The Information - James Gleick [61]
Whatever its nature, electricity was appreciated as a natural force placed under human control. A young New York newspaper, The Times, explained it by way of contrast with steam:
Both of them are powerful and even formidable agents wrested from nature, by the skill and power of man. But electricity is by far the subtlest energy of the two. It is an original natural element, while steam is an artificial production.… Electricity combined with magnetism, is a more subjective agent, and when evolved for transmission is ready to go forth, a safe and expeditious messenger to the ends of the habitable globe.♦
Looking back, rhapsodists found the modern age foretold in a verse from the book of Job: “Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?”♦
But lightning did not say anything—it dazzled, cracked, and burned, but to convey a message would require some ingenuity. In human hands, electricity could hardly accomplish anything, at first. It could not make a light brighter than a spark. It was silent. But it could be sent along wires to great distances—this was discovered early—and it seemed to turn wires into faint magnets. Those wires could be long: no one had found any limit to the range of the electric current. It took no time at all to see what this meant for the ancient dream of long-distance communication. It meant sympathetic needles.
Practical problems had to be solved: making wires, insulating them, storing currents, measuring them. A whole realm of engineering had to be invented. Apart from the engineering was a separate problem: the problem of the message itself. This was more a logic puzzle than a technical one. It was a problem of crossing levels, from kinetics to meaning. What form would the message take? How would the telegraph convert this fluid into words? By virtue of magnetism, the influence propagated across a distance could perform work upon physical objects, such as needles, or iron filings, or even small levers. People had different ideas: the electromagnet might sound an alarum-bell; might govern the motion of wheel-work; might turn a handle, which might carry a pencil (but nineteenth-century engineering was not up to robotic handwriting). Or the current might discharge a cannon. Imagine discharging a cannon by sending a signal from miles away! Would-be inventors naturally looked to previous communications technologies, but the precedents were mostly the wrong sort.
Before there were electric telegraphs, there were just telegraphs: les télégraphes, invented and named by Claude Chappe in France during the Revolution.♦♦ They were optical; a “telegraph” was a tower for sending signals to other towers in line of sight. The task was to devise a signaling system more efficient and flexible than, say, bonfires. Working with his messaging partner, his brother Ignace, Claude tried out a series of different schemes, evolving over a period of years.
The first was peculiar and ingenious. The Chappe brothers set a pair of pendulum clocks to beat in synchrony, each with its pointer turning around a dial at relatively high speed. They experimented with this in their hometown, Brûlon, about one hundred miles west of Paris. Ignace, the sender, would wait till the pointer reached an agreed number and at that instant signal by ringing a bell or firing a gun or, more often, banging upon a casserole. Upon hearing the sound, Claude, stationed a quarter mile away, would read the appropriate number off his own clock. He could convert number to words by looking them up in a prearranged list. This notion of communication via synchronized clocks reappeared in the twentieth