The Tyranny of E-mail

by John Freeman

  The hopes for what this new now would bring were enormous. It aroused feelings of patriotism and, more important, a desire for unity that would prove a dream in the short term, with the Civil War around the corner. As one observer noted in 1846, “The power of the States will be broken up in some degree by this intensity and rapidity of communication, and the Union will be solidified…. We shall become more and more one people, thinking alike, acting more alike, and having one impulse.”

  The U.S. government was slow to embrace this sentiment, however. The telegram faced enormous skepticism in a world where the discovery of electricity still felt like a conjuring trick. Samuel F. B. Morse began plying the U.S. government for funds in 1838 and became so frustrated he traveled to Europe to drum up support, unsuccessfully. In England, the inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had been peddling their own electric telegraph to the English government with equal lack of success. They eventually convinced the Great Western Railroad to run a thirteen-mile telegraphic link between Paddington and West Drayton, and Blackwall Railway in London’s docklands. Their successful installation and use of the telegraph to catch robbers—descriptions of whom were sent down the line, aiding in their apprehension—eventually won people over, and Cooke enjoyed an enormous public relations coup when one of his early lines was used to announce the birth of Queen Victoria’s second son, Alfred Ernest Albert, on August 6, 1844.

  In the United States, a bill was finally put forward to fund Morse’s proposed line in 1842, granting him $30,000 of federal money to develop his telegraph, but not before Representative Cave Johnson of Tennessee goaded the House, which had not funded many experiments in science at that point, into considering giving half of the earmarked funds to Theophilus Fisk, a proponent of mesmerism, also known as hypnosis. Fisk’s earmark did not pass, but spiritualists would later petition the U.S. Congress again on the belief that in the mysterious workings of the telegraph there might be hints of a much greater “spiritual telegraph” between Heaven and Earth.

  Morse responded as a scientist; he would show that his ideas could be verified factually. As he began building his first line, he visited the Capitol to demonstrate how his telegraph worked, hauling a five-mile-long cable into the building to show messages being passed along it (through a system of electrical pulses, which were then decoded on the opposite end). No one understood what this experiment proved. Morse finally convinced his skeptics two years later when, in May 1844, he sent word that James K. Polk and Henry Clay were nominated for the presidency by the Democratic National Convention from Washington, D.C., to a temporary platform fifteen miles outside Baltimore, beating a courier sent along the railroad by nearly an hour.

  Morse has since been credited with inventing the telegraph, but he merely perfected an idea that had been in development for nearly a century. The word “telegraph,” which literally means “that which writes from a distance,” was coined by the French, who pioneered the development of the optical semaphore system that predated the electric telegraph. Morse’s incarnation was quickly picked up and developed by state governments throughout Europe. The Belgians built a line connecting Brussels and Antwerp in 1846, while the French opened their system to the public on November 29, 1850. In the Netherlands, a royal ordinance of December 8, 1847, made private telegraphic undertakings so circuitous as to keep telegraphy practically a government operation. The Holland Railway Line, however, opened its own services to the public in 1845, and thereafter it fell to cities and municipalities to build their own lines connecting to the trunk system built by the central government. Prussia and Austria followed in 1849; Bavaria and Saxony in 1850; Sweden in 1853; Denmark in 1854; Norway, Spain, and Portugal in 1855; Russia in 1857; and Greece in 1859. All of the important lines in these countries were built by the government, and by 1904, the United States was the only country where the telegram wasn’t publicly owned and operated.

  In the United States, it was primarily the private companies, the railroads, and the military that laid the telegraph lines. The Civil War of 1860 was only the second major world conflict (after the Crimean War) in which generals talked to their troops and field commanders via a communication network that differed significantly from that used by generals two thousand or three thousand years previously. Union and Confederate troops laid wires on their marches north and south, establishing some fifteen thousand miles of the network for military purposes. Three hundred operators died while sending messages.

