Thomas C. Jepsen’s
biography, Ma Kiley: the Life of a Railroad Telegrapher (Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1997) comes
from Mattie Kuhn’s autobiography, “The Bug and I: Parts 1-4,” Railroad Magazine, April-June 1950. Jepsen took his lead from the narrative and
tracked down the records that substantiated the story. Just as we have usernames, so did telegraphers; and Mattie Kuhn called
herself Ma Kiley for 40 years, actually some years after she began
working. Her first message was on the
death of Queen Victoria,
January 22, 1901. She had learned to
send and receive some months before, desperate to earn a living after leaving
the first of several husbands.
By that time, women were a
visible minority, first in railroading (from 1832), then in telegraphy (from 1846). Jepsen’s introduction and his annotations to Mattie Kuhn’s story provide footnotes to
sources. At the end of the book, he
cites Carolyn Marvin’s When Old
Technologies Were New (1989) to substantiate some of the parallels between
women in telegraphy and women in computing. The computer is, after all, only a
prodigious telegraph; and the roots of ASCII are in Morse Code.
When not a boomer pounding
brass, Kuhn also waited tables, drew water, and even sold life insurance. She knew nothing but hard work and hard
fortune when not making money as a telegrapher, though she did break down and
cry when another telegrapher bought her dinner and a train ticket; and slipped
five dollars into a magazine - as much a gesture of camaraderie as any deference to her womanhood. Usually,
she rode free: her pins for the Commercial Telegraphers Union of American and
the Order of Railroad Telegraphers were her pass.
They were different lines
of work. Railroads were 20 years slow in
figuring out that they could manage and control trains with the only thing that
traveled faster. In addition, commodities
brokers, hotels, banks, and many other enterprises also needed telegraphers. Mattie Kuhn worked for both. So, she belonged to both unions.
The telephone impacted
telegraphy but did not finally make it obsolete until 1940. The telegraph was generally more reliable
when accuracy and precision were at a premium. Paper tapes for recording
messages went out of common use in the 1850s, but still were installed when
legal issues demanded a recording.
Compared to that, a telephone call was mere hearsay.
Mattie Kuhn worked until
1942. Encouraged by a published author
she met, she spent eleven days typing up her narrative. She sent her story to Railroad Magazine, as did many
veterans. The age of steam was
passing. The telegraph was gone. “I can find no one who speaks my language,”
she wrote. It is not known when Mattie
Kuhn taught herself to type. Telegraphers
owned their own typewriters, as they owned their own “bugs” - Vibroplex sending
and receiving keys.
The telegraph and
the typewriter were both machines that liberated women by rewarding their
intelligence while granting no privilege to men’s strength. The first female telegrapher was Sarah G. Begley in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1846. Elizabeth Cogley was the first woman employed as a railroad telegrapher, in 1852, for the Ohio and Atlantic Telegraph Company. (Railroads and commercial companies found a hand-in-glove relationship with the railroads providing rights-of-way, and telegraph companies providing operators who also worked as station clerks.)
Typically, women were paid less, on the assumption that they would soon marry, though this seems statistically not at all true. Mattie Kuhn eventually demanded and got the
wages she wanted wherever she worked, but that was based on a long string of
references for both railroad and commercial offices – and her own strength of
character. She was willing to walk away
from a deal she did not like. The
telegraph was the medium by which operators sent out inquiries, just as
software developers use the Internet.
Like today’s programmers, telegraphers also had to know hardware. Mattie Kuhn passed ad hoc examinations in the
wiring of switchboards, the maintenance of circuits and batteries, and the
proper grounding of her own direct current device.
She never recovered from
the death of her second child. She left
him at an orphanage, apparently with money for his care, but she returned to
find him unconscious from fever and he never woke up. It was a long time before she could cry.
She herself missed three
months of work because of typhoid fever.
Suffering from appendicitis, she was given an array of concoctions
before paying for her own transportation and surgery.
The book runs 138 pages,
notes and all. It is dense with feeling,
insight, and expression.
ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
