thoroughly that uniform national views were quite impossible, 
even before the Civil War. Perhaps an even more important 
consequence of the telegraph was that in America the literary 
talent was drawn into journalism, rather than into the book 
medium. Poe and Twain and Hemingway are examples of writers 
who could find neither training nor outlet save through the 
newspaper. In Europe, on the other hand, the numerous small 
national groups presented a discontinuous mosaic that the 
telegraph merely intensified. The result was that the telegraph 
in Europe strengthened the position of the book, and forced 
even the press to assume a literary character.

     Not least of the developments since the telegraph has 
been the weather forecast, perhaps the most popularly 
participative of all the human interest items in the daily press. 
In the early days of telegraph, rain created problems in the