  President Lincoln, much as Obama would later be with e-mail, was attached to the machine at the hip. “For the last two or three weeks of his life Lincoln virtually lived at the telegraph office,” sociologist Robert Rupp has written. “The wires were kept busy with dispatches to and from the President.” He would often peer over the shoulders of the cipher operators when an important message came in and was being decoded. He used the telegram to urge his generals on from afar. I HAVE SEEN YOUR DISPATCH EXPRESSING YOUR UNWILLINGNESS TO BREAK YOUR HOLD WHERE YOU ARE, he wrote to General Grant in City Point, Virginia. NEITHER AM I WILLING. HOLD ON WITH A BULL-DOG GRIP, AND CHEW AND CHOKE, AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

  The opposing armies occasionally even used the cable to talk to each other. I SEE YOUR CONDITION THROUGH MY TELESCOPE, wired Confederate General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, after seeing a truce flag waved by a Union leader, Robert Anderson. WE HAVE INTERCEPTED YOUR SUPPLIES. GIVE IN LIKE A GOOD FELLOW, AND BRING YOUR GARRISON TO DINNER, AND BEDS AFTERWARDS. NOBODY INJURED, I HOPE? Thanks to the telegraph, news of their victories and losses appeared in newspapers the next day.

  News from Afar for Everyone

  Once information of national import could be conveyed by telegram, it created a new media landscape. Until this point, newspapers had had to rely on the speed of couriers, rowboats, and the Pony Express to beat one another to breaking a story. In one fell swoop, the telegraph fundamentally changed how newspapers competed for customers, since any organization with access to a telegraph could get access to news. In the 1840s, the Times of London—which regarded itself as a global newspaper, in keeping with England’s far-reaching empire—carried news from New York that had taken five weeks to arrive, from South Africa that dated back seven weeks, and from India that was nearly two months old. By 1870, after the laying of the transatlantic cable, which allowed telegraphic communication between America and Europe, that Doppler wave of news was eliminated, and not just for Londoners. A doctor in South London could pick up a newspaper and read of events that had happened in South Dakota hours before. As telegraphic cables were laid from one continent to the next, a baker in San Francisco could learn about floods in China, a fire in Bombay, and the birth of a royal offspring in Austria.

  Newspapers’ reaction to this development was simply to print bigger editions in order to accommodate all the news. In Britain, this was made possible by the 1855 repeal of the Stamp Act, which had made newspapers prohibitively expensive. In fact, Lloyds Bank in London, which had begun as a coffee shop and briefly printed its own newsletter, even had an appointed time when, upon the ringing of a bell, a man would stand up and read the morning’s newspaper aloud so that its patrons could share the expense.

  Between 1855 and 1870, a large number of biweekly newspapers became dailies, including The Manchester Guardian (1855) and The Glasgow Herald (1859), rearranging the media environment. London papers began to circulate around the country, and since they had to go to press earlier to get onto trains, news in the Glasgow and Manchester papers was actually three hours fresher than that in the capital. The beginning of newspapers’ great age was upon the UK. In fiscal year 1869–70, Great Britain had 1,450 newspapers with an aggregate circulation of 350 million.

  Telegrams were essential to this growth. In England in 1872, the telegram ferried 40 million words of newspaper dispatches, constituting one-fifth of the volume of all telegrams sent, the equivalent of forty entire sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their contents were typed out and passed along by hand. A similar effect was observab
le across the English Channel. The number of French newspapers exploded after the 1830 revolution, with an “avalanche threatening to overwhelm Paris,” and by 1845 there were more than 65 million copies in aggregate circulation. In 1847, fed by telegraphic links to the world, Paris alone supported twenty-six daily newspapers, with a strong demand for literary matters by literary readers.

  The American newspapers had a head start on this golden era of public information, as newspapers had been intimately involved in both the War of Independence and the discussion surrounding the First Constitutional Congress. Indeed, several founding fathers—including Benjamin Franklin, who edited one of the nation’s first newspapers, and Noah Webster, who founded New York’s first daily newspaper, The American Minerva, at the behest of Alexander Hamilton—were ex-journalists of a sort. To be a newspaperman, in a sense, was to be in touch with one’s people, an idea at the heart of American democracy.

