Telegraph (Rail)Road
An almost by-product of the rise of the railroad was the sudden influence and acceptance of a system that had been frowned upon, mistrusted and even laughed at when first trialled. The spread of the telegraph would almost be down to one man, and he was in charge of the Erie Railroad.
Charles Minot (1810 - 1866)
As would be proven time and time again, running a railroad was a tough business, and not for the faint-hearted. It required big men with big voices and big ambitions (and big pockets) who would be hands-on, banging the boardroom table or sometimes even banging, literally or figuratively, heads together to get things done. No shrinking violet, no man afraid to raise his voice or swim against the flow, or speculate where others feared to invest, was likely to ever have a successful business, so much more so in that of the new cattle drive, the railroad. Such a man was Charles Minot, a barrister-to-be, son of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, but whose head was turned not by the law but by the locomotive. A man who got interested in engineering and worked for the Boston & Maine Railroad, where he got to grips with the telegraph, one of the first men to master it. He moved on from the Boston & Maine to the Erie Railroad, becoming its General Superintendent in 1850.
Minot had an odd way of dealing with insubordination. If he called a man to his office to chew him out, and another man looked in before him, his quick temper would explode and be expended on that man, leaving the - usually blameless - man in question wondering what he had done to deserve such treatment, and no doubt retreating in a hurry, while the actual focus of his anger, when he appeared, would be waved off without a word.
Minot was one of the first to work with the telegraph, as mentioned, and also possibly the first to see its potential for use in communicating with his trains. Prior to this, the only way of finding out whether a train was on the way or not was by looking out for the smoke from the stack, usually visible just above the horizon, and often only discernible through a telescope utilised by a station manager who had climbed up a special pole in order to get the necessary height to spot it. There was no such thing as switching and all trains ran on the same track, so for two trains to be on the same line at the same time, without adequate distance between them, could spell disaster. Often, trains would be required to pull in to a station and wait for the one due to pass before they could again use the track.
Minot changed all this. He had long lines of telegraph poles built along the route at the side of the tracks, and though it took some coaxing, demonstration and bullying to get the drivers to trust the contraption, eventually his innovation was praised in 1855 by the state’s Engineer and Surveyor in his report:
The telegraph has been in use on the Erie since 1852 [meaning practically]. By the concurrent testimony of the superintendents of the road, it has saved more than it cost every year. There is an operator at every station on the line, and at the important ones day and night, so placed that they have a fair view of the track. They are required to note the exact time of the arrival, departure, or passage of every train, and to transmit the same by telegraph to the proper officer. On each division there is an officer called train despatcher, whose duty it is to keep constantly before him a memorandum of the position of every train upon his division, as ascertained by the telegraphic reports from the several stations. The trains are run upon this road by printed time-tables and regulations. When they become disarranged, the telegraph is also used to disentangle and move them forward. When trains upon any part of this road are delayed, the fact is immediately communicated to the nearest station, and from there by telegraph to every station on the road. Approaching trains are thus warned of the danger, and accidents from this cause are prevented.
When one or more of the trains from any general cause, like that of snow storms, etc., have been retarded and are likely to produce delays on the other trains, the train despatcher is authorized to move them forward by telegraph under certain rules which have been arranged for that purpose. Having before him a schedule of the time of the passage of each train at its last station, he can determine its position at any desired moment with sufficient accuracy for his present purpose, and can adopt the best means of extricating the delayed trains and of regulating the movement of all so as to avoid any danger of collision or further entanglement. He then telegraphs to such stations as are necessary, giving orders to some trains to lay by for a certain period, or until certain trains have passed, and to others to proceed to certain stations and there await further orders.
To prevent any error or misunderstanding between the despatcher and the conductor of the train, he is required to write his order in the telegraph operator's book. The operator who receives the message is required to write it upon his book, and to fill up two printed copies, one of which he hands to the conductor of the train, and one to the engineman. The despatcher then transmits a message to the conductor, asking him the question : " How do you understand my message?" To which the conductor must make reply in his own words, repeating the substance of the message as he understands it, to detect any error which may be made by the operator, or of his own understanding of it. If this is satisfactory to the despatcher, he telegraphs, "All right, go ahead!" and until this final message is received, no trains can be moved on the road by telegraph. Time is saved by using abbreviations for stations and messages, trains, etc.
In this way, if a passenger train is delayed an hour or more, all freight trains which would be held by it at the several stations under the general rules are moved forward to such other passing places as they are certain to reach before the delayed trains could overtake them, and thus it frequently happens that in a single day the trains which would otherwise be delayed, are moved forward by telegraph, the equivalent to the use of two or three engines and trains.
Not surprisingly, soon after this the telegraph became the standard way of communicating with trains, of scheduling and dispatching them, and, in time (sadly) of communicating news of crashes or other delays that might occur along the line, as well as weather reports and other items of interest to the driver.
