Impactul telegrafului şi al telefonului asupra comerţului cu cereale de la gurile Dunării (1856-1914)
The impact of the telegraph and the telephone on the grains commerce at the mouths of the Danube (1856-1914)

Summary/Abstract: The year 1860 marked a decisive change in the global grains market with the introduction of the transatlantic telegraph connection. For the first time in history, information could travel significantly faster than goods could. Extremely costly and only within the reach of multination companies, the use of the telegraph gradually became part of everyday commerce. The flourishing of economic media transformed the telegraph into the main mechanism of price calculation for the international grains markets. The connections between the major stock exchanges existed now with delays of only 24 hours at most. The traders from Chicago and New York were now tied to Liverpool and London and from the British Isles the information was distributed to all of Europe. By extension, the traders from Odessa and from the Danubian ports also joined in. This study shows how the difficulty with which the data was transmitted did not influence considerably the transactions from the Danubian grains market. The archival and historical media files do not allow for the creation of empirical data using econometrics. As such, we cannot determine the exact fluctuation in the local stock markets based on information received by means of telegraph and telephone.

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