The banner photo is
likely the Canadian Pacific Railway's landline telegraph office at Victoria,
British Columbia in the period 1905-15. Note the telegraph 'sounders' in the
elevated boxes next to the heads of the two telegraphers on the left. The
railroad's rails never did make it to Vancouver Island but the CPR services
certainly did in the form of the trans-Pacific Empress steamers, coastal
steamers, the Empress Hotel in Victoria and of course, the telegraph system. A
customer could walk into a CPR station office in a prairie whistle stop and
purchase a ticket to any place the transportation company went: get on the train
in Moose Jaw and eventually disembark from an Empress liner in Hong Kong, all on
the same ticket!
The landline code consisted not of beeps or tones, but
the spaces between clicks as the circuit was opened and closed by the operator at a remote station using Continental Code to key the circuit. The on again, off again current flowed through a coil of wire in the sounder box creating a fairly weak magnetic field which pulled at a spring loaded soft iron clapper. Thus there would be a click each time the remote telegrapher tapped his key. The sounder was mounted in an elevated box firstly to bring it nearer the operator's ear, and secondly to make the clicks more pronounced in a noisy room.
In the right background are three telegram runners. No doubt their bicycles are outside and waiting to take the boys and telegrams to the recipients. They were the equivalent to today's bicycle couriers. In those days telephone systems were in their
infancy and served only the local community. Convenient long distance calling was an option some years into the distant future. Canada had been spanned with telegraph wire when the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in the 1880's. Undersea cables connected the continents together. Thus telegrams were a vital and quick communication tool for messaging between towns and countries.
Previous to 1909 wireless station operating times were 8 am to 6 pm daily. Stations had only the one operator. After 1909 service times were to 8 am to 1:30 am and each station had two operators. There were no vacation or sick leave in those days. If the operator was sick he just had to
come into work and tough it out.
I'm compiling a brief history of each Government Wireless Station on the west coast of Canada. The amount of actual information I have is quite small but as I come across an item, I'll post it under the appropriate station
button on the left of this page.
