What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

  When the English and the American enterprises opened their doors to the general public, it was far from clear who, besides the police and the occasional chess player, would line up to pay the tariff. In Washington, where pricing began in 1845 at one-quarter cent per letter, total revenues for the first three months amounted to less than two hundred dollars. The next year, when a Morse line opened between New York and Philadelphia, the traffic grew a little faster. “When you consider that business is extremely dull [and] we have not yet the confidence of the public,” a company official wrote, “you will see we are all well satisfied with results so far.”♦ He predicted that revenues would soon rise to fifty dollars a day. Newspaper reporters caught on. In the fall of 1846 Alexander Jones sent his first story by wire from New York City to the Washington Union: an account of the launch of the USS Albany at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.♦ In England a writer for The Morning Chronicle described the thrill of receiving his first report across the Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph line,

  the first instalment of the intelligence by a sudden stir of the stationary needle, and the shrill ring of the alarum. We looked delightedly into the taciturn face of our friend, the mystic dial, and pencilled down with rapidity in our note-book, what were his utterances some ninety miles off.♦

  This was contagious. Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers, heretofore “the rapid and indispensable carrier of commercial, political and other intelligence,”♦ as an American journalist put it.

  For this purpose the newspapers will become emphatically useless. Anticipated at every point by the lightning wings of the Telegraph, they can only deal in local “items” or abstract speculations. Their power to create sensations, even in election campaigns, will be greatly lessened—as the infallible Telegraph will contradict their falsehoods as fast as they can publish them.

  Undaunted, newspapers could not wait to put the technology to work. Editors found that any dispatch seemed more urgent and thrilling with the label “Communicated by Electric Telegraph.” Despite the expense—at first, typically, fifty cents for ten words—the newspapers became the telegraph services’ most enthusiastic patrons. Within a few years, 120 provincial newspapers were getting reports from Parliament nightly. News bulletins from the Crimean War radiated from London to Liverpool, York, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Birmingham, and Hull. “Swifter than a rocket could fly the distance, like a rocket it bursts and is again carried by the diverging wires into a dozen neighbouring towns,”♦ one journalist noted. He saw dangers, though: “Intelligence, thus hastily gathered and transmitted, has also its drawbacks, and is not so trustworthy as the news which starts later and travels slower.” The relationship between the telegraph and the newspaper was symbiotic. Positive feedback loops amplified the effect. Because the telegraph was an information technology, it served as an agent of its own ascendency.

  The global expansion of the telegraph continued to surprise even its backers. When the first telegraph office opened in New York City on Wall Street, its biggest problem was the Hudson River. The Morse system ran a line sixty miles up the eastern side until it reached a point narrow enough to stretch a wire across. Within a few years, though, an insulated cable was laid under the harbor. Across the English Channel, a submarine cable twenty-five miles long made the connection between Dover and Calais in 1851. Soon after, a knowledgeable authority warned: “All idea of connecting Europe with America, by lines extending directly across the Atlantic, is utterly impracticable and absurd.”♦ That was in 1852; the impossible was accomplished by 1858, at which point Queen Victoria and President Buchanan exchanged pleasantries and The New York Times announced “a result so practical, yet so inconceivable … so full of hopeful prognostics for the future of mankind … one of the grand way-marks in the onward and upward march of the human intellect.”♦ What was the essence of the achievement? “The transmission of thought, the vital impulse of matter.” The excitement was global but the effects were local. Fire brigades and police stations linked their communications. Proud shopkeepers advertised their ability to take telegraph orders.

  Information that just two years earlier had taken days to arrive at its destination could now be there—anywhere—in seconds. This was not a doubling or tripling of transmission speed; it was a leap of many orders of magnitude. It was like the bursting of a dam whose presence had not even been known. The social consequences could not have been predicted, but some were observed and appreciated almost immediately. People’s sense of the weather began to change—weather, that is, as a generalization, an abstraction. Simple weather reports began crossing the wires on behalf of corn speculators: Derby, very dull; York, fine; Leeds, fine; Nottingham, no rain but dull and cold.♦ The very idea of a “weather report” was new. It required some approximation of instant knowledge of a distant place. The telegraph enabled people to think of weather as a widespread and interconnected affair, rather than an assortment of local surprises. “The phenomena of the atmosphere, the mysteries of meteors, the cause and effect of skiey combinations, are no longer matters of superstition or of panic to the husbandman, the sailor or the shepherd,”♦ noted an enthusiastic commentator in 1848:

  The telegraph comes in to tell him, for his every-day uses and observances, not only that “fair weather cometh out of the north,” but the electric wire can tell him in a moment the character of the weather simultaneously in all quarters of our island.… In this manner, the telegraph may be made a vast national barometer, electricity becoming the handmaid of the mercury.

