The initial rate in 1866 for messages sent along the transatlantic cable was ten dollars a word, with a ten word minimum, meaning that a skilled workman of the day would have to set aside ten weeks’ salary in order to send a single message. As a practical matter, this limited cable use to governments (transmissions from the British and American governments had priority under the terms of their agreements with Field’s telegraph companies) and big businesses (who made up about 90 percent of telegraph traffic in the early years).

Businesses quickly turned to the use of commercial codes through which one word could convey an entire message. For example, the word “festival” as telegraphed by one fireworks manufacturer meant “a case of three mammoth torpedoes.” And for truly urgent information, price was considered no object: New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley spent $5,000 (over $65,000 in 2003 dollars) in 1870 to transmit one report about the Franco-Prussian War. During three months in 1867, the transatlantic cable sent 2,772 commercial messages, for a revenue that averaged $2,500 a day. But this represented just five percent of capacity, so the rate for sending a telegram was halved to $46.80 for ten words, a move which boosted daily revenue to $2,800.

  • Ertebolle@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Hah, if this happened nowadays you’d have to sign up for a $1000/month subscription for 100 words a month on a 5-year contract, pay a $35/word overage fee, and if you didn’t use all 100 words in a particular month, you could pay $5/word to roll over up to 10 of them to the next month. And if you try to cancel your subscription after those 5 years, they put you on hold for 3 hours and then accidentally hang up on you.

      • Ertebolle@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Yes, and you can’t use your contracted word quota for that, and you have to send all of your personal information along with a prescribed seven-paragraph legal statement expressing your wish to cancel

    • over_clox@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, but you didn’t count for inflation…

      It would probably be more like $1,000,000 a month in today’s dollars.

    • Quokka@quokk.au
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      1 year ago

      Mate sounds like you need a better provider.

      I haven’t seen that shit since mobile Internet in 2010.