The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  In this case, the government agency involved was the Defense Department. Its interest was piqued by its perceived need, following the launch of the Soviet satellites in the late 1950s, to counter a new high-technology threat. It was deemed suddenly important to the generals and admirals in Washington that their family of three huge mainframe computers at the Pentagon, at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska, and at the underground headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado should be linked together, able to relay information about war readiness and threat assessment in real time. An agency known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was set up to investigate the possibilities of doing this. An MIT professor named Joseph Licklider, who specialized in examining how the brain converts air vibrations into the perception of sounds—psychoacoustics—was chosen to lead the team.

  It can be convenient to regard the Internet that then developed as an entity that rests on three coequal pillars. There is first the physical Internet, or the hardware Internet, with its spiderwebs of fiber-optic cables and nests of routers and server farms, with its secret nodes and mirror sites and Internet exchanges. Though it is so complex that in current form it can only be a creation of many, “Lick” Licklider’s contribution to its making was seminal.

  For it was Licklider who in 1969 came up with core ideas behind what was to be called the ARPANET. This was the original network of defense computers, Virginia to Nebraska to Colorado and back to Virginia, a connection made back when computers were huge glass-windowed, air-cooled rooms filled with ranks of man-size towers, each one topped with whirling drums of magnetic tape that spun this way and that like the infernal clock contraptions in Metropolis. The ARPANET connecting these machines—devised by Larry Roberts, another half-forgotten Internet pioneer—supposedly allowed for the better defending of America and in theory permitted the nation’s atomic weapons to be launched much more quickly than those owned by the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces.

  Happily that particular need never arose, and once the threat had subsided, the technology started to seep into the commercial world and inexorably and inevitably led to a civil version of ARPANET. This peaceable version eventually linked not three single room-size machines, but millions upon millions of computers and their hundreds of thousands of networks across the globe. Over the next two decades, it evolved into what was rolled out first throughout the United States in March 1990 as the modern Internet.

  But the hardware is only the hardware. The computers also needed to decide, or be taught, how best to talk with one another, electronically. The way in which they do so is byzantine; the conversation that hums silently around the world today owes its existence to legions of linguists and lexicographers, if you will, who helped create it. One system eventually turned out to be particularly appropriate—a list of subatomic courtesies that let two strange machines get to know each other, along with a list of microscopic interpreters to decode the linguistic codes that are peculiar to one machine and can make them intelligible to another. The system came to be known as TCP/IP, Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. For the Internet to function properly, both are employed simultaneously, conjoined as the Internet Protocol Suite. Two Americans are most commonly associated with creating these proprieties of computer conversation, jointly becoming the Miss Manners, if you like, of the cyberworld.

  Joseph Licklider, Vint Cerf, and Robert Kahn can fairly be said to have conceived and invented the basic structure of the modern Internet—with a memo from Licklider in 1963 first suggesting the need for a network of connected computers. Cerf and Kahn were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005; Licklider died in 1990, before the implications of the Internet were fully realized.

  One was Vint Cerf, the other Robert Kahn. Working as government employees together at DARPA, the pair devised ways of slicing digitized information into tiny packets, sending these packets in cleverly arranged order down the wires connecting the computers, and then reassembling the packets in the distant computer into a precise copy of the information.

  Both men eventually left government to preach the essential goodness of computer connectivity, and both have been deluged with honors, mostly from their native United States. Doubtless Licklider would have won a medley of plaudits, too, but this modest and kindly man, predictor of so much and architect of so many of the central ideas, died young, in 1990, just as the Internet was getting started. According to Larry Roberts, it was in the early 1960s that Licklider began to suggest that “everybody could use computers anywhere and get at data anywhere in the world. He didn’t envision the number of computers we have today by any means, but he had the same concept—all of the stuff linked together throughout the world, that you can use a remote computer, get data from a remote computer, or use lots of computers in your job. The vision was really Lick’s originally. He didn’t have a clue how to build it. He didn’t have any idea how to make this happen. But he knew it was important, so he sat down with me and really convinced me that it was important and convinced me into making it happen.”

  Both creations, the physical structure and the protocols of communication, are different in two symbolically important respects from the final supporting pylon of the Internet, the medium known as the World Wide Web. The Web is the simplest of the three baseplates of the Internet, the easiest to explain. It is a medium that offers a computer user a means* of transmitting real information—text, pictures, film, sounds—from computer to computer or device to device. It transmits this information through the physical system of the Internet that was devised at the Pentagon by Roberts and Licklider, using the protocols first made at the Pentagon by Cerf and Kahn.

  But the Web does not have many creators—just one. And neither he nor its early users were Americans. Tim Berners-Lee is British, and his first customers were scientists working at the nuclear research center CERN, in Switzerland. He told them about his invention in a memo sent electronically in August 1991. The web, as he called it, “aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere. [It] was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!”

