AP at 175, Part 3: A New Century, 1901-25

The Associated Press (AP) celebrates its 175th birthday in May 2021. To mark this milestone, the AP Corporate Archives has assembled a concise visual history of the organization, offered here in an eight-part monthly blog, “AP at 175.” This is the third of eight installments.

Valerie S. Komor
Director, AP Corporate Archives

Part 3: A New Century, 1901-25

Melville Elijah Stone (1848-1929), who had been named general manager of the AP of Illinois in 1893, remained in that role as AP moved to New York City in 1900. His newspaper background in Chicago, combined with experience owning an interest in an iron foundry (his father was both clergyman and tool manufacturer), perfectly prepared him to appreciate the mechanics of the cooperative.  For under his leadership, an array of technologies sprang up, were tested, perfected, installed, and eventually replaced by something faster and more efficient. His most important hire was a young Kent Cooper to the Traffic Department in 1910.

The first generation of telegraph technology--the Morse key, sounder and the Vibroplex bug--gave way in 1905 to the Yetman transmitting typewriter, which could transmit Morse code and typewrite copy simultaneously at 35 words per minute.  When the Morkrum Company of Skokie, Illinois introduced “telegraph typewriters” or “teletypes,” in 1914, Cooper visited the factory and ordered them installed on the New York City circuit. Clattering away at 60 words per minute, the teletype created a perforated tape that triggered the printing of copy at sending and receiving stations. 

One of AP’s proudest telegraphic feats occurred during the 1916 World Series, which featured the Boston Red Sox and the Brooklyn Braves.  Employing 26,000 miles of wire--the longest Morse circuit in the history of the telegraph-- AP transmitted the play by play directly from the ballparks to 550 newspapers, just under half of membership. 

Thomas Edison, an expert telegrapher as well as inventor, noted AP’s achievement and cabled Cooper immediately.  “The Associated Press must be wonderfully well organized to be able to accomplish what was done in the ball games,” he wrote.  Uncle Sam has now a real arterial system and it is never going to harden.”

AP General Manager Melville Elijah Stone (1848-1929) ca. 1900.  Photogravure, Gessford Studio,
New York City.  APCA.

During his tenure as AP General Manager, from 1893 to 1921, Stone worked to train journalists, expand the membership, embrace new technologies and open bureaus overseas.  In 1900, he launched a series of pocket-size manuals for staff, the first entitled, “The AP: What It Is.”  This was followed by “Instructions for Correspondents” (1911), in which he wrote: “It would be difficult to say whether Promptness or Accuracy is the more important—both are cardinal in Associated Press service; neither should be subordinated to the other.”  

World War I, the greatest story of the era, was also the most difficult to report.  Stone was frank with the Board of Directors:  “The machinery for the exchange of news among the largest news-gathering associations of the world [has been] either totally or partly demolished.”  Censorship was frequent and often capricious.  However, the ingenuity and dedication of journalists like Charles Kloeber in New York, George A. Schreiner and Hendrik Van Loon in Belgium, Elmer Roberts in Paris and Stanley Prenosil wherever Roberts needed him overcame such barriers. 

Roberts was among the few American reporters to have seen first-hand the carnage of the Western Front.  In a 1916 letter to Stone, proposing a story about war atrocities, he confided, “There are terrible things about this war which have never yet been written, and this may be the beginning of tearing open the realities… While I am looking into this matter absolutely on its news basis for us, yet it seems to me that the cause of civilization may be served incidentally.”    

Letter from William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, to AP General Manager Melville E. Stone, April 24, [1900?].  APCA. 

When AP moved from Chicago to New York City, incorporating in New York State on May 22, 1900, members returned their existing contracts for cancellation and concluded new ones.  These contracts, which fill 42 boxes, were often accompanied by ingeniously engraved letterhead such as this example from the Examiner.  The contracts, correspondence and enclosures document the period from 1882 (the date of the earliest contract) to 1903, as the organization established itself as a not-for-profit cooperative in New York.  Book historians may be interested in the detailed inventories of printing shops often enclosed with bills of sale.  Newspapers were typically located near their printers or within the same establishment. 

“World Wide Wireless,” 1915.  Publicity flyer, Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. APCA.

AP first contracted with Marconi for wireless telegraphy service in September 1899 to cover the America’s Cup yacht races off Sandy Hook in New York Harbor.  Marconi himself came to New York to direct coverage of the sporting classic. Sending apparatus were located on two following steamships.  Morse operators on board sent progress bulletins to the cable-ship Mackay Bennett where they were translated and telegraphed to New York over a submarine cable.  By 1920, as AP reported in the Service Bulletin, several ultra-modern methods were deployed to report the races:  telephone, seaplane, dirigible, and U.S. Navy destroyers.

“The Mainspring of the World’s Watch,” Associated Press Service Bulletin, July 1, 1920, Issue 54.  APCA.

