What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

  ♦ “IF YOU’LL ONLY JUST PROMISE”: Charles Dibdin, “The Telegraph,” in The Songs of Charles Dibdin, Chronologically Arranged, vol. 2 (London: G. H. Davidson, 1863), 69.

  ♦ “THESE STATIONS ARE NOW SILENT”: Taliaferro P. Shaffner, The Telegraph Manual, 31.

  ♦ “ANYTHING THAT COULD BE THE SUBJECT”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 56.

  ♦ “ANYONE PERFORMING UNAUTHORIZED TRANSMISSIONS”: Ibid., 91.

  ♦ “WHAT CAN ONE EXPECT”: Ibid., 93.

  ♦ “OTHER BODIES THAT CAN BE AS EASILY ATTRACTED”: J. J. Fahie, A History of Electric Telegraphy to the Year 1837 (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1884), 90.

  ♦ “THIS SECONDARY OBJECT, THE ALARUM”: E. A. Marland, Early Electrical Communication (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964), 37.

  ♦ HARRISON GRAY DYER TRIED SENDING SIGNALS: “An attempt made by Dyer to introduce his telegraph to general use encountered intense prejudice, and, becoming frightened at some of the manifestations of this feeling, he left the country.” Chauncey M. Depew, One Hundred Years of American Commerce (New York: D. O. Haynes, 1895), 126.

  ♦ “IT MUST BE EVIDENT TO THE MOST COMMON OBSERVER”: John Pickering, Lecture on Telegraphic Language (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1833), 11.

  ♦ “TELEGRAPHY IS AN ELEMENT OF POWER AND ORDER”: Quoted in Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 200.

  ♦ “IF THERE ARE NOW ESSENTIAL ADVANTAGES”: John Pickering, Lecture on Telegraphic Language, 26.

  ♦ “A SINGLE LETTER MAY BE INDICATED”: Davy manuscript, quoted in J. J. Fahie, A History of Electric Telegraphy to the Year 1837, 351.

  ♦ “I WORKED OUT EVERY POSSIBLE PERMUTATION”: William Fothergill Cooke, The Electric Telegraph: Was it Invented By Professor Wheatstone? (London: W. H.Smith & Son, 1857), 27.

  ♦ “SUPPOSE THE MESSAGE TO BE SENT”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph: With the Reports of Congress, and a Description of All Telegraphs Known, Employing Electricity Or Galvanism (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1847), 178.

  ♦ “THE WORDY BATTLES WAGED”: Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 21.

  ♦ “THE MAILS IN OUR COUNTRY ARE TOO SLOW”: Recalled by R. W. Habersham, Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals.

  ♦ “IT WOULD NOT BE DIFFICULT”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 70.

  ♦ “SEND A MESSENGER TO MR HARRIS”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 128.

  ♦ AT THE STROKE OF THE NEW YEAR: Laurence Turnbull, The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, With an Historical Account of Its Rise, Progress, and Present Condition (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1853), 87.

  ♦ “IN THE GARB OF A KWAKER”: “The Trial of John Tawell for the Murder of Sarah Hart by Poison, at the Aylesbury Spring Assizes, before Mr. Baron Parks, on March 12th 1845,” in William Otter Woodall, A Collection of Reports of Celebrated Trials (London: Shaw & Sons, 1873).

  ♦ “IN CONVEYING THE MOVES, THE ELECTRICITY TRAVELLED”: John Timbs, Stories of Inventors and Discoverers in Science and the Useful Arts (London: Kent, 1860), 335.

  ♦ “WHEN YOU CONSIDER THAT BUSINESS IS EXTREMELY DULL”: Quoted in Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (New York: Berkley, 1998), 55.

  ♦ ALEXANDER JONES SENT HIS FIRST STORY: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph, 121.

  ♦ “THE FIRST INSTALMENT OF THE INTELLIGENCE”: Charles Maybury Archer, ed., The London Anecdotes: The Electric Telegraph, vol. 1 (London: David Bogue, 1848), 85.

  ♦ “THE RAPID AND INDISPENSABLE CARRIER”: Littell’s Living Age 6, no. 63 (26 July 1845): 194.

  ♦ “SWIFTER THAN A ROCKET COULD FLY”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 138.

  ♦ “ALL IDEA OF CONNECTING EUROPE WITH AMERICA”: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph, 6.

  ♦ “A RESULT SO PRACTICAL, YET SO INCONCEIVABLE”: “The Atlantic Telegraph,” The New York Times, 6 August 1858, 1.

  ♦ DERBY, VERY DULL: Charles Maybury Archer, The London Anecdotes, 51.

