Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Women and telegraphy
The telegraph system required a large labor force to operate the transmitting and receiving machines
(
Fig. 10.25
). This need provided new “high tech” jobs for women, many of whom could operate telegraph
machines with great dexterity. In February 1846, only two years after Samuel Morse's first successful demon-
stration of the electric telegraph, the Magnetic Telegraph Company opened an office in Lowell, Massachusetts,
and hired a woman named Sarah Bagley as one of the first female telegraphers in the United States. Early in
1847, she was promoted to run the magnetic telegraph office in nearby Springfield, Massachusetts, but was
understandably unhappy to learn that she earned only three-quarters as
much as the man she replaced. This experience, together with her earlier
experiences in the Lowell textile mills, led her to be an early advocate of
women's rights.
The
Illustrated London News
described the scene in a telegraph office
in 1874:
It is a cheerful scene of orderly industry, and it is, of course, not the less
pleasing because the majority of the persons here are young women,
looking brisk and happy, not to say pretty, and certainly quite at home.
Each has her own instrument on the desk before her. She is either just
now actually busied in working off or in reading some message, or else,
for the moment she awaits the signal, from a distant station, to announce
a message for her reception. Boys move here and there about the galler-
ies, with the forms of telegrams, which have been received in one part of
the instrument-room, and which have to be signaled from another, but
which first have to be conveyed, for record, to the nearest check-tables
and sorting tables in the centre.
37
Fig. 10.25. The Central Telegraph Office
London in 1874 employed 1,200 teleg-
raphists of whom 740 were female and
270 boy messengers. Each day around
18,000 messages were transmitted. This
engraving was produced to accompany
an article in the
Illustrated London News
.
ARPANET gets funded
The story of how Bob Taylor got the funding to build the ARPANET is now the stuff of legend. In his
office, Taylor had multiple terminals connecting him to different computers funded by ARPA at the vari-
ous research centers across the country. Each terminal required a different login procedure, and no com-
puter could “talk” to another. Frustrated by these incompatibilities, Taylor decided to act on Licklider's idea.
Without even writing a short memo about his plan, he went straight to the office of ARPA Director Charles
Herzfeld. Fortunately, Herzfeld had seen the “multiple terminal problem” for himself and had also previ-
ously talked with both Licklider and Taylor about their ideas for interactive computing and networking. The
gist of Taylor's argument to Herzfeld was that because more and more researchers were requesting funds
from ARPA to have their own expensive computers, it would be more cost-effective for ARPA to network the
computers at the different sites so that researchers could share both the hardware and access each other's
results. Taylor suggested that ARPA should fund a small test network connecting these ARPA computers,
initially with only four nodes, but then expanding to a dozen or more if it was successful. After just twenty
minutes of discussion, Taylor left Herzfeld's office with an extra million dollars in his budget to build such a
network. The original program plan for the ARPANET talks about accessing time-shared computers and does
not mention network survivability in case of nuclear attack.
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