  In 1800, there were 376 newspapers in operation in the United States; by 1835, that number had quadrupled to 1,200; and by 1870, there were 5,871 newspapers with a total circulation of 20 million copies, and newspaper circulation was increasing by 15 percent a year. Many of them were cheap, and they were packed with news. The early telegraphic companies briefly tried to sell news to the papers. As it turned out, the opposite happened. In The History of American Journalism, James D. Startt and William David Sloan chronicle how newspaper editors banded together and “created a system of newspaper-generated and newspaper-owned information sent to other newspapers over leased wires.” In 1848, as war with Mexico loomed, the Baltimore Sun joined the New York Herald and several other newspapers to cover the Mexican War, the first American conflict that received nearly same-day coverage in the press. Out of this collaboration was created the New York Associated Press, a cooperative news agency that sold news to papers throughout the country. This arrangement soon spread to other parts of the country, until in 1900 the Illinois Associated Press reincorporated in New York and henceforth became known as the AP.

  Meanwhile, something slightly different was happening in Europe. The German-born Paul Julius von Reuter, who until the 1830s had run a translation house and a service that sent messenger pigeons with closing stock prices to a central office, began to offer news—mostly financial—by telegram. For the first year, he sent the pigeons as well, as backup, using them to bridge the gaps between nations that did not have telegraphic treaties. Gradually, he expanded out of financial news, proving how extraordinary his service was in 1859, when he “obtained a copy of a crucial French speech concerning relations with Austria and was able to provide it to the Times in London within two hours of its being delivered in Paris.”

  All across Europe, a new class of everyday readers was being created. Newspapers helped lead this group of readers to the newly popular form of the novel, running book reviews, especially the newly expanded “provincial papers,” such as The Manchester Guardian and The Scotsman, which had a strong driving ethic of social reform and were therefore especially interested in the circulation of ideas. Lists of new titles that had appeared in local booksellers appeared in these sections, while serials of emerging works by Charles Dickens and other writers appeared in the weekly versions of daily papers and were syndicated by authors to fifteen or twenty papers, sustaining, in piecemeal fashion, the audience for the flourishing genre of the novel.

  Newspapers were soon filled with other news that the telegraph made possible: weather forecasts, synchronous scientific observations, speeches by politicians, up-to-date stock prices from markets around the world, descriptions of foreign battles. For a brief moment, thinking it would encourage patriotism and support for the Crimean War, London newspapers made the mistake of printing information about troop and fleet deployment, much to the delight of foreign spies in the city.

  The telegraph did not just institute a one-way communication from newspapers to the people; people talked back through it, as well. When the International Workers of the World threatened a walkout of 250,000 men—miners, harvest hands, and lumbermen—if deported workers were not returned to their home in Arizona, they sent their final demands to President Woodrow Wilson by telegram. A few years later, the Emergency Peace Federation staged a telegraphic protest to the U.S. buildup to World War I, flooding newspapers and representatives with a million messages of peace. It made such a stir that the Naval Training Association urged its two thousand members to send their own cables in support of military action.

  The First Era of Information Overload

  Managing the onslaught of the world’s muchness, brought to people by virtue of the telegraph, quickly became a quandary for individuals, especially businessmen. Merchants who depended on commodity prices had to check fluctuations with increasing regularity, and their monitoring and manipulating in turn made price fluctuations more frequent. They also worked late to keep up with markets overseas and traded news with an ever-expanding circle of contacts. As Tom Standage writes in The Victorian Internet, the businessman E. W. Dodge wrote about this new way of life with a palpable weariness: “The merchant goes home after a day of hard work and excitement to a late dinner, trying amid the family circle to forget business, when he is interrupted by a telegram from London, directing, perhaps, the purchase in San Francisco of 20,000 barrels of flour, and the man must dispatch his dinner as hurriedly as possible in order to send off his message to California.”