  ♦ “THE PHENOMENA OF THE ATMOSPHERE”: Ibid., 73.

  ♦ “ENABLES US TO SEND COMMUNICATIONS”: George B. Prescott, History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), 5.

  ♦ “FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES”: The New York Times, 7 August 1858, 1.

  ♦ “DISTANCE AND TIME HAVE BEEN SO CHANGED”: Quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’” 463.

  ♦ LIEUTENANT CHARLES WILKES: Charles Wilkes to S. F. B. Morse, 13 June 1844, in Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 60.

  ♦ “PROFESSOR MORSE’S TELEGRAPH IS NOT ONLY AN ERA”: Quoted in Adam Frank, “Valdemar’s Tongue, Poe’s Telegraphy,” ELH 72 (2005): 637.

  ♦ “WHAT MIGHT NOT BE GATHERED SOME DAY”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 133.

  ♦ “MUCH IMPORTANT INFORMATION … CONSISTING OF MESSAGES”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, viii.

  ♦ THE GIVING, PRINTING, STAMPING, OR OTHERWISE TRANSMITTING: Agreement between Cooke and Wheatstone, 1843, in William Fothergill Cooke, The Electric Telegraph, 46.

  ♦ “THE DIFFICULTY OF FORMING A CLEAR CONCEPTION”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 336.

  ♦ “TELEGRAPHIC COMPANIES ARE RUNNING A RACE”: Andrew Wynter, Subtle Brains and Lissom Fingers: Being Some of the Chisel-Marks of Our Industrial and Scientific Progress (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1863), 363.

  ♦ “THEY STRING AN INSTRUMENT AGAINST THE SKY”: Robert Frost, “The Line-Gang,” 1920.

  ♦ “A NET-WORK OF NERVES OF IRON WIRE”: Littell’s Living Age 6, no. 63 (26 July 1845): 194.

  ♦ “THE WHOLE NET-WORK OF WIRES”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 333.

  ♦ “THE TIME IS NOT DISTANT”: Andrew Wynter, Subtle Brains and Lissom Fingers, 371.

  ♦ “THE TELEGRAPHIC STYLE BANISHES”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 132.

  ♦ “WE EARLY INVENTED A SHORT-HAND”: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph, 123.

  ♦ “THE GREAT ADVANTAGE”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 46.

  ♦ THE SECRET CORRESPONDING VOCABULARY: Francis O. J. Smith, THE SECRET CORRESPONDING VOCABULARY; Adapted for Use to Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph: And Also in Conducting Written Correspondence, Transmitted by the Mails, or Otherwise (Portland, Maine: Thurston, Ilsley, 1845).

  ♦ THE A B C UNIVERSAL COMMERCIAL ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH CODE: Examples from William Clauson-Thue, THE A B C UNIVERSAL COMMERCIAL ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH CODE, 4th ed. (London: Eden Fisher, 1880).

  ♦ “IT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO THE AUTHOR’S KNOWLEDGE”: Ibid., iv.

  ♦ “TO GUARD AGAINST MISTAKES OR DELAYS”: Primrose v. Western Union Tel. Co., 154 U.S. 1 (1894); “Not Liable for Errors in Ciphers,” The New York Times, 27 May 1894, 1.

  ♦ AN ANONYMOUS LITTLE BOOK: Later reprinted, with the author identified, as John Wilkins, Mercury: Or the Secret and Swift Messenger. Shewing, How a Man May With Privacy and Speed Communicate His Thoughts to a Friend At Any Distance, 3rd ed. (London: John Nicholson, 1708).

  ♦ “HE WAS A VERY INGENIOUS MAN”: John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1982), 324.

  ♦ “HOW A MAN MAY WITH THE GREATEST SWIFTNESS”: John Wilkins, Mercury: Or the Secret and Swift Messenger, 62.

  ♦ “WHATEVER IS CAPABLE OF A COMPETENT DIFFERENCE”: Ibid., 69.

  ♦ THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE DILETTANTES: David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 189.

  ♦ “WE CAN SCARCELY IMAGINE A TIME”: “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” Graham’s Magazine, July
1841; Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1277.

  ♦ “THE SOUL IS A CYPHER”: The Literati of New York (1846), in Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, 1172.

  ♦ A BRIDGE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THE OCCULT: Cf. William F. Friedman, “Edgar Allan Poe, Cryptographer,” American Literature 8, no. 3 (1936): 266–80; Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (New York: Knopf, 1926).

  ♦ A “KEY-ALPHABET” AND A “MESSAGE-ALPHABET”: Lewis Carroll, “The Telegraph-Cipher,” printed card 8 x 12 cm., Berol Collection, New York University Library.

