| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gregory J. Downey. Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850–1950. New York: Routledge. 2002. Pp. xiv, 242. Cloth $85.00, paper $23.95.
Gregory J. Downey illuminates a major component of American telegraphy hitherto neglected by historians of technology and geographers alike: the thousands of boys who delivered millions of telegrams in these hundred years of peak traffic. As Downey notes, historians of technology have traditionally concentrated on those who invented wire communications technologies, developed them into corporate communications systems, managed telegraph operators and clerks, and operated telegraphs. More recently, historians have examined class, ethnic, and gender dimensions of American telegraphy. Meanwhile geographers have focused on the effects of telegraph networks on the size of cities and the speed of business.	1
Applying the familiar concept of the "social construction" of the world. Downey studies messenger boys as overlooked but key players in the evolution of these material technologies: senders and receivers, printers and repeaters, lines and poles, typewriters and pneumatic tubes. He simultaneously analyzes the urban spaces that partly shaped those machines' uses. Yet messengers enjoyed unique working spaces: separate from closely supervised production floors and, except while awaiting their next assignments, literally outside of telegraph offices. Messengers commonly interacted with customers as sole representatives of their entire companies.	. . .

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