telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (10/09/89)
Sunday, October 8, 1871 was a pretty typical day, said Robert Read, a young man in the employ of the Western Union Telegraph Company in Chicago. He had gone to work as usual about 2:00 pm that afternoon at the telegraph office downtown, where he worked full time as a telegraph operator. In an article in the [Chicago Tribune] in 1901, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of what was then commonly referred to simply as 'The Fire', Mr. Read discussed the events of that Sunday evening and the Monday following. As those of us today remember without question where we were and what we were doing when we heard of JFK's assasination, and our elders recall in detail what they were doing when the news of Pearl Harbor came over the radio, Read talked in detail about the assasination of President Lincoln, then got into a detailed account of the fire, and the operation of the telegraph office at that time. In those days, in addition to circuits from major cities across the United States, the office had numerous local circuits around the city. Nearly every major mercantile establishment, every bank, and every hotel had a telegraph key, or sometimes more than one. The Chicago Board of Trade alone had three keys. A few wealthy and important citizens had them also, such as Mayor Mason. The federal courthouse and City Hall were equipped. Mr. Read pointed out that 'it was nice to work on Sunday or at night, because the local keys were usually silent; on occassion the mayor would have something to send, or the business men, but normally our only traffic at night or Sunday was to or from out of the city, and then not too much.' He also pointed out that 'a benefit for the employees in those days was they gave you a key to use at home; you had to pay for the key but they let us send messages for free wherever we wanted. Many guys just used their key to call down to the office and chat in their spare time...' Something similar to what we today would call an annunciator was used in the office to tell what key was active at any given time. The electrical current would cause a little colored strip of metal to sort of bounce and 'flop over' with a louder than usual 'clicking noise'. This caught the operator's attention, who would look and see what was what, and respond accordingly. The fire started about 9:30 pm that Sunday night, on the west side, at what today in 1989 is numbered 837 West DeKoven Street. Ironically, today the site is the Fire Prevention Bureau of the City of Chicago. But in those days, it was a private home owned by a Mr. and Mrs. O'Leary. According to Read's account, and substantiated by other historical accounts, the real panic began when the fire did the 'impossible', and spread across the river into the downtown area. Everyone assumed the fire would burn itself out when it reached the west bank of the Chicago River....but the wind was quite strong, and some burning embers were carried in the wind to the other bank where they landed on one of the outbuildings of the Chicago Gas Works. A rather large explosion soon followed when the Gas Works blew up, knocking most of the south side of the city into darkness when the gas lamps went out. Read said he watched it from the office, and the assumption was it had to stop someplace, but the strong winds and limited resources of the Fire Department combined to keep the inferno going. He said maybe it was around 11 pm '.....and the guy who usually worked all night did not show up; I was both annoyed and concerned. I couldn't leave until he arrived, and the fire was obviously going to take our office sooner or later.....about midnight, I guess, Mayor Mason came in with the police superintendent and had me begin getting emergency help in. They had me contact General Phillip Sheridan of the Army, to tell him they needed troops and whatever assistance he could give.' 'Well you know those wires were not private, not like the telephone of today (1901!!) where you can talk and assume no one is learning your business with you. I guess within thirty minutes or so, most of the guys I dealt with all over the United States were busy chattering about 'that big fire they're having in Chicago'; which was good actually, cause the relief efforts started that same night.' 'Finally about one o'clock, the fire had spread to the building next to us and I sent a message out; I remember just what I said; to anyone who is getting this message, I was signing off, if I did not get out the roof would probably collapse on me.' Read said he gathered up what papers and records he could, along with the money in the cash drawer and locked everything in the 'fire proof safe' and left the building. He had been out of the building less than a minute when the building caught fire -- the dry timber it was -- and in perhaps twenty minutes it was nothing but ashes, with the metal safe standing there alone, along with melted keys and wire, some other charred remains. Curiously, the wires exited the building in such a way that the majority of them were not harmed at that point once they left the building, but within an hour they had melted or the poles around town had caught fire and fallen down. He said he spent the rest of the night just wandering around downtown watching the fire. '....I knew I would never see such a spectacle again in all my life....and there was nothing I could do at the office, since it was gone anyway....' Read noted in the Tribune interview another pitiful aspect of the fire: Where the firemen were making what efforts they could to control the fire and limit its spread, no one thought to protect the Water Works. In those days, like now, the water was drawn from Lake Michigan, but the pressure in the mains was obtained by diverting some water into a stream along-side the building, where a water wheel was spinning. This water wheel in turn drove some hydraulic gears which pumped air into the mains, forcing the water along from air pressure. When the fire spread to the Water Works building itself, that was the end of the pumping machinery, and at about 3:30 am Monday morning, the city's water supply shut off. At that point, said Read, the firemen said in essence to hell with it. The fire continued burning virtually unabated until about 10:30 pm Monday night when rain began falling which put out what was still ablaze. The manager of the telegraph office and several of his men met early Monday morning to survey the damage and get service restored as soon as possible. 'By about noon, negotiations were complete and we bought a building over on Canal Street near the Customs House, and we relocated in there along with the post office.....what was just incredible was the tangle of melted wire laying everywhere all over town....some of it melted by the fire into the most grotesque shapes imaginable...it was about three weeks before we were able to reconstruct everything; I don't know to this day why the office records were not filed elsewhere; sometimes we were just guessing about who had what before the fire....' 'The main thing we figured was to get the out of town circuits going again, and Tuesday afternoon they had strung up a wire that connected in over at 18th Street which got us our line back to St. Louis and a couple other places. Lucky we found some keys that had not been damaged too badly and we were able to use them. I think in a minute or less after the wire to St. Louis was restored they must have heard us down there, cause they got on their key and started passing traffic they had been holding for the past day and a half. I think everyone in the United States at that point must have had friends or relatives or business of some kind in Chicago because we got so much stuff in the next twenty four hours you would not believe it. For about six months after that, we had a huge amount of traffic around the clock it seems. Relief agencies, government officials, newspapers wanting to know about the fire; you name it. I think within about six months most of the merchants downtown had rebuilt; I know the courthouse was rebuilt and the Board of Trade rather soon, and the local wires were pretty much back the way we had them I guess six or seven months later. By the summer of '72 things were pretty much back to normal in our office.' Robert Read did mention, when prompted by the Tribune writer, that he had been given a 'meritorious award' by Western Union afterward for his efforts to protect company property the night of the fire. He laughed and said 'you know, they opened the 'fire proof safe' the next day -- everything in it was charred; I guess from the terrible heat of the fire -- a lot of what I put in there that night were the records they could have used in the weeks following had they not been rendered illegible from the soot and heat.... maybe I should have carried them all out of the building....home with me or something.' Patrick Townson