The historical radio series DuPont Cavalcade of America celebrated the first century of the Associated Press in 1948 by dramatizing scenes in the news cooperative’s past — from its first big error (signal flags were involved) through an effort of literally Biblical proportions to monopolize a telegraph line and relay European news from Halifax (did the Queen really ban the waltz?), to more significant news from Gettysburg, Little Big Horn, and the Johnstown Flood — over 2,000 dead, with the AP reporter filing his story despite a broken leg.

The compressed story takes the AP from its start as a cost-cutting cooperative effort by the six most important New York newspapers of 1848 into the new century, then jumps to its 1948 status as a million-words-a-day wire service with a membership of 4,000 subscribers.

The radioplay even manages to get in a few chuckles on the way, particularly when an AP agent has a telegraph operator transmit Bible passages to keep control of the wire for several hours.

(I thought I’d posted an essay about this episode long ago, but I don’t see it here. Perhaps it’s lurking on the backup disk from my old office computer. At least this blog post will remind me to do a more thorough write-up the next time I update my Cavalcade of America page.)