Daniel McCalllum (1815 - 1878)
If Minot got it done, pushed it through, another man made sure it kept being done. Hailing from Scotland, Daniel McCallum came to America when his family emigrated to New York when he was only seven years old. Another civil engineer, he began his career designing buildings then moved on to bridges, where he pioneered a new concept which resulted in the McCallum Inflexible Arched Truss Bridge, able to take much heavier loads than other bridges of its time. In 1854 he succeeded Minot as General Superintendent of the Erie Railroad, where he had very specific ideas about management, explained in a report to the stockholders in 1856:
"A superintendent of a road fifty miles in length can give it's business his professional attention and may be constantly on the line engaged in the direction of its details; each person is personally known to him, and all questions in relation to its business are at once presented and acted upon, and any system however imperfect may under such circumstances prove comparatively successful.
In the government of five hundred miles in length a very different state exists. Any system which might be applicable to the business and extent of a short road would be found entirely inadequate to the wants of a long one. and I am fully convinced that in the want of system perfect in its details, properly adapted and vigilantly enforced, lies the true secret of their [the large roads’] failure; and that this disparity of cost per mile in operating long and short roads, is not produced by a difference in length, but is in proportion to the perfection of the system adopted..."
McCallum was the first, not just railroad man but businessman to see a way to delineate and delegate responsibilities to staff, so that certain people were authorised and tasked with certain areas of the business only, everything got done properly and, perhaps as importantly - leaving Charles Minot’s rather novel approach to one side - when something went wrong, it was easy to apportion blame. He also invented what is generally believed to be the world’s first organisation chart, and his model of business management set the standard other businesses across America were to adopt, so in some ways he could even been seen as the father of business organisation in America. He explained his chart thusly:
"By inspection it will be seen that the Board of Directors as the fountain of power, concentrates their authority in the President as the executive Officer, who in that capacity directly controls those officers who are shown on the Diagram at the termini of the lines diverging from him, and these in their turn, through all the various ramifications down to the lowest employee control those who terminate the lines from them.
All orders from the Superior officers are communicated in the above order, from superior to subordinate to the point of desired; thereby securing despatch in their execution and maintaining proper discipline without weakening the authority of the immediate superior of the subordinate controlled by the order thus transmitted. Each individual, therefore, holds himself responsible only to his immediate superior.”
He had more ideas too:
"A system of operations to be efficient and successful should be such as to give to the principal and responsible head of the running department a complete daily history of details in all their minutiae. Without such supervision, the procurement of a satisfactory annual statement must be regarded as extremely problematic. The fact that dividends are made without such control does not disprove the position, as in many cases the extraordinarily remunerative nature of an enterprise may ensure satisfactory returns under the most loose and inefficient management..."
McCallum presented the following general principles for the formation of such an efficient system of operations, reprinted in Vose (1857)
First. A proper division of responsibilities.
Second. Sufficient power conferred to enable the same to be fully carried out, that such responsibilities may be real in their character.
Third. The means of knowing whether such responsibilities are faithfully executed.
Fourth. Great promptness in the report of all derelictions of duty, that evils may at once be corrected.
Fifth. Such information to be obtained through a system of daily reports and checks that will not embarrass principal officers nor lessen their influence with their subordinates.
Sixth. The adoption of a system, as a whole, which will not only enable the general superintendent to detect errors immediately, but will also point out the delinquent.
About the core principle of management, he summarized:
"All that is required to render the efforts of railroad companies in every respect equal to that of individuals, is a rigid system of personal accountability through every grade of service..."
Vose (1857, p. 416) added, that all subordinates should be accountable to, and directed by, their immediate superiors only. Each officer must have authority, with the approval of the general superintendent, to appoint all persons for whose acts he is held responsible, and to dismiss any subordinate when in his judgment the interests of the company demand it.[/I]
In 1977 business professor Robert Chandler had this to say about the man and his system:
"McCallum's principles and procedures of management, like his organization chart, were new in American business. No earlier American businessman had ever had the need to develop ways to use internally generated data as instruments of management. None had shown a comparable concern for the theory and principles of organization. The writings of James Montgomery [a British textile manager with American experience] and the orders of plantation owners to their overseers talked about the control and discipline of workers, not the control, discipline, and evaluation of other managers. Nor does Sidney Pollard in his "Genesis of Modern Management" note any discussion about the nature of major principles of organization occurring in Great Britain before the 1830s, the data at which he stops his analysis...Poor had McCallum's organization chart lithographed and offered copies for sale at $I a piece. Douglas Galton, one of Britain's leading railroad experts, described McCallum's work in a parliamentary report printed in 1857. So too did the New York State Railroad Commissioners in their annual reports. Even the Atlantic Monthly carried an article in 1858 praising McCallum's ideas on railroad management...
(all the above copied verbatim from Wiki, as I’m a lazy git and I don’t really understand it anyway)