In 1908, Lewis Hine began taking photographs of bicycle messenger boys across America. Funded by the National Child Labor Committee (NCL), Hine recorded the lives of the boys who took messages on their bicycles from telegraph companies and drugs stores to homes, stores, brothels, panel-houses and offices. Hine was not there simply to observe the boys who played an integral part in creating and sustaining a rapid nationwide communications network, although one that went only so fast as a boy could pedal. He wanted to expose child-labor abuses. These messenger boys worked unsupervised, long hours and for little pay. They encountered seedy venues rife with crime, drugs and sex. The NCL found: “The messenger’s cap is an open sesame to the underworld.”

NCL activist Edward N Clooper said the messenger boys were being sucked into a life of vice. He said the boys fetched the prostitutes “chop-suey, chili-con-carne, liquor, tobacco, opium, medicine and articles used in their trade, deposit their money in the bank and one instance was found in which a boy was actually acquired by a prostitute to clean up her room and make her bed.”

The boys were used as agents to “purchase cocaine and opium… and for drugs used to render insensible the patrons of the disreputable house that they may be robbed by its inmates”.

It would not last: *

Western Union upgraded its message collection and delivery technologies only after 1940, when child labor and education laws, minimum wage laws, and unionization drove up the cost of human messengers. Without a messenger to deliver it, however, a telegram was no different than a letter or a phone call; Western Union lost its distinctive brand identity and its position in the communications marketplace steadily eroded after World War II.

Via: Lewis Hine, Mashable, Design Observer, Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850-1950, by Gregory J. Downey