This is a detailed floor plan of the AP offices at 51 Chambers Street where AP resided from 1914 to 1925.  Chief of Traffic Kent Cooper sat near General Manager Stone and adjacent to Traffic (today’s “technology” department).  Careful examination reveals a librarian’s desk conveniently located opposite the cable desks to permit librarians to save incoming copy, presumably in the official “record room.”  The offices at Chambers Street were the first to bring together news and traffic staff under the same roof.

“The Phillips Code, a thoroughly tested method of shorthand arranged for telegraphic purposes….” 
by Walter P. Phillips.  New York, 1879, revised 1914.  APCA.

Of the abbreviations introduced by the AP’s Walter Phillips in his code for telegraphers, the most famous may be SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) and POTUS (President of the United States).  Interestingly, the tear on the upper left-hand page reveals an advertisement for the Vibroplex “bug,” an instrument designed in 1905 by former AP telegrapher Horace G. Martin.  It used a spring vibrator to reduce the number of sending strokes on the telegraph key, thereby diminishing the incidence of hand paralysis among “knights of the key.”

AP teletype operators on the New York City circuit, 51 Chambers Street, New York, 1923.  APCA.

The first machines for printing over a telegraph wire (known initially as the “printer telegraph” or the telegraph typewriter” and finally as the “teletype”) were manufactured in Skokie, Illinois by the Morkrum Company.  Printing on paper was done by a revolving typewheel using a standard typewriter apparatus.  Hearing of the company’s work, AP Head of Traffic, Kent Cooper, visited in early 1914 to see if this new machine could be used on AP wires.  Impressed by Morkrum engineer Harry Biele, Cooper hired him away to coordinate the installation of the machines at AP’s Chambers Street headquarters where they underwent further testing.  The eight evening and nine morning New York papers were the first to receive the entire report over the Morkrum circuits, which now replaced messenger delivery and the city Morse wire.

Maj. James Aloysius Mills (1883-1942), right, with an unidentified colleague, [Paris?], ca. 1917.  APCA.

James Aloysius Mills became one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated foreign correspondents—a role that would be impossible to reprise today.  A New York City native, he joined the AP in 1905 as an assistant to General Superintendent Charles H. Boynton, later working in a similar capacity for General Manager Melville E. Stone.

During World War I, Mills held the rank of Major in the American Red Cross, serving at the front in France from 1917 to 1918 with the Military Affairs division.  As Secretary of the Red Cross Commission to Romania, he headed an emergency relief expedition to that country and to Russia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Switzerland, and Italy.

Mills made hundreds of photographs of the relief work in clinics, hospitals, camps and among displaced populations, assembling an extraordinary visual record of the human costs of war.   Lewis Wickes Hine served as chief photographer for the Red Cross mission and 53 of Hine’s original contact prints are contained within one of Mills’ three albums. 

James A. Mills Treasury Card, 1905-42.  APCA.

Mills’ arrival in Bombay in November 1930 signaled the beginning of a relationship between Mills and Mahatma Gandhi which lasted until Mills’ death in 1942. One of his first major stories on Gandhi came when he followed a tip that Gandhi was to be released from prison in Poona.  Mills kept up a 96-hour vigil outside the prison gates until Gandhi was released and Mills could interview him.

Throughout 1931, Mills travelled with Gandhi in India and accompanied him to the Second Roundtable Conference on Dominion Status for India in London.  At the time Gandhi was arrested in January 1932, Gandhi bade farewell to Mills by giving him a whack on the back, putting an arm around him, and handing him the following message:

“I am grateful to you for keeping the public informed of our activities and our aims. Tell the people that even as America won its independence through suffering, valor and sacrifice, so shall India in God’s good time achieve her freedom by suffering, sacrifice and non-violence. Let America not forget us in our travail.”

EOS (Extraordinary Occasion Service) Bulletin, Nov. 11, 1918.  Washington D.C. Bureau Records of the Associated Press, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

This bulletin, announcing the imminent end of World War I, timed off at 2:52 a.m. Eastern Time on Nov. 11, 1918, two minutes after the State Department announced the signing of the armistice in Versailles.  AP’s Washington bureau transferred its records (1915-30) to the Library in 1944, as it was becoming overwhelmed by the influx of World War II wire copy. 

Greek girl in Salonika carrying home a sack of food, ca. 1919.  Original print from the negative X142
by Lewis W. Hine.  APCA.

Archivists have identified 53 prints by Hine in one of the albums of James A. Mills and compared them with the Hine prints in the records of the American Red Cross at the Library of Congress.  All Hine images are numbered in the lower left corner.  They are instantly recognizable as the work of a single photographer (and social worker) intent on photographing the human face. 

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Photo editing and text by Valerie Komor, Director, AP Corporate Archives.

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