Soon after the Wall Street Journal's founding in 1889, the
newspaper distinguished itself through its use of the telegraph.
Thanks to imaginative use of the new invention, the Journal
became the first newspaper to report from London and Boston. The
dots and dashes devised by Kevin Sprouls, however, transmit
information in a different way. The tiny marks, or flecks enable
the transformation of a photograph, roughly 3 x 5 inches into a
legible portrait of only one-third the size. Sprouls explained
in a 1984 interview: "We've had to adopt this style which is
suitable for reproduction on a small scale. . . . When you're
dealing with something as small as half-column portraits, if
you're using lines or anything coarser than just a little fleck
of ink . . . it would tend to get very coarse and grainy so the
dot is just a very fine way of introducing gradations in tones."
Given the generally small, uniform size of the Journal's
illustrations, drawings are easier to read than photographs. As
Sprouls observes, for the