About a hundred years back, such a system was in vogue in various
countries of Europe.

Early in the nineteenth century before the telegraph was invented, a New
York newspaper man named David Hale used a Pony Express system to
collect state news. A little later, in 1830, a rival publisher, Richard
Haughton, political editor of the New York Journal of Commerce borrowed
the same idea. He afterward founded the Boston Atlas, and by making
relays of fast horses and taking advantage of the services offered by a
few short lines of railroad then operating in Massachusetts, he was
enabled to print election returns by nine o'clock on the morning after
election.

This idea was improved by James W. Webb, Editor of the New York Courier
and Enquirer, a big daily of that time. In 1832, Webb organized an
express rider line between New York and Washington. This undertaking
gave his paper much valuable prestige.

In 1833, Hale and Hallock of the Journal of Commerce started a rival
line that enabled them to publish Washington news within forty-eight
hours, thus giving their paper a big "scoop" over all competitors.
Papers in Norfolk, Va., two hundred and twenty-nine miles south-east of
Washington actually got the news from the capitol out of the New York
Journal of Commerce received by the ocean route, sooner than news
printed in Washington could be sent to Norfolk by boat directly down the
Potomac River.

The California Pony Express of historic fame was imitated on a small
scale in 1861 by the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, then, as now, one of