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Walter Polk Phillips was an American telegrapher and journalist.
Background
He was born on June 14, 1846 on a farm near Grafton, Massachussets, United States, to which town his parents Andrew Smith and Roxena Minerva (Drake) Phillips removed when he was eleven years of age.
As a boy he became a messenger for the telegraph at Providence and, being permitted to practise at the key, quickly made himself proficient in the art. His rapidity and precision in taking messages by sound won him first place in a speed contest, in recognition of which Samuel F. B. Morse presented him with a testimonial gold pencil.
Education
He did not have much schooling. He left school at age twelve.
Career
Attracted to journalism, in 1867 he commenced to devote his nights to reporting for the Providence Journal and, the following year, became city editor, then managing editor, of the Providence Herald. In 1871 he was a reporter on the New York Sun.
At intervals, however, he returned to telegraphy. For a time he was a fellow operator with Edison in Boston; during the winter of 1872-73 he was in the Western Union office in New York, and later he was one of the eight experts chosen to man the first leased press wire, which was installed in 1875, connecting New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. He devised a code for news transmission, "The Phillips Telegraphic Code" (1879), and a system for facilitating delivery of telegraphic copy more fully punctuated and better edited.
Interested in telegraphy and journalism, he contributed regularly to the Telegrapher and became the associate editor of the Electrician, then the leading trade journal. His stories, sketches, and paragraphs, which had been signed "John Oakum, " were issued as a little book in 1876, Oakum Pickings, and were republished in part twenty years later as Sketches, Old and New, with some additions, including an essay, "From Franklin to Edison. " He also was the author of My Debut in Journalism (1892), a volume of newspaper-office tales.
Phillips was the managerial head of the Associated Press. He had recently scored brilliantly as the Washington representative of the New York Associated Press through the Hayes administration, from which position he had been called to help perfect the opposition association for papers arbitrarily excluded from the long-established news source. Such was his exceptional organizing ability and grasp of the telegraph situation that, within a short time, by utilizing the independent wires and by making alliances with news agencies abroad operating in rivalry to those supplying the Associated Press, he was delivering regular reports to nearly one hundred dailies on a far-flung network of leased lines.
In 1892-93, the United Press under Phillips' management absorbed the New York Associated Press and had practically concluded negotiations for a huge merger with the Western Associated Press papers when irreconcilable disagreements arose over division of territory and matters of control. In the great "War of the News Giants" which followed (1893 - 97), Phillips was the field marshal for the United Press forces. Success seemed near when he annexed the Southern Associated Press and again when he won over the New England Associated Press, but the endurance and persistence of the new Associated Press finally overpowered the United Press.
The collapse occurred in the spring of 1897 and Phillips quit the news-gathering field. After the extinction of his position as general manager of the United Press, Phillips was prominently connected with the Columbia Graphophone Company as an executive officer for fifteen years and with the American Red Cross, in whose Board of Control he was active during the period of the Spanish-American War.
His Songs of the Wheel, mostly humorous in tone, which he gathered together in his zeal for the sport, was published in 1897. In this volume he inserted some rhymes of his own set to music, notably "The Stout Man's Conquest. " He spent his closing years in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and at Vineyard Haven, Massachussets, where he died.
Achievements
Walter Polk Phillips invented a special system of abbreviations that would make sending and receiving news stories much easier - the Phillips Code. The Phillips code quickly became popular with newspaper telegraphers, and it soon became the standard at newspapers of that era. He was the United Press's founding general manager, one of the leading news gatherers of the country. Besides, Phillips was the president of the Columbia Graphophone Company.