  The Web came to California, to Stanford, a month later; it spread beyond universities and into the hands of the general public in 1993, and by the end of the year there were six hundred websites. At the end of 1994 there were nearly three thousand, including sources for information on music, cooking, and movies; an early Internet comic named Doctor Fun; a webcam pointed into a fish tank; a means of ordering pizza online; a free-speech website called Bianca’s Smut Shack; and the online site of one of the world’s most venerable newspapers, the Economist.

  From the summer of 1994 on, the Internet went into accelerative overdrive, exponential and hyperkinetic. There are said to be more than six hundred million websites today, connecting the world, drilling details into and out of the most remote corners of the planet.

  And the most remote corners of America, too. The physical plant of the Internet is everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Orange markers show where buried fiber-optic cables run, spearing across the remoteness but too valuable to have anyone dig anywhere close to them, so identified everywhere, even deep in forests and swamps. Google has just built an immense server farm on the site of the old drive-in movie theater in Council Bluffs, Iowa, close to the great gold-colored spike that marks the spot that Abraham Lincoln declared the starting point for the transcontinental railroad.

  Lewis and Clark passed down the Columbia River in 1804, and then half a century later, the settlers and their wagons rumbled along nearby on their way to a future. Today in a flat nearby valley, there is a town called Prineville. Facebook has an enormous anonymous structure there, half dark and chill. All such centers lie behind tall razor-wire fences, are policed on the outside by guards and watchtowers and lights, have usually as the sole entrance an unm
arked door with a smokers’ ash receptacle beside it, and are manned on the inside by just a small corps of three or four uniformed men who pad around like keepers in some strange beastless zoo. But each one is a zoo crammed with iron mesh cages that hold hundreds and hundreds of computer servers, all of them passing data from one to another or down into the cables, up and out of them into other cables, all soundless and not a little sinister.

  I was escorted around one such center in northern California. The keeper was utterly discreet about his charges, trusting that I would be sufficiently mesmerized by the millions of winking lights and the low blue light bathing the building’s innards not to ask too many questions. But he did start at one point, gesturing to one especially large cage, in which the Cisco servers were all jet black and shiny, like Darth Vader’s skin. “That,” he said with great solemnity, “is where they store all the information on California’s deadbeat dads.”

  Every man who has run out on child support or is late with his alimony payments or who in some other way is said to have failed his children or his former spouse—every name, every address, and every last detail of the miscreant is corralled behind the black mesh of chain mail. Every time a gathering of diodes on a server panel begins a fury of colored blinking, as happened several times while I was watching, it signified that someone, somewhere in the world, was seeking to find out something about someone whose details lie buried on slices of conducting metal within.

  One of the newly built cathedrals of an entirely new kind of unification church—a Google server farm, housing tens of thousands of highly secure computer nodes that store and exchange at lightning speed information both for the entire American nation and, now, for the entire world.

  And while the computers are soundless in their labors, the center hums with a low-frequency rumble of motors and harmonics. Great air-conditioning systems have to be built alongside these vast new information cathedrals to keep the computers and their eternally spinning hard drives from overheating, melting, bursting into flame, and perhaps for just one critical microsecond, going disastrously offline, off the grid.

  Somewhere across the world a computer user is expecting that his click of a mouse button will yield instant access to a piece of information. If he has to wait—in a world where waiting is an intolerable new inconvenience—an analysis will show within seconds just which data center is responsible for the delay and why. To ensure that there are as few interruptions as possible, immense quantities of electricity are deployed to keep everything running with precision and perfection and permanence: 2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.

  Therein lies an irony, perhaps. The Internet was formed in America, based in America, a godchild of all the earlier technologies born or first used in America that helped to connect its people and landscape as one, and now its business is in connecting the world. Connecting America to the world, true, and connecting the world to America. But while many of the networks that employ the Internet—Twitter, especially—have proved themselves unimaginably adroit in linking together people and causes and helping create the new phenomenon of mass thinking that has come to be known as the hive mind, it is no longer a stated or perceived mission of the network to help anneal the nation that made it all into one.

  If California is to feel at one, to be at one, with Maine and the Dakotas and Florida and Alabama, then it has to be hoped that the structures already settled into place by the great men and great visions of the past will continue to endure, as the republic endures. It is surely evident now that the Internet, the great new technological missionary of the age, is obliged to a future lying well beyond America. Its creators have as their unstated vision the uniting of the whole world. The unum that is America’s proudest accomplishment today will in time become part of an even greater pluribus, which one day will be similarly forged by electronics into one great planetary unity.

  Whether such a dream will work and will make sense remains to be seen. It may not happen, but it will surely be attempted. It may be a dream, or it may be a nightmare. In the forefront of this effort will be the century’s new corps of forge masters. They will probably no longer be, as in the past, great public figures of strength and courage and determination. The days of Powell and Hayden, Lewis and Clark, Maclure and Edison and Clarence King are long over; there will be no further examples of men bent on surveying mountains or hammering railroad ties or wrenching trees from the living earth or excavating canals or listening for faint radio signals through the fog. Instead the new pioneers of unification will be technical men, hidden quietly out of sight in their blue-lit warehouses, surrounded by silent frenzies of blinking server lights.

