35. US Journalism and the Industrial Revolution

Replacing manual labor with machines, steam engines, many important inventions and improvements.

In 1812, Friedrich Koenig patented in London a mechanical printing press driven by a steam engine. The steam printing press significantly reduced the cost of production and greatly expanded the possibilities for increasing the circulation of newspapers.

The industrial revolution has accelerated the communication of people. The railways facilitated the mailing of newspapers. Of particular importance to increase the efficiency of the press was the invention of the telegraph. It was made in 1832 by the Russian scientist Schilling, and in 1838 the first telegraph line 21 km long was carried out in London. The shortcomings inherent in the Schilling system were eliminated by the American inventor Morse, and in 1844 the first long-distance telegraph line Baltimore-Washington was conducted in the USA by the Morse system. In the next two decades, a large-scale introduction of telegraph into the United States occurred. Telegraph lines tied the whole country. In 1858, a miracle of technical thought of the time was created, a transatlantic telegraph line, laid between Europe and America along the bottom of the ocean. Somewhat later, in 1861, a transcontinental telegraph line was connected to the east and west coasts of the United States.

Technical thought went further. In 1874, the printing telegraph was invented. But it did not have time to begin its implementation, as in 1877 an American engineer from Boston, Alexander Bell invented a telephone. Its implementation began immediately, and by the end of 1877 in Boston there was already a telephone station and 700 subscribers. In 1884, the New York-Boston long-distance telephone line entered service.

The use of new media: telegraph, telephone, radio and railways has accelerated communications. The world has become small. Any news from anywhere in the world was transmitted to the newspaper editors almost instantly. The efficiency of journalism has increased immeasurably.

The rise of press agencies contributed to an increase in the efficiency of journalism. In the 1830–50s, such agencies appeared in all European countries. The first press agency in the United States, the Associated Press, was created in 1847 as a result of an agreement by major New York newspapers to jointly collect and deliver information from the theater of war to the years of the war with Mexico For each newspaper individually, this task was daunting. Associated Press is a cooperative type agency.

One of the most important inventions that reflected the fate of journalism was photography. Before it, the method of woodcutting was used — printing from boards on which the desired image was cut. These boards were dipped in paint and then applied to paper. Something similar is the stationery. In the XVIII century. illustrations in newspapers were rarely used. Basically it was the vignettes that accompanied the advertisement. By the middle of the XIX century. the situation has changed: large-size xylographic images were often placed in newspapers, on which hundreds of different objects could be depicted. Illustrated editions appeared. The middle of the 19th century is the heyday of woodcutting.

However, woodcuts had a number of significant drawbacks. The process of preparing the matrices was very laborious, the result was a black and white image without semitones. But the main drawback was that the xylographic picture is just an illustration, a figment of the artist’s imagination, and not a document.

The first photo was taken in 1839 by the French inventor Louis Dager. The weak point of the Daguer method was that the photo could only be printed in one copy. This disadvantage was eliminated by the invention of the Englishman William Talbot (1840), which allowed him to receive an unlimited number of photographs from a single negative. And yet, between Talbot's invention and the photo on the newspaper pages is a whole period of difficult searches and experiments. It was not an easy task to print a photo on newspaper, but not on special photo paper. Therefore, in the middle of the century, photographs were often used as samples by which artists carved an image on the boards. Images printed in this way acquired the character of documents, could fix facts, carry information about real events. So, during the civil war of 1861-1865. in the newspapers were images of battle Siens.

New equipment required large capital investments If at the beginning of the XIX century. it was possible to create a newspaper with a few hundred dollars in your pocket, but by the middle of the century it was already worth hundreds of thousands.

Quality newspapers, focusing on the wealthy strata, did not reduce the price. But by the middle of the XIX century. a new generation of press appeared, mass newspapers, available to the main part of the population both in price and in content.