The Information - James Gleick [72]
The physical landscape changed, too. Wires everywhere made for strange ornamentation, on city streets and country roads. “Telegraphic companies are running a race to take possession of the air over our heads,”♦ wrote an English journalist, Andrew Wynter. “Look where we will aloft, we cannot avoid seeing either thick cables suspended by gossamer threads, or parallel lines of wire in immense numbers sweeping from post to post, fixed on the house-tops and suspended over long distances.” They did not for some time fade into the background. People looked at the wires and thought of their great invisible cargo. “They string an instrument against the sky,”♦ said Robert Frost, “Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken / Will run as hushed as when they were a thought.”
The wires resembled nothing in architecture and not much in nature. Writers seeking similes thought of spiders and their webs. They thought of labyrinths and mazes. And one more word seemed appropriate: the earth was being covered, people said, with an iron net-work. “A net-work of nerves of iron wire, strung with lightning, will ramify from the brain, New York, to the distant limbs and members,”♦ said the New York Tribune. “The whole net-work of wires,” wrote Harper’s, “all quivering from end to end with signals of human intelligence.”♦
Wynter offered a prediction. “The time is not distant,”♦ he wrote, “when everybody will be able to talk with everybody without going out of the house.” He meant “talk” metaphorically.
In more ways than one, using the telegraph meant writing in code.
The Morse system of dots and dashes was not called a code at first. It was just called an alphabet: “the Morse Telegraphic Alphabet,” typically. But it was not an alphabet. It did not represent sounds by signs. The Morse scheme took the alphabet as a starting point and leveraged it, by substitution, replacing signs with new signs. It was a meta-alphabet, an alphabet once removed. This process—the transferring of meaning from one symbolic level to another—already had a place in mathematics. In a way it was the very essence of mathematics. Now it became a familiar part of the human toolkit. Entirely because of the telegraph, by the late nineteenth century people grew comfortable, or at least familiar, with the idea of codes: signs used for other signs, words used for other words. Movement from one symbolic level to another could be called encoding.
Two motivations went hand in glove: secrecy and brevity. Short messages saved money—that was simple. So powerful was that impulse that English prose style soon seemed to be feeling the effects. Telegraphic and telegraphese described the new way of writing. Flowers of rhetoric cost too much, and some regretted it. “The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness,”♦ wrote Andrew Wynter:
“May I ask you to do me the favour” is 6d. for a distance of 50 miles. How many of those fond adjectives therefore must our poor fellow relentlessly strike out to bring his billet down to a reasonable charge?
Almost immediately, newspaper reporters began to contrive methods for transmitting more information with fewer billable words. “We early invented a short-hand system, or cipher,”♦ boasted one, “so arranged, that the receipts of produce and the sales and prices of all leading articles of breadstuffs, provisions, &c., could be sent from Buffalo and Albany daily, in twenty words, for both cities, which, when written out, would make one hundred or more words.” The telegraph companies