January 2011

On the afternoon of June 2, 1875, two young men bent over work benches in the hot and stifling garret of a five-story brick building occupied by the electrical workshops of Charles Williams, at 109 Court Street, Boston. They did not speak to one another, for they were in separate rooms some sixty feet apart, at opposite ends of the floor. Between the rooms ran a length of wire.

The younger of the two men was Thomas A. Watson, twenty-one years old, a native of Salem who had left school at the age of thirteen but had become, during several years of employment at the workshop, an able and imaginative technician. His skill had been tested in the construction of virtually all the devices required by Williams’ clients—call bells, telegraph keys, galvanometers, annunciators, relays, sounders. He had, moreover, read nearly all of the few books on electricity then available, in the morning of the electrical age. His fingers were deft, his intelligence keen.

In a thousand tank towns and junctions across the land, he was a man boys wanted to be when they grew up. Wherever the railroad had come, depositing a lonely depot in its wake, he was a fixture—and a most important one: Stationmaster, telegrapher, flagman, ticket salesman, and express agent rolled into one—a man who spent, it often seemed, an unconscionable amount of time just sitting peacefully in the sun or jawing with anyone who happened by to pass the time of day, but who carried out his assorted tasks as efficiently as any responsible executive would. His hours, when he was working, were busy ones: when he was not—well, time was what people had most of in 1876 in the town where he lived.

To most people, prairie country is farm country—big fields of corn and oats, rolling pastures with lone trees standing on the slopes. But when the virgin timber that originally covered the river valleys was slaughtered to make room for corn and cattle, homesteads and town sites, good bits of it were left, down along the creeks and river bottoms, under the crests of low hills. These are the prairie woods, where farmers turned loose their cattle and where country communities held Sunday-school picnics and Fourth of July celebrations. Every town had its woods close by—“Somebody’s Grove,” or “down by the creek.” “Going to the woods” was an institution with which prairie children grew up.

Undertaking to examine “the decisive effect of individual human character on history,” the British writer Correlli Barnett reaches a glum conclusion. In his excellent book, The Swordbearers , he studies four famous leaders of the First World War—Colonel-General Helmuth von Moltke, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, General Philippe Pétain, and General Erich Ludendorff—and his moral seems to be that these men were thrown into crises that were simply too big for them. Their impact on history came largely because of their own inability to measure up to an overwhelming challenge.

America was settled and developed by people who, in the face of crisis, were prepared to forgo etiquette and confront reality with their gloves off. Ladies, as in the Old World, were habitually more inclined to observe the conventions than men; yet now and then, in our early days, one of them took the shortest possible course between where she was and where she wanted to be. On July 15, 1837, in Chatham Four Corners, New York, Miss Emily Moore made up her mind that Mr. Frederic Everest was the man for her. Since the likelihood of their meeting under ordinary circumstances seemed slim, she sat down and wrote the accompanying letter (now in the collection of Mr. Philip Jones of Shelton, Connecticut, and printed here with its quaint errors intact). The end of the story is unknown: whether Emily conquered Everest is veiled in the mists of history. But we cannot help suspecting that a girl with that much courage somehow, sometime, got what she wanted.

Mr. Everest:

The fabric of history is often woven of surprising threads: the chance meeting, the extravagant whimsey of fate. No better illustration of this can be found than the string of events surrounding the table in Wilmer McLean’s parlor upon which Ulysses S. Grant drew up the terms that brought the Civil War to a close.