In the spring of 1897, Will and Jack's parents took a long-planned trip to Europe.
A transatlantic crossing in 1897 was a very different experience than it would be even five years later. The first Marconi wireless system was not installed on a ship until 1900 so, for Will's parents in 1897, this meant 7 to 10 days of complete communication blackout. A week or more on a 500ft boat in the middle of the Atlantic, with no way to call for help or contact your loved ones if something went wrong.
Living in an age where you can watch a family member's flight take off 5,000 miles away in real time on your handheld supercomputer - that sort of isolation is difficult to even fathom.
Needless to say, a message confirming to your loved ones that you had arrived safely would be a top priority for most people once you found yourself on solid ground again. And being that it could easily take another week or so for a letter to make its way back to the US (or 17 days in the case of the first letter Will's dad sent from Gibraltar), the ability to communicate almost instantly by wired telegraph was the obvious choice. However it came at a (literal) price.
International telegrams were expensive. Really, really expensive.
Telegraphers charged by the word and the cost varied significantly based on the destination of the message - as the rates below (from March 1897) show...
So sending the short message "Arrived safely. At Grand Plaza Hotel, Rome. Will write soon." back to the US would run you $3.80 ($147.18 adjusted for inflation). And Europe was on the lowest end of the cost spectrum...
Sending a telegram from the US to Brisbane, Australia in March 1897 was $2.62 per word (roughly $100 in 2025).
Fortunately there was a rather clever way to lower the cost of cable communication ...
On May 18th, 1897 (the travelers had departed on the 7th), Will's grandmother received the long awaited message from Will's parents in Europe. It consisted of a single word - misentry.
