Tuesday, February 13, 2024
Speakers: Professor Edmund Russell, CMU, and Lauren Winkler, Cartographer
Telegraphs transformed the world in the nineteenth century by slashing the time for information to travel by 99 percent, uniting two cities with near instantaneous communication. But it took decades to build telegraphs that stretched from ocean to ocean and united the country. We have created an interactive map that shows the development of the telegraph system in the United States from its inception in 1844 to the completion of a transcontinental telegraph system in 1862. We have created what we believe is the first born-digital map of a telegraph system anywhere in the world and will demonstrate it in this presentation, focusing on the role that Pittsburgh played in the telegraph network, and then on the importance of the East End and Squirrel Hill in the city’s telephone network.
About the Speaker: Dr. Edmund Russell, a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, and Lauren Winkler, a cartographer and SHHS member, will discuss their research related to mapping the history of the transcontinental telegraph in the U.S. Their two-year collaboration resulted in the creation of the first digital map of a telegraph system. Downtown Pittsburgh played a significant role in the telegraph network, and Andrew Carnegie was an early telegraph operator. In Squirrel Hill, the Bell Telephone exchange office at Murray Avenue and Pocusset Street served as a receiving station for telegraph messages that were sent Downtown electronically to be printed and delivered by messenger boys throughout the city as part of the U.S. Mail.
Squirrel Hill Historical Society 