Today I Learned @lemmy.world maniajack @lemmy.world 1y ago

TIL The initial rate in 1866 for messages sent along transatlantic cable was $10 a word, with a ten word minimum.

www.pbs.org How the Early Cable Was Used | American Experience | PBS

When the first transatlantic cable was successfully laid in the summer of 1858, two continents buzzed with the promise of instant communication.

The initial rate in 1866 for messages sent along the transatlantic cable was ten dollars a word, with a ten word minimum, meaning that a skilled workman of the day would have to set aside ten weeks' salary in order to send a single message. As a practical matter, this limited cable use to governments (transmissions from the British and American governments had priority under the terms of their agreements with Field's telegraph companies) and big businesses (who made up about 90 percent of telegraph traffic in the early years).

Businesses quickly turned to the use of commercial codes through which one word could convey an entire message. For example, the word "festival" as telegraphed by one fireworks manufacturer meant "a case of three mammoth torpedoes." And for truly urgent information, price was considered no object: New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley spent $5,000 (over $65,000 in 2003 dollars) in 1870 to transmit one report about the Franco-Prussian War. During three months in 1867, the transatlantic cable sent 2,772 commercial messages, for a revenue that averaged $2,500 a day. But this represented just five percent of capacity, so the rate for sending a telegram was halved to $46.80 for ten words, a move which boosted daily revenue to $2,800.

39 comments

Hah, if this happened nowadays you'd have to sign up for a $1000/month subscription for 100 words a month on a 5-year contract, pay a $35/word overage fee, and if you didn't use all 100 words in a particular month, you could pay $5/word to roll over up to 10 of them to the next month. And if you try to cancel your subscription after those 5 years, they put you on hold for 3 hours and then accidentally hang up on you.
- Also you have to cancel via transatlantic wire
  
  Yes, and you can't use your contracted word quota for that, and you have to send all of your personal information along with a prescribed seven-paragraph legal statement expressing your wish to cancel
- Yeah, but you didn't count for inflation...
  
  It would probably be more like $1,000,000 a month in today's dollars.
- Mate sounds like you need a better provider.
  
  I haven’t seen that shit since mobile Internet in 2010.
Inflation calculators only go back to 1913 and 1914, but $100 back then would work out to somewhere between $2,500-$3,500 now.
- They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a word is worth a thousand dollars!
  
  "A picture is worth a thousand words but the right word is worth a thousand pictures"
  
  Not sure if that's what you're referencing but you reminded me of that line.
- Paying $7000 just to write "send nudes". Gosh darn.
  
  Don’t forget the 10 word minimum
Small change compared to what telecommunications carriers make these days
- Ehhhh I mean on an information:revenue ratio? Nooooo
  
  Per unit costs are down, but revenue and most likely profits are up
Here are some messages sent

https://atlantic-cable.com/Article/1858Messages/index.htm

Also the first message was from Q Victoria to President Buchanan for laying the Transatlantic line.
Permanently Deleted
- In many ways yes, in many ways no. It's hard to say where the balance lies, whether it's better to be rich in the far past, or average income in the present. In terms of subjectively feeling happy I think it's probably better to be rich in the past.
  
  It’s always better to be rich I’d guess but I’d rather be middle income now with AC and internet acces than 100 years ago
- I have a microwave, but I don't have a whole mansion filled with servants.
- Some things have gotten better, but some have gotten worse. I’ve always thought that the analogy of older flagship phones fits this perfectly.
  
  Is your current budget android more common on the streets than a flagship from 4 years ago ever was? Yes. Does it have a comparable processor, and camera? Maybe. Is the build quality better? Hell no.
  
  Why I buy flagship phones and keep them for 5 years.
- In terms of availability of information and communication, definitely. In terms of cost of living and housing and its relation to average income, I'd wager not.
  
  Hard to be better off than the rich of any era in such relative economic terms without being rich yourself.
- Even if just for the stench of their unwashed bodies
- Yeah, all those Nigerian princes can email me as much as they want now.
I’m going to need this translated into a cost per MB
- Average English word length is 4.7 characters, add spaces/punctuation and figure 6 total, so 1 MB = 174763 words = $1,746,730. Or around $23 million in 2023 dollars.
  
  That's pretty similar to Verizon's out-of-network roaming rate, iirc.
- What i wanna know is why they didn't charge by character rather than word?
  
  You can squish words into a single clump and still have the individual words easily discernable. So what stopped people from simply removing all the blank spaces from a sentence and calling it a single word?
  
  If there was a maximum character count for what is considered a single word then you could still clump a few real words together into a single squished-together fake word, which would still save thousands of dollars.
  
  Or did the words have to be actual words found in the dictionary? If that was the case then were people not able to use words that weren't in the dictionary, like a company's invented codename for a project they were working on?
  
  I mean, it's not like this was an automated process or anything. I'm sure people just used common sense.
  
  Morse code has has a standard word length which happens to be represented by “PARIS”
  
  Probably wasn’t private. You likely needed a company telegraph operator to send the message.
And I thought it was bad when they used to charge per SMS text.

39 comments