  This was a transformative idea. In 1854 the government established a Meteorological Office in the Board of Trade. The department’s chief, Admiral Robert FitzRoy, formerly a captain of HMS Beagle, moved into an office on King Street, furnished it with barometers, aneroids, and stormglasses, and dispatched observers equipped with the same instruments to ports all around the coastline. They telegraphed their cloud and wind reports twice daily. FitzRoy began issuing weather predictions, which he dubbed “forecasts,” and in 1860 The Times began publishing these daily. Meteorologists began to understand that all great winds, when seen in the large, were circular, or at least “highly curved.”

  The most fundamental concepts were now in play as a consequence of instantaneous communication between widely separated points. Cultural observers began to say that the telegraph was “annihilating” time and space. It “enables us to send communications, by means of the mysterious fluid, with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space,”♦ announced an American telegraph official in 1860. This was an exaggeration that soon became a cliché. The telegraph did seem to vitiate or curtail time in one specific sense: time as an obstacle or encumbrance to human intercourse. “For all practical purposes,” one newspaper announced, “time, in the transit, may be regarded as entirely eliminated.”♦ It was the same with space. “Distance and time have been so changed in our imaginations,” said Josiah Latimer Clark, an English telegraph engineer, “that the globe has been practically reduced in magnitude, and there can be no doubt that our conception of its dimensions is entirely different to that held by our forefathers.”♦

  Formerly all time was local: when the sun was highest, that was noon. Only a visionary (or an astronomer) would know that people in a different place lived by a different clock. Now time could be either local or standard, and the distinction baffled most people. The railroads required standard time, and the telegraph made it feasible. For standard time to prevail took decades; the process could only begin in the 1840s, when the Astronomer Royal arranged wires from the Observatory in Greenwich to the Electric Telegraph Company in Lothbury, intending to synchronize the clocks of the nation. Previously, the state of the art in time-signaling technology was a ball dropped from a mast atop the observatory dome. When faraway places were coordinated in time, they could finally measure their longitude precisely. The key to measuring longitude was knowing the time someplace else and the distance to that place. Ships therefore carried clocks,
preserving time in imperfect mechanical capsules. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition used the first Morse line in 1844 to locate the Battle Monument in Baltimore at 1 minute, 34.868 seconds east of the Capitol in Washington.♦

  Far from annihilating time, synchrony extended its dominion. The very idea of synchrony, and the awareness that the idea was new, made heads spin. The New York Herald declared:

  Professor Morse’s telegraph is not only an era in the transmission of intelligence, but it has originated in the mind an entirely new class of ideas, a new species of consciousness. Never before was any one conscious that he knew with certainty what events were at that moment passing in a distant city—40, 100, or 500 miles off.♦

  Imagine, continued this exhilarated writer, that it is now 11 o’clock. The telegraph relays what a legislator is now saying in Washington.

  It requires no small intellectual effort to realize that this is a fact that now is, and not one that has been.

  This is a fact that now is.

  History (and history making) changed, too. The telegraph caused the preservation of quantities of minutiae concerning everyday life. For a while, until it became impractical, the telegraph companies tried to maintain a record of every message. This was information storage without precedent. “Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting therefrom the salient features of the social and commercial life of England in the nineteenth century,” mused one essayist. “What might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?”♦ In 1845, after a year’s experience with the line between Washington and Baltimore, Alfred Vail attempted a catalogue of all the telegraph had conveyed thus far. “Much important information,” he wrote,

  consisting of messages to and from merchants, members of Congress, officers of the government, banks, brokers, police officers; parties, who by agreement had met each other at the two stations, or had been sent for by one of the parties; items of news, election returns, announcement of deaths, inquiries respecting the health of families and individuals, the daily proceedings of the Senate and House of Representatives, orders for goods, inquiries respecting the sailing of vessels, proceedings of cases in the various courts, summoning of witnesses, messages in relation to special and express trains, invitations, the receipt of money at one station and its payment at the other, for persons requesting the transmission of funds from debtors, consultations of physicians …♦

  These diverse items had never before been aggregated under one heading. The telegraph gave them their commonality. In patent applications and legal agreements, too, the inventors had reason to think about their topic in the broadest possible terms: e.g., the giving, printing, stamping, or otherwise transmitting of signals, or the sounding of alarms, or the communication of intelligence.♦

