabul.  At what point Mackay’s wireless message from Kabul met Jay Gould’s land-lined Western Union is anybody’s guess.  But the “cable” did get stopped in Reno, duly noted on the telegram itself, “attempt to deliver from Reno unsuccessful”; but the message left Kabul just fine.

Note:  The “pony” part of the news regarding Lincoln benefited from extra horses and riders and fast riding given the gravity of the “breaking news”.  At the time, even with the hiatus of horses between the wired portions of the country, the news of Lincoln’s election set “an astounding new speed record for long-distance communication.”

The Gutzon Borglum story is interesting, among other activities he designed the flame that flickered in the torch of the Statute of Liberty.  It was John Mackay’s son, Clarence Mackay that commissioned the Borglum statute.  The statute was originally supposed to be situated on the Capitol grounds in Carson City.  The “Mackay School of Mines” building was originally the “Stanford White School of Mines”.  Gutzon, “thought of himself as a Western artist and dreamed of cattle, horses and open spaces.”  See: “Six Wars At a Time” - The Center for Western Studies; Sioux Falls, South Dakota

[First posted:  2010.03.08 / Monday - Arrived Safely]