  This enervation would only increase. By 1888, the telegraph had become primarily a mode of business communication in the United States. Forty million telegrams were sent that year. Just 5 percent of telegraphic revenues came from messages between family and friends; 8 percent came from news service use of the wires. The vast majority, The New York Times reported in a news article, 87 percent, was “commercial and speculative,” a category that included not just business use of the telegraph but also wires sent to “‘bucket shops’ and pool rooms, where chances are sold on races thousands of miles away.” For this reason, when the Royal Mail took over the British telegraph service in 1870, American businessmen were not in a hurry to urge their government to follow suit. Doing so had run the Royal Mail into debt for the first time, and taxes were raised to lower the cost of telegrams to six cents for ten words, including the addressee, or the equivalent of about a dollar today. American businessmen, then as now opposed to taxes, wondered, “Is it fit and proper,” argued one of them in a newspaper story of the time, “that the whole of people should be taxed to subsidize a cheap telegraph?”

  The anxiety produced by this much-increased interconnectivity trickled down, as people who thought and wrote about communication and traveled in business circles foresaw a new era descending upon them. Commentators began to worry that somehow, a more civilized time of communication was being Morse-coded out of existence. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” goes a famous comment by Henry David Thoreau, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Progress began to take on the dimensions of Icarus’s flight. “Our desire to outstrip Time has been fatal to more things than love,” wrote an editorialist in the London Star in 1901. “We have minimized and condensed our emotions…. We have destroyed the memory of yesterday with the worries of tomorrow…. We do not feel and enjoy; we assimilate and appropriate.” The writing desk of that era wasn’t a place of leisurely communication but rather an indictment: “In the secret drawer the checkbook nestles comfortably close to a few brief notes and telegrams that make up the sum of modern sentiment.”

  Since most people didn’t send and receive telegrams regularly, the telegraph made the biggest impact in their lives by increasing the scope of the world it brought to them. This new, globalized sense of now would soon test the limits of human empathy. Small-town residents in the United States suddenly found it difficult to put local news into the context of large-scale disasters around the world. One newspaper, the Alpeno Echo in Michigan, defiantly shut down its incoming telegraph service,
tired of becoming the world’s echo chamber rather than a record of its own community. “It could not tell why the telegraph company caused it to be sent a full account of a flood in Shanghai, a massacre in Calcutta, a sailor fight in Bombay, hard frosts in Siberia,” Standage wrote, “and not a line about the Muskegon fire.”

  American Nervousness

  Many dilemmas of our own age can be glimpsed in the nineteenth century’s convergence of the technologies of the railroad and the telegraph with the introduction of standardized time. Information overload is beginning to create a free-floating anxiety. In American Nervousness, George Miller Beard discusses the impact of the increasing burden of time in the workplace. In one section, describing the modern man who has turned his watch into a fetish object, he writes:

  Before the general use of these instruments of precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments… men judged time by probabilities, by looking at the sun, and needed not, as a rule, to be nervous about the loss of a moment, and had incomparably fewer experiences wherein a delay of a few moments might destroy the hopes of a lifetime. A nervous man cannot take out his watch and look at it when time for an appointment or train is near without affecting his pulse, and the effect on that pulse, if we could but measure it, would be correlated to a loss to the nervous system. Punctuality is a greater thief of nervous force than is procrastination of time. We are under constant strain, mostly unconscious, oftentimes in sleeping as well as in waking hours, to get somewhere or do something at a definite moment.

  Beard’s analysis of the woes of the nervous man were part of a worldwide fad of diagnosing as neurasthenia the mental exhaustion of mostly upper-class individuals involved in sedentary employment. William James popularized the diagnosis, dubbing it “Americanitis,” since Americans seemed particularly prone to the disorder due to their stressful business environment and the rapid urbanization of their society. Given how many symptoms were grouped under the rubric—everything from chronic fatigue syndrome to irritable bowel syndrome (though these afflictions were not called by those names back then)—it seems more plausible today to treat the rash of diagnoses as a visible symptom itself, the mark of a society undergoing great change.