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By Root 831 0

was like the bursting of a dam whose presence had not even been known. The social consequences could not have been predicted, but some were observed and appreciated almost immediately. People’s sense of the weather began to change—weather, that is, as a generalization, an abstraction. Simple weather reports began crossing the wires on behalf of corn speculators: Derby, very dull; York, fine; Leeds, fine; Nottingham, no rain but dull and cold.♦ The very idea of a “weather report” was new. It required some approximation of instant knowledge of a distant place. The telegraph enabled people to think of weather as a widespread and interconnected affair, rather than an assortment of local surprises. “The phenomena of the atmosphere, the mysteries of meteors, the cause and effect of skiey combinations, are no longer matters of superstition or of panic to the husbandman, the sailor or the shepherd,”♦ noted an enthusiastic commentator in 1848:

The telegraph comes in to tell him, for his every-day uses and observances, not only that “fair weather cometh out of the north,” but the electric wire can tell him in a moment the character of the weather simultaneously in all quarters of our island.… In this manner, the telegraph may be made a vast national barometer, electricity becoming the handmaid of the mercury.

This was a transformative idea. In 1854 the government established a Meteorological Office in the Board of Trade. The department’s chief, Admiral Robert FitzRoy, formerly a captain of HMS Beagle, moved into an office on King Street, furnished it with barometers, aneroids, and stormglasses, and dispatched observers equipped with the same instruments to ports all around the coastline. They telegraphed their cloud and wind reports twice daily. FitzRoy began issuing weather predictions, which he dubbed “forecasts,” and in 1860 The Times began publishing these daily. Meteorologists began to understand that all great winds, when seen in the large, were circular, or at least “highly curved.”

The most fundamental concepts were now in play as a consequence of instantaneous communication between widely separated points. Cultural observers began to say that the telegraph was “annihilating” time and space. It “enables us to send communications, by means of the mysterious fluid, with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space,”♦ announced an American telegraph official in 1860. This was an exaggeration that soon became a cliché. The telegraph did seem to vitiate or curtail time in one specific sense: time as an obstacle or encumbrance to human intercourse. “For all practical purposes,” one newspaper announced, “time, in the transit, may be regarded as entirely eliminated.”♦ It was the same with space. “Distance and time have been so changed in our imaginations,” said Josiah Latimer Clark, an English telegraph engineer, “that the globe has been practically reduced in magnitude, and there can be no doubt that our conception of its dimensions is entirely different to that held by our forefathers.”♦

Formerly all time was local: when the sun was highest, that was noon. Only a visionary (or an astronomer) would know that people in a different place lived by a different clock. Now time could be either local or standard, and the distinction baffled most people. The railroads required standard time, and the telegraph made it feasible. For standard time to prevail took decades; the process could only begin in the 1840s, when the Astronomer Royal arranged wires from the Observatory in Greenwich to the Electric Telegraph Company in Lothbury, intending to synchronize the clocks of the nation. Previously, the state of the art in time-signaling technology was a ball dropped from a mast atop the observatory dome. When faraway places were coordinated in time, they could finally measure their longitude precisely. The key to measuring longitude was knowing the time someplace else and the distance to that place. Ships therefore carried clocks, preserving time in imperfect mechanical capsules. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the U.S.