1882 | Communications, Media
Communications, Media
Western Electric wins a contract February 6 to produce telephones for the Bell Company, which will acquire the firm (see 1872; 1876). Young women replace the boys who have worked as telephone operators but proved unmanageable (see 1878); strictly disciplined, the women are forbidden to listen in on conversations, cross their legs, or blow their noses or wipe their brows without permission (those who marry are often discharged).
Harrison Gray Otis, 45, acquires an interest in the Los Angeles Times (see 1881). A Union Army enlistee who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, the Ohio-born Otis moved to California in 1876 and ran the Santa Barbara Post until 1879. The Times has absorbed the Weekly Mirror but is still only a four-page paper with a circulation of just 12,000; Otis will gain full control of the Times-Mirror Co. by 1886 and make it a powerful voice of Republican opposition to labor unions (see commerce, 1910).
"When a dog bites a man that is not news, because it happens so often, but when a man bites a dog that is news," says New York Sun city editor John B. Bogart, 34, to a cub reporter.
The Milwaukee Journal begins publication as the Daily Journal November 16 in competition with the city's other six newspapers, notably the 45-year-old Sentinel. Sauk County, Wisconsin-born journalist Lucius W. (William) Nieman, 24, buys a controlling interest 22 days later and will edit the Journal until his death in 1935, making it a voice of liberalism in the Midwest.
Dow Jones & Company (initially Dow, Jones & Co.) is founded in November by Connecticut-born former Providence Journal reporter Charles H. Dow, 31, and Edward D. Jones, 26, who open offices in a small, unpainted room at the bottom of some wooden stairs at 15 Wall Street, where former Drexel, Morgan employee Charles Milford Bergstrasser helps them go into business distributing handwritten news bulletins reproduced with carbon paper and tissue (they will not get a hand-cranked printing press until 1884) (see Wall Street Journal, 1889; commerce [Dow Jones Average], 1884).
The newspaper Current Events (Jiji shimpÅ) begins publication at Tokyo under the direction of educator-author Yukichi Fukuzawa, now 47.