[GreenKeys] Where was the "Telegraph" in AT&T?

[Jim Haynes]

It's perhaps important too that when Bell made the pivotal invention
that led to the telephone he was working on a "harmonic telegraph"
frequency-division multiplex scheme.  His rival Elisha Gray
accomplished the harmonic telegraph invention.  But perhaps when
AT&T was getting started the idea of the harmonic telegraph was
still interesting to the business world.

And then there was the later time when Jay Gould was forced to divest
his ownership in various telegraph enterprises, including Western
Union, and AT&T, by then a rich company, bought control of W.U.  It was
then forced to divest and thus ended our last chance to have an integrated
wire communication system in the U.S.  Later on W.U. attempted to sell
a doctrine that the U.S. should have one company exclusively for voice
communication and a second one exclusively for written messages.  It
was always an article of faith with W.U. people that in offereing TWX
service AT&T was violating its agreement to stay out of the telegraph
business and keep W.U. out of the telephone business.  As if the wires
cared what kind of signals they carried.

 	---

 	"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
 	"No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
 		Meredith Willson, The Music Man