strange as it may seem, a college professor, Samuel Finley Breese
Morse, of New York University. During 1832-36 Morse, when
not busy with his academic duties, had been experimenting with
an electric device to send messages over wires he had stretched
in and out of the classrooms of the old University Building on
Washington Square.
To many, including several of his colleagues, the instrument was only an interesting mechanical toy of no practical value. But when Horace Greeley was given a private demonstration of the magnetic telegraph, he was most enthusiastic about its possibilities, and said to Morse, " You are going to turn the news- paper office upside down with your invention." In spite of this remark and the fact that he later wrote a magazine article about the instrument, Greeley allowed his rival, Bennett, of The Herald, to excel in using the telegraph to supplement the news that came by mail. The telegraph did not completely supplant the mail as a carrier of news till a much later period.
New York papers, however, were not the first to use the tele- graph: this honor belongs to those of Baltimore. The cities of Baltimore and Washington had no sooner been connected in 1844 by wire largely through Government aid than both morning and afternoon papers of the former city began to print items headed "By Morse's Magnetic Telegraph." Later, when the telegraph line reached the Jersey coast opposite New York, the proceedings of Congress and important news of Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were sent by wire and relayed by boat to New York newspapers, where they were published under a head similar to that used by the Baltimore papers.
When the telegraph came to be used in newspaper offices out- side the cities on the Atlantic Coast, it was employed, strange to say, not so much to give the news as to indicate where it might be found in the exchanges coming by mail. Murat Halstead has told how, when working on a Cincinnati paper in the early fifties, he would go down to the dep6t at one o'clock in the morning, wait for the train, ride on the mail wagon to the post-office, snatch the copies of the newspapers from New York, Philadel- phia, and Baltimore, and then rush to his newspaper office where he would slash out with the scissors the items to which his atten-