  ♦ “ONE OF THE MOST SINGULAR CHARACTERISTICS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 235.

  ♦ POLYALPHABETIC CIPHER KNOWN AS THE VIGENÈRE: Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 63 ff.

  ♦ “THE VARIOUS PARTS OF THE MACHINERY”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” Edinburgh Review 59, no. 120 (1834): 315–17.

  ♦ “NAME OF EVERYTHING WHICH IS BOTH X AND Y”: De Morgan to Boole, 28 November 1847, in G. C. Smith, ed., The Boole–De Morgan Correspondence 1842–1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 25.

  ♦ “NOW SOME ZS ARE NOT XS”: De Morgan to Boole, draft, not sent, ibid., 27.

  ♦ “IT IS SIMPLY A FACT”: quoted by Samuel Neil, “The Late George Boole, LL.D., D.C.L.” (1865), in James Gasser, ed., A Boole Anthology: Recent and Classical Studies in the Logic of George Boole (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 16.

  ♦ “THE RESPECTIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE SYMBOLS 0 AND 1”: George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London: Walton & Maberly, 1854), 34.

  ♦ “THAT LANGUAGE IS AN INSTRUMENT OF HUMAN REASON”: Ibid., 24–25.

  ♦ “UNCLEAN BEASTS ARE ALL”: Ibid., 69.

  ♦ “A WORD IS A TOOL FOR THINKING”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 359.

  ♦ “BABIES ARE ILLOGICAL”: Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic: Part I, Elementary (London: Macmillan, 1896), 112 and 131. And cf. Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 74.

  ♦ “PURE MATHEMATICS WAS DISCOVERED BY BOOLE”: Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (1918; reprinted Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004), 57.

  6. NEW WIRES, NEW LOGIC

  ♦ “THE PERFECT SYMMETRY OF THE WHOLE APPARATUS”: James Clerk Maxwell, “The Telephone,” Rede Lecture, Cambridge 1878, “illustrated with the aid of Mr. Gower’s telephonic harp,” in W. D. Niven, ed., The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; repr. New York: Dover, 1965), 750.

  ♦ GAYLORD AMOUNTED TO LITTLE MORE: “Small enough that if you walked a couple of blocks, you’d be in the countryside.” Shannon interview with Anthony Liversidge, Omni (August 1987), in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), xx.

  ♦ “THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT”: “In the World of Electricity,” The New York Times, 14 July 1895, 28.

  ♦ THE MONTANA EAST LINE TELEPHONE ASSOCIATION: David B. Sicilia, “How the West Was Wired,” Inc., 15 June 1997.

  ♦ “THE GOLD-BUG”: 1843; Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 71.

  ♦ “CIRCUMSTANCES, AND A CERTAIN BIAS OF MIND”: Ibid., 90.

  ♦ “ ‘THINKING MACHINE’ DOES HIGHER MATHEMATICS”: The New York Times, 21 October 1927.

  ♦ “A MATHEMATICIAN IS NOT A MAN”: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July 1945).

  ♦ UTTERLY CAPTIVATED BY THIS “COMPUTER”: Shannon to Rudolf E. Kalman, 12 June 1987, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

  ♦ “AUTOMATICALLY ADD TWO NUMBERS”: Claude Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938): 38–50.

  ♦ HIS “QUEER ALGEBRA”: Vannevar Bush to Barbara Burks, 5 January 1938, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

  ♦ “AN ALGEBRA FOR THEORETICAL GENETICS”: Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 892.

  ♦ EVALUATION FORTY YEARS LATER: Ibid., 921.

  ♦ “OFF AND ON I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON AN ANALYSIS”: Claude Shannon to Vannevar Bush, 16 February 1939, in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 455.

  ♦ “A CERTAIN SCRIPT OF LANGUAGE”: Leibniz to Jean Galloys, December 1678, in Martin Davis, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (New York: Norton, 2000), 16.

  ♦ “HIGHLY ABSTRACT PROCESSES AND IDEAS”: Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 2.

  ♦ “EPIMENIDES THE CRETAN SAID”: Bertrand Russell, “Mathematical Logic Based on the Theory of Types,” American Journal of Mathematics 30, no. 3 (July 1908): 222.

  ♦ “IT WAS IN THE AIR”: Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 109.

  ♦ “HENCE THE NAMES OF SOME INTEGERS”: Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, vol. 1, 61.

  ♦ DOES THE BARBER SHAVE HIMSELF: “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1910), in Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901–1950 (London: Routledge, 1956), 261.

