The Information - James Gleick [71]
Far from annihilating time, synchrony extended its dominion. The very idea of synchrony, and the awareness that the idea was new, made heads spin. The New York Herald declared:
Professor Morse’s telegraph is not only an era in the transmission of intelligence, but it has originated in the mind an entirely new class of ideas, a new species of consciousness. Never before was any one conscious that he knew with certainty what events were at that moment passing in a distant city—40, 100, or 500 miles off.♦
Imagine, continued this exhilarated writer, that it is now 11 o’clock. The telegraph relays what a legislator is now saying in Washington.
It requires no small intellectual effort to realize that this is a fact that now is, and not one that has been.
This is a fact that now is.
History (and history making) changed, too. The telegraph caused the preservation of quantities of minutiae concerning everyday life. For a while, until it became impractical, the telegraph companies tried to maintain a record of every message. This was information storage without precedent. “Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting therefrom the salient features of the social and commercial life of England in the nineteenth century,” mused one essayist. “What might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?”♦ In 1845, after a year’s experience with the line between Washington and Baltimore, Alfred Vail attempted a catalogue of all the telegraph had conveyed thus far. “Much important information,” he wrote,
consisting of messages to and from merchants, members of Congress, officers of the government, banks, brokers, police officers; parties, who by agreement had met each other at the two stations, or had been sent for by one of the parties; items of news, election returns, announcement of deaths, inquiries respecting the health of families and individuals, the daily proceedings of the Senate and House of Representatives, orders for goods, inquiries respecting the sailing of vessels, proceedings of cases in the various courts, summoning of witnesses, messages in relation to special and express trains, invitations, the receipt of money at one station and its payment at the other, for persons requesting the transmission of funds from debtors, consultations of physicians …♦
These diverse items had never before been aggregated under one heading. The telegraph gave them their commonality. In patent applications and legal agreements, too, the inventors had reason to think about their topic in the broadest possible terms: e.g., the giving, printing, stamping, or otherwise transmitting of signals, or the sounding of alarms, or the communication of intelligence.♦
In this time of conceptual change, mental readjustments were needed to understand the telegraph itself. Confusion inspired anecdotes, which often turned on awkward new meanings of familiar terms: innocent words like send, and heavily laden ones, like message. There was the woman who brought a dish of sauerkraut into the telegraph office in Karlsruhe to be “sent” to her son in Rastatt. She had heard of soldiers being “sent” to the front by telegraph. There was the man who brought a “message” into the telegraph office in Bangor, Maine. The operator manipulated the telegraph key and then placed the paper on the hook. The customer complained that the message had not been sent, because he could still see it hanging on the hook. To Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, which recounted this story in 1873, the point was that even the “intelligent and well-informed” continued to find these matters inscrutable:
The difficulty of forming a clear conception of the subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses.♦
A message had seemed to