The Information - James Gleick [64]
…
Adieu, penny-posts! mails and coaches, adieu;
Your occupation’s gone, ’tis all over wid you:
In your place, telegraphs on our houses we’ll see,
To tell time, conduct lightning, dry shirts, and send news.♦
The telegraph towers spread across Europe and beyond, and their ruins dot the countrysides today. Telegraph Hill, Telegrafberget, Telegraphen-Berg are vestigial place names. Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium were early to develop systems on the French model. Germany soon followed. A line between Calcutta and Chunar began operating in 1823; between Alexandria and Cairo in 1824; and in Russia, Nicholas I organized 220 stations from Warsaw to St. Petersburg and Moscow. They held dominion over the world’s communication and then, faster than they had arisen, went obsolete. Colonel Taliaferro Shaffner, a Kentucky inventor and historian, traveled to Russia in 1859 and was struck by the towers’ height and their beauty, the care taken with their painting and landscaping with flowers, and by their sudden, universal death.
These stations are now silent. No movements of the indicators are to be seen. They are still upon their high positions, fast yielding to the wasting hand of time. The electric wire, though less grand in its appearance, traverses the empire, and with burning flames inscribes in the distance the will of the emperor to sixty-six millions of human beings scattered over his wide-spread dominions.♦
In Shaffner’s mind this was a one-way conversation. The sixty-six millions were not talking back to the emperor, nor to one another.
What was to be said, when writing in the air? Claude Chappe had proposed, “Anything that could be the subject of a correspondence.”♦ But his example—“Lukner has left for Mons to besiege that city, Bender is advancing for its defense”—made clear what he meant: dispatches of military and state import. Later Chappe proposed sending other types of information: shipping news, and financial quotations from bourses and stock exchanges. Napoleon would not allow it, though he did use the telegraph to proclaim the birth of his son, Napoleon II, in 1811. A communications infrastructure built with enormous government investment and capable of transmitting some hundreds of total words per day could hardly be used for private messaging. That was unimaginable—and when, in the next century, it became imaginable, some governments found it undesirable. No sooner did entrepreneurs begin to organize private telegraphy than France banned it outright: an 1837 law mandated imprisonment and fines for “anyone performing unauthorized transmissions of signals from one place to another, with the aid of telegraphic machines or by any other means.”♦ The idea of a global nervous system had to arise elsewhere. In the next year, 1838, the French authorities received a visit from an American with a proposal for a “telegraph” utilizing electrical wires: Samuel F. B. Morse. They turned him down flat. Compared to the majestic semaphore, electricity seemed gimcrack and insecure. No one could interfere with telegraph signals in the sky, but wire could be cut by saboteurs. Jules Guyot, a physician and scientist assigned to assess the technology, sniffed, “What can one expect of a few wretched wires?”♦ What indeed.
THE TELEGRAPH AT MONTMARTRE
The care and feeding of the delicate galvanic impulse presented a harsh set of technical challenges, and a different set appeared where electricity met language: where words had to be transmuted into a twinkling in the wire. The crossing point between electricity and language—also the interface between device and human—required new ingenuity. Many different schemes occurred to inventors. Virtually all were based in one way or another on the written alphabet, employing letters as an intermediate layer. This seemed so natural as to be not worth remarking. Telegraph meant “far writing,” after all. So in 1774 Georges-Louis Le Sage of Geneva arranged twenty-four separate wires to designate twenty-four letters, each wire conveying just enough current