Long distance communication used to be pretty expensive, but few messages have made a bigger dent than William Seward’s diplomatic telegram to France, which in 1866 cost him more than $300,000 in today’s currency. This pricey message aptly became known as Seward’s Other Folly. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Seward’s Other Folly”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
It’s easy to forget how expensive long-distance communication used to be.
Twitter and email and Facebook are so easy that they seem as good as free.
Text messages are just a few pennies if they cost anything at all.
And do you remember when you had to be careful about long-distance charges way back before you had to worry about cell phone minutes?
Oh my gosh, yeah. And shh, I’m talking long-distance.
I mean, who thinks about that now?
Because you can’t waste any time repeating yourself.
Right.
But way back before that, there were telegrams.
And I’m thinking of one telegram in particular, probably the most expensive telegram ever sent.
Here’s how it goes.
In the fall of 1866, William Seward was U.S. Secretary of State.
You may remember him as the fellow who negotiated with Russia for the purchase of Alaska.
Right. Seward’s Folly.
That’s right. They call it Seward’s Folly.
This is his other folly.
Seward was trying to manage a conflict between France and Mexico.
He needed to send a message to U.S. diplomats in France with the goal of getting France out of Mexico.
He wrote a telegram.
And when he first wrote it, it was 780 words.
However, it was converted to a cipher of only numbers.
Then the telegraph company had rules that said all numbers must also be spelled out as words.
Oh, no.
This is to cut back on errors.
Oh, no.
Then, when it was sent, there was accidental repetition.
The final message was 3,722 words long.
Oh, no.
It took six hours to send.
Now, this message did get to France, and the French did leave Mexico.
In fact, it was the first American encrypted diplomatic telegram ever sent.
However, Seward misunderstood how much it would cost.
It was more than $19,000.
Oh, no.
That’s $5 a word.
In today’s money, that would be more than $300,000.
Oh, my God.
It was so expensive that it was more than three times his salary as the U.S. Secretary of State.
And the U.S. government couldn’t afford it.
They were still paying off the debt from the Civil War.
Oh, my God.
He refused to pay the bill.
And, in fact, the U.S. government did not pay it until the Telegraph Company sued them and eventually lost the case.
They lost?
The government lost.
The government lost the case and had to pay in 1871.
Can you imagine that if every tweet you sent was $5 a word?
God.
I mean, we take this for granted, but you put this in a picture of the historical perspective.
We are in a really nice place right now.
We sure are.
Maybe communication is too cheap and too easy, but I’d much rather this than $5 a word.
Oh, my God.
But I would say, and I think you’ll agree with this, because we’ve both been freelance journalists, I would love to be paid $5 a word.
Yeah, that’s pretty rare.
My gosh, that’s a lot of dots and dashes.
I mean, just the whole thought that they had to encrypt it by changing all the words or the letters to numbers.
Well, that was the encryption code, and it was a well-known encryption code.
Actually, the code was so well-known that modern analysts look at this, and there’s a great document on the NSA site, the NSA, about this.
And they talk about this particular code as being almost passe at the point.
I mean, it almost wasn’t worth encrypting because the code was so widely known, had it been used for so long, that there really wasn’t any point of encrypting the message.
And to top it off, Seward sent the unencrypted version of it to a local newspaper in New York City that printed it.
And so when those newspapers arrived in France not long after, everyone was able to say, oh, now we know what the encrypted version looked like, and now we know what the unencrypted version looks like.
We can figure out your code.
Oh, no.
Seward had a lot of issues when he was Secretary of State, and a lot of them had to do with trying to reach too high.
Oh, bless his heart.
So how would you like that, a $300,000 telegram?
Oh, my gosh.
This is a show about words and language and ciphers and codes.
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