Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean PostRainey, Thomas
History
Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post
Rainey, Thomas
Mail steamers; Steam-navigation
It has recently been suggested by parties who certainly have not
thought very deeply on the subject, that the completion of the
Atlantic Telegraph, which every body reasonably expects soon to be
completed, will so inaugurate a new era in the transmission of
intelligence, that one of its effects will be the supersession of fast
ocean mails, and consequently of subsidized steamers. It is a first
and palpable view of this question that much of the important
intelligence between the two countries requiring speedy transmission
will be sent through the telegraph, notwithstanding the necessarily
high prices which will be charged for dispatches. These communications
will be sententious, summary, and of great variety. The markets,
prices, important political and other events, private personal and
unelaborated intelligence will come over the wires just as they now
come over existing land lines. The line will create extra facilities
for operations on both sides, and cause more mutual business to be
done. It will thus create the necessity for more correspondence than
before, for particulars, elaboration, items, bills of lading,
exchanges, duplicates, minute instructions, etc., to which there will
be no end. The main transaction of any business being made more
quickly, it will be essential for the papers to pass with greater
dispatch. If there were twenty telegraphic wires working day and
night, which never can be the case from their expensiveness, they
could not do in a month the correspondence and business done by one
steamer's mail. Beside this, those who got their dispatches first
would have a decided advantage over those who would be compelled from
the mass of business to wait several days. It is an advantage of the
steam mails that all get their letters and papers at the same time;
and that no one has thus the advantage of the other. It is hardly
possible for one unacquainted with the postal business to conceive how
large a mass of mail matter is deposited by each steamer; and it is
only necessary to see this to realize that the Atlantic Telegraph will
never materially interfere with the steamers except to require of them
greater speed and heavier mails.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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