The Information - James Gleick [59]
Some years before his death, he told a friend that he would gladly give up whatever time he had left, if only he could be allowed to live for three days, five centuries in the future.
As for his young friend Ada, countess of Lovelace, she died many years before him—a protracted, torturous death from cancer of the womb, her agony barely lessened by laudanum and cannabis. For a long time her family kept from her the truth of her illness. In the end she knew she was dying. “They say that ‘coming events cast their shadows before,’ ”♦ she wrote to her mother. “May they not sometimes cast their lights before?” They buried her next to her father.
She, too, had a last dream of the future: “my being in time an Autocrat, in my own way.”♦ She would have regiments, marshaled before her. The iron rulers of the earth would have to give way. And of what would her regiments consist? “I do not at present divulge. I have however the hope that they will be most harmoniously disciplined troops;—consisting of vast numbers, & marching in irresistible power to the sound of Music. Is not this very mysterious? Certainly my troops must consist of numbers, or they can have no existence at all.… But then, what are these Numbers? There is a riddle—”
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♦ Leibniz dreamed grandly of mechanizing algebra and even reason itself. “We may give final praise to the machine,” he wrote. “It will be desirable to all who are engaged in computations … the managers of financial affairs, the administrators of others’ estates, merchants, surveyors, geographers, navigators, astronomers.… For it is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation.”
♦ Another guest, Charles Dickens, put something of Babbage into the character of Daniel Doyce in Little Dorrit. Doyce is an inventor mistreated by the government he tries to serve: “He is well known as a very ingenious man.… He perfects an invention (involving a very curious secret process) of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures. I won’t say how much money it cost him, or how many years of his life he had been about it, but he brought it to perfection.” Dickens added: “A composed and unobtrusive self-sustainment was noticeable in Daniel Doyce—a calm knowledge that what was true must remain true.”
5 | A NERVOUS SYSTEM FOR THE EARTH
(What Can One Expect of a Few Wretched Wires?)
Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)♦
THREE CLERKS IN A SMALL ROOM UPSTAIRS in the Ferry House of Jersey City handled the entire telegraph traffic of the city of New York in 1846 and did not have to work very hard.♦ They administered one end of a single pair of wires leading to Baltimore and Washington. Incoming messages were written down by hand, relayed by ferry across the Hudson River to the Liberty Street pier, and delivered to the first office of the Magnetic Telegraph Company at 16 Wall Street.
In London, where the river caused less difficulty, capitalists formed the Electric Telegraph Company and began to lay their first copper wires, twisted into cables, covered with gutta-percha, and drawn through iron pipes, mainly alongside new railroad tracks. To house the central office the company rented Founders’ Hall, Lothbury, opposite the Bank of England, and advertised its presence by installing an electric clock—modern and apt, for already railroad time was telegraphic time. By 1849 the telegraph office boasted eight instruments, operated day and night. Four hundred battery cells provided the power. “We see before us a stuccoed wall, ornamented with an electric illuminated clock,” reported Andrew