William John Johnston (1853–1907)

This rare volume (though it's on Google Books) collects a smattering of telegraphic literature from all over the places. It runs the gamut from nonfiction pieces to comic strips to novellas to biography to poetry. The comic strips don't really make any sense to me, but some of the rest was enjoyable. A particular highlight was Joseph Christie's "The Volcanograph," which reveals that operators hated noobs just as much as any modern-day hacker. Some of the stories are pretty good, like "Kate: An Electro-Mechanical Romance" by Charles Barnard, which tells of the love affair between a railroad engineer and a female operator. There are rather a lot of stories about romance with female operators; the telegraph seems to have served the same function as Internet dating for 19th-century shy people, allowing them to open up to each other without a huge chance of exposure or ridicule. Not everything was interesting to a modern reader, of course; I found the poetry awful, and G. W. Russell's "The Vow of the Six Telegraph Operators" was completely inexplicable, even once you ignored the chapter-long anti-Semitic escapade that had nothing to do with the plot (such as there was one). But the book was fun on the whole; the best story of all was probably "Into the Jaws of Death: A Telegraph Operator's Story" by H. van Hoevenbergh, which revealed the true heroism of the operator.… (altro)