My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office ... - Monoskop

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DAILY LIFE IN THE TELEGRAPH OFFICE
—consumption—to step in.” Although Gonzales managed to remain in
good health, tuberculosis claimed the life of Chicago telegrapher Annie
Casey Tipling in August 1893 after a futile trip to the South in search of a
healthier climate. 38
Although poor ventilation and a sedentary lifestyle may have contributed
to a high incidence of tuberculosis, a more common cause of illness
or death was typhoid fever carried by contaminated water supplies. Twentysix-year-old
Josie C. Adams died of typhoid fever while working as an operator
for Western Union in Detroit, Michigan, in 1876, and railroad telegrapher
Ma Kiley nearly succumbed to the same disease at the age of twenty-two in
1902 while working in Sabinas, Mexico. As she recounted in her autobiography,
“The Bug and I,” “I got sick but was afraid to admit it or lay off for
fear I’d never get another job. I held on until a train crew found me unconscious
in the office one night. I never knew how I reached the hotel. After
that I took the train for Del Rio and stayed there 90 days, for I had a bad
siege of typhoid pneumonia and came very near death.” 39
A less serious but common affliction among telegraph operators was
“glass arm” or “telegrapher’s cramp,” now known as “repetitive motion syndrome”
or “carpal tunnel syndrome,” caused by the nature of the hand
operation used to send Morse code continually at high speed. Martha
Rayne described the condition in 1893:
There is the disease known as telegraph cramp, the diagnosis
of which has not yet been thoroughly ascertained by the physicians.
An operator stretches out her hand to press her finger upon
the button of the instrument, and suddenly her arm refuses to
obey her will, and lies numb on the desk beside her. If the tendons
of her wrist had been cut through, her manual helplessness would
not be greater. The strongest voluntary force is too feeble to make
itself felt at the ends of the fingers. The operator simply can not
do her work. 40
The only known treatment for the affliction was to stay off the key until the
symptoms disappeared. In the 1890s, advertisements for arm braces began
to appear in telegraphic trade magazines. Introduction of the Vibroplex or
“bug” around 1900 greatly reduced the strain involved in sending and
thereby lowered the incidence of glass arm.