  In this time of conceptual change, mental readjustments were needed to understand the telegraph itself. Confusion inspired anecdotes, which often turned on awkward new meanings of familiar terms: innocent words like send, and heavily laden ones, like message. There was the woman who brought a dish of sauerkraut into the telegraph office in Karlsruhe to be “sent” to her son in Rastatt. She had heard of soldiers being “sent” to the front by telegraph. There was the man who brought a “message” into the telegraph office in Bangor, Maine. The operator manipulated the telegraph key and then placed the paper on the hook. The customer complained that the message had not been sent, because he could still see it hanging on the hook. To Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, which recounted this story in 1873, the point was that even the “intelligent and well-informed” continued to find these matters inscrutable:

  The difficulty of forming a clear conception of the subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses.♦

  A message had seemed to be a physical object. That was always an illusion; now people needed consciously to divorce their conception of the message from the paper on which it was written. Scientists, Harper’s explained, will say that the electric current “carries a message,” but one must not imagine that anything—any thing—is transported. There is only “the action and reaction of an imponderable force, and the making of intelligible signals by its means at a distance.” No wonder people were misled. “Such language the world must, perhaps for a long time to come, continue to employ.”

  The physical landscape changed, too. Wires everywhere made for strange ornamentation, on city streets and country roads. “Telegraphic companies are running a race to take possession of the air over our heads,”♦ wrote an English journalist, Andrew Wynter. “Look where we will aloft, we cannot avoid seeing either thick cables suspended by gossamer threads, or parallel lines of wire in immense numbers sweeping from post to post, fixed on the house-tops and suspended over long distances.” They did not for some time fade into the background. People looked at the wires and thought of their great invisible cargo. “They string an instrument against the sky,”♦ said Robert Frost, “Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken / Will run as hushed as when they were a thought.”

  The wires resembled nothing in architecture and not much in nature. Writers seeking similes thought of spiders and their webs. They thought of labyrinths and mazes. And one more word seemed appropriate: the earth was being covered, people said, with an iron net-work. “A net-work of nerves of iron wire, strung with lightning, will ramify from the brain, New York, to the distant limbs and members,”♦ said the New York Tribune. “The whole net-work of wires,” wrote Harper’s, “all quivering from end to end with signals of human intelligence.”♦

  Wynter offered a prediction. “The time is not distant,”♦ he wrote, “when everybody will be able to talk with everybody without going out of the house.” He meant “talk” metaphorically.

  In more ways than one, using the telegraph meant writing in code.

  The Morse system of dots and dashes was not called a code at first. It was just called an alphabet: “the Morse Telegraphic Alphabet,” typically. But it was not an alphabet. It did not represent sounds by signs. The Morse scheme took the alphabet as a starting point and leveraged it, by substitution, replacing signs with new signs. It was a meta-alphabet, an alphabet once removed. This process—the transferring of meaning from one symbolic level to another—already had a place in mathematics. In a way it was the very essence of mathematics. Now it became a familiar part of the human toolkit. Entirely because of the telegraph, by the late nineteenth century people grew comfortable, or at least familiar, with the idea of codes: signs used for other signs, words used for other words. Movement from one symbolic level to another could be called encoding.

  Two motivations went hand in glove: secrecy and brevity. Short messages saved money—that was simple. So powerful was that impulse that English prose style soon seemed to be feeling the effects. Telegraphic and telegraphese described the new way of writing. Flowers of rhetoric cost too much, and some regretted it. “The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness,”♦ wrote Andrew Wynter:

  “May I ask you to do me the favour” is 6d. for a distance of 50 miles. How many of those fond adjectives therefore must our poor fellow relentlessly strike out to bring his billet down to a reasonable charge?

  Almost immediately, newspaper reporters began to contrive methods for transmitting more information with fewer billable words. “We early invented a short-hand system, or cipher,”♦ boasted one, “so arranged, that the receipts of produce and the sales and prices of all leading articles of breadstuffs, provisions, &c., could be sent from Buffalo and Albany daily, in twenty words, for both cities, which, when written out, would make one hundred or more words.” The telegraph companies tried to push back, on the grounds that private codes were gaming the system, but ciphers flourished. One typical system assigned dictionary words to whole phrases, organizing them semantically and alphabetically. For example, all words starting
with B referred to the flour market: baal = “The transactions are smaller than yesterday”; babble = “There is a good business doing”; baby = “Western is firm, with moderate demand for home trade and export”; button = “market quiet and prices easier.” It was necessary, of course, for sender and recipient to work from identical word lists. To the telegraph operators themselves, the encoded messages looked like nonsense, and that, in itself, proved an extra virtue.