Silencing of the Wires

For Five Minutes Not a Tick Was Heard Anywhere.

     CHICAGO, Sept. 19.—One feature absolutely unique in history characterized the McKinley obsequies. It was the silencing of the telegraph. Never before since electricity was first put to use as a means of communication from city to city and from country to country has there taken place, it is said, anything paralleling, even in a small way, what was done this afternoon on a scale that was magnificent. On orders from the officials of the different telegraph companies or upon the common impulse of the presidents where instructions were not received, the telegraphic system of the United States was hushed for five minutes at 2:30 p. m., the hour set for lowering the president’s body into the grave at Canton. At that moment on all the huge network of wires from the Atlantic to the Pacific not a “sounder” in the land gave a single tick and the great ocean cables were pulseless as the corpse of the late chief magistrate himself. Wires of the Associated Press, the Postal telegraph, the Northern Telegraph company, the Chicago & Milwaukee Telegraph company and all similar organizations were included in the general stoppage.