| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850–1950. By Gregory J. Downey. (New York: Routledge, 2002. xiv, 242 pp. Cloth, $85.00, ISBN 0-415-93108-8. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-415-93109-6.)
More than twenty-five years ago, Raphael Samuel published what has become a seminal article stressing the ubiquitous influence of hand labor during the industrial revolution: "The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain" (History Workshop, Spring 1977). Gregory J. Downey has now published a similarly themed monograph on the nineteenth-century communications revolution in the United States. Historians have lavished attention on inventors, entrepreneurs, and skilled workers of this revolution, but much less attention has been paid to un- and semiskilled labor in communications industries or, for that matter, most sectors of the economy.	1
Important as technological innovations and business structures were, the linchpin was human labor, particularly the role of messenger boys. Messengers were "boundary workers in an information internetwork" (p. 127) composed of the intersections of the telegraphy, telephony, and postal systems. They served as the crucial human link between the consuming public and this communications internetwork, thus humanizing this new technological system.	. . .

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