[ih] "Father of e-Marketing"

[Brian E Carpenter]

> In May of 1864, a group
> of British politicians received a knock on the door with a telegram
> waiting on the other side.

But those were individual messages delivered by hand, typically by a
telegraph boy. To my mind it needs to be an automatic process to count
as spam rather than junk mail. 

Regards
   Brian

On 04-Jun-19 07:56, Bill Ricker wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 5:35 PM Brian E Carpenter
> <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I have nothing concrete about telegraphic spam, but there wasn't really enough automation until 1914 or so to allow anything except manually generated advertising telegrams, which I don't think would count: it's automation that enables spam, surely?
> 
> Jacquard punch programming has been rediscovered for text and
> non-graphic programming repeatedly!
> 
> Wikipedia reports
> << In 1846, Alexander Bain used punched tape to send telegrams.
>    This technology was adopted by Charles Wheatstone in 1857 for the
> preparation,
>     storage and transmission of data in telegraphy.[1]
>    [1] Maxfield, Clive (13 October 2011). "How it was: Paper tapes and
> punched cards". EE Times.
>   >>
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bain_(inventor)
> 
> He invented the electric clock, facsimile transmission, and "chemical
> telegraph" , which is a precursor of heat-sensitive cash-register
> receipts, and could mark received messages so fast he had to invent
> off-line composition and automated fast sending.
> 
> It doesn't say anything about repeating the same offline message to
> multiple addressees; was in only point-to-point use in a few cities,
> but spamming Paris from Lille with a commercial directory for
> addresses would have been potentially profitable if it happened.
> 
> Ok, time to make use of the Google-fu that I developed before Google
> was a thing. (I don't mind GOOG using our start-up's business model
> sucessfully; we weren't using it.)
> 
> Google reports
> 
> <<A 1864 Telegram Was The World's First Spam Message - Curiosity
> But what was likely the world's first spam message was delivered via
> telegraph wires to very confused recipients. In May of 1864, a group
> of British politicians received a knock on the door with a telegram
> waiting on the other side. Expecting a note of critical national
> importance, they were surprised to see an ad inside the envelope. The
> telegram communicated that a local dental practice, run by "Messrs
> Gabriel," would be open from 10am to 5pm until October. Some of the
> recipients were outraged by this unsolicited advertisement, and even
> wrote a complaint to the Times: "I have never had any dealings with
> Messrs Gabriel and beg to know by what right do they disturb me by a
> telegram which is simply the medium of advertisement?" This event
> shows how new communication technologies are always met with
> surprising new ways of using them
> https://curiosity.com/topics/a-1864-telegram-was-the-worlds-first-spam-message-curiosity/
>>>
> 
> << Pre-Internet
> In the late 19th century, Western Union allowed telegraphic messages
> on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded
> instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864,
> when some British politicians received an unsolicited telegram
> advertising a dentist.[13]
> [13] "Getting the message, at last". The Economist. 2007-12-14.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming#Pre-Internet
>>>
> 
> In 1864, that could well have been Wheatstone telegraphy using Bain's
> sender as opposed to Morse telegraphy ... or the dentist may simply
> have paid his local Telegraph office to deliver paper copies locally
> by foot w/o any electric transmission at all. (Equivalent of paying
> urchins to deliver handbills but with value-add of a uniform and
> official telegraph office form, so likely to get read. That is much of
> the deceptive techniques of eMarketing fully formed!)
>