Government postal services signed contracts with

Government postal services signed contracts with shipping lines to subsidize
the carriage of mail across seas and oceans on the fastest ships available. In
India, where non-governmental mail had traditionally been handled by
travelers or private couriers, the British established a uniform postal system
in 1837 and introduced railway mail service in the 1850 s. In China and the
Ottoman Empire, where mail service remained slow and unreliable, foreign-
ers opened branches of their national postal services to serve their needs.
China did not establish an Imperial Postal Service until 1897 .
That left the problem of cost. Until the 1840 s, governments saw private
letters as a source of revenue, and charged the recipient by the number of
pages and the distance covered, introducing delays and inef fi ciencies. In 1837
the Englishman Rowland Hill proposed charging the sender – not the
recipient – one penny for any letter weighing half an ounce or less to
anywhere in the British Isles. This reform, introduced in 1840 , caused an
upsurge in mail and was soon imitated in the United States, France, and other
countries. Correspondence, once a privilege of the wealthy, was now within
the means of the poor, an incentive to mass literacy.
The other revolution in communication was the electric telegraph. During
the early nineteenth century, several inventors tried to use electricity to
convey messages. Two practical systems emerged in 1837 : that of Charles
Wheatstone and William Cooke in Britain, which used fi ve wires to move a
pointer to letters of the alphabet on a dial, and that of the American Samuel
Morse, which used a code of dots and dashes transmitted by a single wire
with an earth return. Though the Wheatstone – Cooke system was fast and
reliable, the Morse system was cheaper, and eventually prevailed worldwide.
The electric telegraph was at least ten times faster than the Chappe system
and could work at night and in bad weather as well as on sunny days. Excess
capacity persuaded governments to open telegraph service to the public,
even in France where the government had long forbidden public access to the
Transportation and communication, 1750 to the present
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Chappe network. In the United States and (until the 1870 s) in Britain, the
telegraphs were operated by private companies; elsewhere, they were
government-run. Telegraph lines soon crisscrossed nations and continents.
In Western nations, governments, newspapers, businesses, and private citi-
zens eagerly took to the telegraph, stimulating the fl ow of commerce and the
transmission of news. In exchange for free access to the telegraph, railways
encouraged telegraph companies and administrations to erect lines along
their tracks to coordinate trains and prevent accidents. Banks began to
transfer funds instantaneously by telegraph, speeding up commerce.