  As this dream or this nightmare unfolds, deep within these fortresses, such men of cool dispassion and quiet determination will remain fixed to their allotted tasks of a new ideal, that of making the planet one and then placing America in her proper context as a briefly glorious component of the comprehensive history of earth. The men who united the states, in their next incarnation as a part of this new ideal, will have become transmuted into the men who united the world.

  EPILOGUE

  I live in a small Northeastern American town, a lonely, lovely place so full of unusual characters and strange stories that I have often thought it amply deserving of a curious little book. But then, Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio in 1919, in which he told tales from a similarly hidden little town in the Midwest, weaving them together into the rude fabric of a novel that has remained a classic of modern American literature ever since. In other words, the job has already been done.

  Nevertheless, I fancied that it might be possible to try to write his book again. It might be done as a centennial experiment, to come out in 2019—only this time it would be set in my village of Sandisfield, Massachusetts, with a new cast and a new set of happenings and memories. Like Winesburg, to protect reputations and allow for some literary license, the place could be given a new name. I toyed with the idea—filching from Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome—of calling it Starkfield, Massachusetts. Under that title, a book telling of life in a forgotten corner of America in the twenty-first century might become a classic work of fiction, too, to be read in the schools and living rooms of the twenty-second. It was a fancy, little more, but one that long lingered in my mind.

  Instead, for a reason that has much to do with the underlying theme of this book, something quite different happened. A group of us, mostly admirers of Sherwood Anderson and all of us quite aware of the uniquely interesting nature of our own little town and its people, started a local monthly newspaper. The Sandisfield Times published its first issue in April 2010, and in the years since it has become, to the surprise of all, an essential part of village life, required reading for everyone—like the Winesburg Eagle, in fact, but a century later.

  The paper is now popular, needed, and ceaselessly written to, and it has brought to Sandisfield something that the village has never truly enjoyed in all of its 250 years of incorporated existence: a sense of community, a common sense of unity.

  There were reasons why it had taken so long. Geography was one: the rivers that flowed down from the Berkshire hills and through the town had long separated the tiny clusters of houses, kept people firmly apart from one another. “This is a town where you’ll never be bothered if you don’t want to be,” someone said when I first moved here in 2001. Some days not a single car comes down our dirt road. The quiet can be deafening, though magical for being so. There is just the breeze and the birdsong and on a winter’s day like this one, the cracking of the ice, and at night the screaming and yapping of the local coyotes. This is a fine place for those who value solitude.

  Then again, New Englanders can be a taciturn breed, stern with newcomers. The old Puritan families, remainders of the first settlers, keep their own counsel. But this is America, and these first settlers have since been augmented by outsiders who journeyed here
from just about everywhere. There are Finns and Magyars here in abundance, and Ukrainians, a handful of Scots and a Cornishman, a lady from Haiti, a Latvian, a family of newly arrived Albanians from Kosovo. The town constable’s family is from Spain. Once there were enough Russian Jews here—many bent on raising chickens for the grocers of New York City—to warrant turning the old Baptist church into a synagogue. But then the Jews went down to the city, leaving the chicken farms behind. The temple that they left then became the village arts center, where a small group of enthusiasts produces plays for each other and puts on thinly attended concerts. And for years the people of Sandisfield, different, disparate, diffident, kept resolutely to themselves like this: America in ethnic microcosm, though in this corner of the country, an America somewhat disinclined to pull together as one.

  But now, with the newspaper, much has changed. The forum that its pages offer is now abuzz with news, argument, and conversation. The annual town meeting, by which most New England villages govern themselves and which here used to be a sorry affair attended by almost no one, is now for the first time crowded with voters, loud with debate. The arts center staged a play about the history of the village in 2012, and for the first time in its ten-year existence, found it had to turn people away for want of room.

  Neighborliness has now become commonplace, replacing distance and isolation. I write this two days after a historic snowstorm; all I can see from my study window is a blanket of pure white, the old stone walls quite submerged by drifts, the apple trees in the orchard shuddering under the blasts of wind. The early records of this town referred to it as a “howling wilderness,” and on a day like this, with my windows rattling and the birds being knocked sideways in the sky, it is. Yet people still come by—some on cross-country skis, some on snowshoes—to make sure all is well; and we go out, too, knocking on doors, making certain those without power have firewood and hot soup and toddy. Everyone now has a camera, and after an event like this, the telephone rings constantly with offers of images for the coming month’s newspaper. Now that there is a paper, people want to employ it to be able to remember where they were, to remind themselves what it was like, when the Great Storm of 2013 struck Sandisfield, our town. (And yes: Thornton Wilder’s play of that name was due to be staged here later in the year—another mark of the coming change, of the growth of community.)