  ♦ “LOOKED AT FROM THE OUTSIDE”: Kurt Gödel, “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I” (1931), in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 1, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 146.

  ♦ “A SCIENCE PRIOR TO ALL OTHERS”: Kurt Gödel, “Russell’s Mathematical Logic” (1944), in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 2, 119.

  ♦ “ONE CAN PROVE ANY THEOREM”: Kurt Gödel, “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I” (1931), 145.

  ♦ “CONTRARY TO APPEARANCES, SUCH A PROPOSITION”: Ibid., 151 n15.

  ♦ “AMAZING FACT”—“THAT OUR LOGICAL INTUITIONS”: Kurt Gödel, “Russell’s Mathematical Logic” (1944), 124.

  ♦ “A SUDDEN THUNDERBOLT FROM THE BLUEST OF SKIES”: Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, 166.

  ♦ “THE IMPORTANT POINT”: John von Neumann, “Tribute to Dr. Gödel” (1951), quoted in Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Weiner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 133.

  ♦ “IT MADE ME GLAD”: Russell to Leon Henkin, 1 April 1963.

  ♦ “MATHEMATICS CANNOT BE INCOMPLETE”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), 158.

  ♦ “RUSSELL EVIDENTLY MISINTERPRETS MY RESULT”: Gödel to Abraham Robinson, 2 July 1973, in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 5, 201.

  ♦ HIS NAME WAS RECODED BY THE TELEPHONE COMPANY: Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (New York: Atlas, 2005), 207.

  ♦ “YOUR BIO-MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS”: Hermann Weyl to Claude Shannon, 11 April 1940, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

  ♦ “PROJECT 7”: David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 289.

  ♦ “APPLYING CORRECTIONS TO THE GUN CONTROL”: Vannevar Bush, “Report of the National Defense Research Committee for the First Year of Operation, June 27, 1940, to June 28, 1941,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, 19.

  ♦ “THERE IS AN OBVIOUS ANALOGY”: R. B. Blackman, H. W. Bode, and Claude E. Shannon, “Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems,” Summary Technical Report of Division 7, National Defense Research Committee, vol. 1, Gunfire Control (Washington D.C.: 1946), 71–159 and 166–67; David A. Mindell, “Automation’s Finest Hour: Bell Labs and Automatic Control in World War II,” IEEE Control Systems 15 (December 1995): 72–80.

  ♦ “BELL SEEMS TO BE SPENDING ALL HIS ENERGIES”: Elisha Gray to A. L. Hayes, O
ctober 1875, quoted in Michael E. Gorman, Transforming Nature: Ethics, Invention and Discovery (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 165.

  ♦ “I CAN SCARCE BELIEVE THAT A MAN”: Albert Bigelow Paine, In One Man’s Life: Being Chapters from the Personal & Business Career of Theodore N. Vail (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921), 114.

  ♦ “I FANCY THE DESCRIPTIONS WE GET”: Marion May Dilts, The Telephone in a Changing World (New York: Longmans, Green, 1941), 11.

  ♦ “NO MATTER TO WHAT EXTENT A MAN”: “The Telephone Unmasked,” The New York Times, 13 October 1877, 4.

  ♦ “THE SPEAKER TALKS TO THE TRANSMITTER”: The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; repr. New York: Dover, 1965), 744.

  ♦ “WHAT THE TELEGRAPH ACCOMPLISHED IN YEARS”: Scientific American, 10 January 1880.

  ♦ “INSTANTANEOUS COMMUNICATION ACROSS SPACE”: Telephones: 1907, Special Reports, Bureau of the Census, 74.

  ♦ “IT MAY SOUND RIDICULOUS TO SAY THAT BELL”: Quoted in Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 140.

  ♦ “AFFECTATIONS OF THE SAME SUBSTANCE”: J. Clerk Maxwell, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 155 (1865): 459.

  ♦ THE FIRST TELEPHONE OPERATORS: Michèle Martin, “Hello, Central?”: Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1991), 55.

  ♦ “THEY ARE STEADIER, DO NOT DRINK BEER”: Proceedings of the National Telephone Exchange Association, 1881, in Frederick Leland Rhodes, Beginnings of Telephony (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929), 154.

  ♦ “THE ACTION OF STRETCHING HER ARMS”: Quoted in Peter Young, Person to Person: The International Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge: Granta, 1991), 65.

  ♦ “THE TELEPHONE REMAINS THE ACME”: Herbert N. Casson, The History of the Telephone (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 296.

  ♦ “ANY TWO OF THAT LARGE NUMBER”: John Vaughn, “The Thirtieth Anniversary of a Great Invention,” Scribner’s 40 (1906): 371.