Chewing Gum and Cigarettes                                  Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna       I came across the astounding fact that General Santa Anna--he of Texas War of Independence and Mexican War fame--introduced chewing gum to the United States!!      Santa Anna was president/dictator/caudillo of Mexico five times. Between 1823 and 1855 every time he took power, he managed to anger enough people he would be overthrown. Even though he constantly lost battles, he was known as a better general than politician or administrator.   Liberal and Conservative Mexicans joined together to create a new constitution, one which they hoped would stop the chaos of Mexican politics. Known as the War of the Reforma they triumphed in August of 1855. Santa Anna was d riven into exile.  He lived in various places, Cuba, Columbia, St. Thomas, and New York City...

The Great Eastern Returning to a Buoy Marking a Break in the Cable (A painting by Robert Dudley)      Cyrus Field's powers of persuasion must have been enormous. After the spectacular and expensive failure of the 1858 cable he raised funds for another effort in 1865. Though he came from a reasonably prosperous middle class family, Field's rise was really "rags to riches" and his enemies never let him forget it calling him "a junk collector."  Though a wealthy man Field was officially a New York City licensed junk collector.  His paper mills supplemented  wood pulp paper  with cotton rags. He had rag collecting contracts much like a recycling company would have today with a steel mill. To keep warehouses full of rags, Field was officially licensed as a "junk collector."       Field kept up with telegraph technology.  Blame for the failure of the 1858 cable was tossed back and forth among several of the key players.  Th...

HMS Agamemnon laying the Trans Atlantic cable 1858 NASA's program to send a man to the moon required--and yielded-- a variety of scientific and technical breakthroughs.  The moonshot of the 1850s, laying a telegraph cable from the New World to the Old World require--and yielded-- significant technical and scientific discoveries.  It was expected that once ships and cable were ready and in place, it would take only six to eight days to connect the continents.  Instead, it took nearly ten years and six  $1,200,000  major failures. But it wasn't until the cables had been successfully connected and tested that the real trouble began. By 1852 Europe was  already laying lines short distances under water such as  across the Irish Sea and the English Channel. Early experiments in laying telegraph cable underwater demonstrated it took a lot more redesigning than simply putting more gutta percha and tar insulation around the copper wires and plunking it in the w...

  Samuel Morse's telegraph Telegrams seem so old fashioned and fussy today.  Younger readers have probably never even seen a real telegram.  They might even believe "Morse Code" is a computer programming language. The telegraph was the internet of its day--only it caught on faster than the internet.  Before the telegraph, n ews travelled slowly at three to five mile per hour , about as fast as a person can walk in an hour, or ride a horse on a good road.  It is difficult to imagine in modern times the impact of "instant news" the telegraph made possible. The Post Office worried the telegraph would make mailing letters obsolete.  English railroads had experimented with using a crude telegraph signal to operators of switches for train tracks.  The idea of turning those signals into more sophisticated methods of conveying complex messages produced a variety of early types of telegraphs, all focused on printing out letters. A sender would have to use a pia...