The Information - James Gleick [66]
“Telegraphy is an element of power and order,”♦ Abraham Chappe had said, but the rising financial and mercantile classes were the next to grasp the value of information leaping across distance. Only two hundred miles separated the Stock Exchange on Threadneedle Street in London from the Bourse at the Palais Brongniart, but two hundred miles meant days. Fortunes could be made by bridging that gap. For speculators a private telegraph would be as useful as a time machine. The Rothschild banking family was using pigeons as postal carriers and, more reliably, a small fleet of boats to carry messengers across the Channel. The phenomenon of fast information from a distance, having been discovered, generated a cascade of excitement. Pickering in Boston did the math: “If there are now essential advantages to business in obtaining intelligence from New York in two days, or less, or at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour, any man can perceive that there may be a proportionate benefit, when we can transmit the same information for that distance by telegraph at the rate of four miles in a minute, or in the space of a single hour, from New York to Boston.”♦ The interest of governments in receiving military bulletins and projecting authority was surpassed by the desires of capitalists and newspapers, railroads and shipping companies. Still, in the sprawling United States, even the pressure of commerce was not enough to make optical telegraphy a reality. Only one prototype succeeded in linking two cities: New York and Philadelphia, in 1840. It transmitted stock prices and then lottery numbers and then was obsolete.
All the would-be inventors of the electrical telegraph—and there were many—worked from the same toolkit. They had their wires, and they had magnetic needles. They had batteries: galvanic cells, linked together, producing electricity from the reaction of metal strips immersed in acid baths. They did not have lights. They did not have motors. They had whatever mechanisms they could construct from wood and brass: pins, screws, wheels, springs, and levers. In the end they had the shared target at which they all aimed: the letters of the alphabet. (Edward Davy thought it was necessary to explain, in 1836, how and why the letters would suffice: “A single letter may be indicated at a time, each letter being taken down by the attendant as it arrives, so as to form words and sentences; but it will be easy to see that, from the infinite changes upon a number of letters, a great number of ordinary communications may be conveyed.”♦) Along with this common stock list, in Vienna, Paris, London, Göttingen, St. Petersburg, and the United States, these pioneers shared a sense of their excited, competitive landscape, but no one knew clearly what anyone else was doing. They could not keep up with the relevant science; crucial advances in the science of electricity remained unknown to the people who most needed them. Every inventor ached to understand what happened to current flowing through wires of different lengths and thickness, and they continued to struggle for more than a decade after Georg Ohm, in Germany, worked out a precise mathematical theory for current, voltage, and resistance. Such news traveled slowly.
It was in this context that Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, in the United States, and, in England, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone made the electric telegraph a reality and a business. In one way or another, all of them later claimed to have “invented” the telegraph, though none of them had done so—certainly not Morse. Their partnerships were destined to end in brutal, turbulent, and bitter patent disputes embroiling most of the leading electrical scientists on two continents. The trail of invention, leading through so many countries, had been poorly recorded and even more poorly communicated.
In England, Cooke was a young entrepreneur—he saw a prototype needle telegraph while traveling in Heidelberg—and Wheatstone a King’s College, London, physicist with whom