News Release - The Huntington Acquires Important Collection of Telegraph History Papers from the Civil War and Postwar Era

The acquisition includes rare documents relating to Thomas Edison’s game-changing invention, the quadruplex telegraph

SAN MARINO, Calif.—In a move that deepens its collections in the history of science and technology as well as its American Civil War holdings, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens has acquired the personal papers of Thomas T. Eckert (1825–1910), head of the United States Military Telegraph (USMT) under Pres. Abraham Lincoln and later the president of Western Union. The archive includes materials related to inventor Thomas Edison’s first great electrical invention: the quadruplex telegraph, which allowed users to send four telegraph messages simultaneously. Original documents detail the drama and machinations that unfolded in the early days of telecommunication, when rival railroad barons vied for control of the lucrative telegraph business.

The archive also contains new information that highlights the USMT’s role in the 1862 campaigns of the Civil War, especially those in Virginia and Maryland, including the battle of Antietam.

This is The Huntington’s second acquisition of Eckert’s papers: In 2012, the institution made headlines with its purchase of the official telegraph ledgers of the USMT office in Washington that was headed by Eckert. The ledgers, spanning the years 1862–67, recorded nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams, including exchanges between Lincoln, members of his cabinet, and officers of the Union Army. Roughly one-third of the messages were written in code. The 2012 acquisition also included the cipher books used for encrypting and decoding telegrams. (A crowdsourcing project was launched in 2016 to transcribe the coded telegrams. The digitized ledgers and accompanying transcripts can be viewed on the Huntington Digital Library. Full decryption of the encoded telegrams is a future project.)

The newly acquired papers comprise Eckert’s own personal files: correspondence from his early Civil War work (Eckert was in charge of all telegraphic communications for Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac from February to September 1862) as well as a previously unknown archive from his post-war career. The collection includes 217 items—letters, telegrams, photographs, receipts, and other materials—that trace the growth, economics, and politics of the U.S. telegraph network as it spread across the nation with the railroads.

A key historical figure in the collection is Union Pacific railroad magnate Jay Gould, who employed Eckert in the 1870s to head his Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Co. (and who, coincidentally, was a colleague of Collis Huntington, uncle of The Huntington’s founder, Henry Edwards Huntington). Gould’s bitter rival, William Henry Vanderbilt, controlled Western Union, and the archive sheds light on the telegraph wars between the two. Gould ultimately gained a controlling interest in Western Union in 1881; Eckert worked for both men at different times and served as president of Western Union from 1893 to 1900.