The victorian internet [Book Review] - IEEE Xplore

REVIEW A. David Wunsch

The Victorian Internet Tom Standage. New York, NY: Berkley Books, 1998, pp ix + 227, index ($12 paper, $22 cloth). man with an uncertain grasp of physics and engineering but with an inventive mind develops a clever piece of software and combines it with someone else’s hardware to create a system that becomes a landmark in telecommunications. The story might come from the Information Industries Supplement of this week’s New York Times but it describes even better the activities of Samuel Morse of 150 years ago. This similarity in eras motivated Tom Standage to write a history of the nineteenth century electric telegraph for the citizens of the twentyfirst century Internet. His title, conflating the reign of Queen Victoria with our current obsession, suggests his intention: to present the history of an old communications device in a way that gives perspective on a recent invention that has affected most of us. This book will not win any history prizes — it is the work of a British journalist, written in an undemanding and entertaining style and based entirely on secondary sources. However, as someone who occasionally teaches the history of technology, I might well assign Standage in a course not only to give my students an easy introduction to the telegraph but, more importantly, to innoculate them with some scepticism against the pontifications of techno-utopians, a species of humanity that has attached itself to the Internet in no smaller degree than it did to the telegraph. For example, Standage quotes Nicholas Negroponte head of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory on how the Internet will lead to world peace by breaking down national boundaries so that in the future children “are not going to know what nationalism is.” Coming near the end of the book, the statement is laughable because Standage prepares us well: in the mid-19th

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A. David Wunsch is Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA. 01854

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century, after the successful completion and financing of the Atlantic Cable by Cyrus Field, his brother Henry compared it to “a fleshy bond between severed portions of the human family, along which pulses of love and tenderness will run backward and forward forever. ...it seems as if this sea nymph, rising out of the waves, was born to be the herald of peace.” The bulk of Standage’s book is a workmanly chronicle of the telegraph. He begins with a prehistory, treating the system of purely mechanical, unelectrified, semaphore signaling towers used for relaying messages, deployed in late-eighteenth century France by Claude Chappe at the behest of the French government. Although this invention did indeed separate communication from its historic link with transportation its use was of course restricted to daylight and clear weather. We are reminded that the word “telegraph” is French in origin (like “radio”) and dates from this period before the electric telegraph. “Telegraph hills” in Europe and North America derive their name from their use in supporting these signaling structures. Americans reading Standage will discover that their consensus that Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph does not extend to the rest of the world. The author gives considerable attention to two Englishman, William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone who, despite their troubled partnership, put together a commercial working telegraph inspired by elementary telegraphic inventions Cooke had seen while a student in Germany. They developed a system that employed a pair of electromagnetically rotated pointing needles. The axes of the needles intersect at a letter of the alphabet drawn on a dial face. Although lacking the elegance of the Morse system, pointing needle telegraphs of various kinds proved popular in England. A single needle system of Cooke and Wheatstone involving a network of 4000 miles was deployed in England by 1852. Look in the eleventh edition of The Encyclopedia Brittanica (1911), in those days still a British creation, and you will find under Charles Wheatstone “the inventor of modern telegraphy” while for Morse the entry begins “American artist and inventor.” Strangely, there is no listing for Cooke. Standage serves us the standard facts about Morse’s life: his education at Yale, his pursuit of a career as a painter, and his fateful Atlantic crossing of 1832 where a conversation with a fellow passenger

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Winter 2000/2001

gives him the idea of constructing an electric telegraph. We learn of his productive alliance with Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, development of the code, and the famous message “What hath God wrought!” sent over the line connecting Baltimore with Washington in 1844. Conspicuously absent is any remark about the precedent set by the ownership of the telegraph system in the US. In 1844 Morse and his partners offered to sell their invention to the federal government, which refused the opportunity, thus establishing the principal of private ownership of electrical communication in the U.S. After this, it is unsurprising that the telephone, radio, and television. were developed privately in America, in marked distinction to the practices in most of Europe. The book is weak on the harder technical details of the telegraph. The innovation of multiplexing is treated almost as an afterthought while Joseph Henry, who invented the hardware underlying Morse’s system, doesn’t get all the attention he deserves. The vexing question of whether, as is sometimes asserted, Alfred Vail invented the Morse code is not considered. Although the author delivers some interesting vignettes about Cooke and Wheatstone, and their fractious partnership, there is little comparable about Morse. He remains the kindly looking avuncular figure of his old-age portraits. The reader is left oblivious to his ugly side: his strong nativist anti-Catholic streak, which motivated him to run for mayor of New York, as well as his support of slavery. The book is strong on those aspects of the telegraph which most closely parallel the story of the Internet. We learn that just as the Internet has been used for criminal purposes (fake sales offers, theft of credit card numbers, etc.), the telegraph too was used for nefarious purposes almost from the beginning, e.g., in tampering with horse wagering and financial markets. Schemes for cryptography and improved channel capacity, much now in the news for the Internet, surfaced almost from the start for the telegraph. What motivated the use of codes was of course the need for secrecy — a diplomat didn’t want his confidential remarks spirited off by a teenage telegraph operator. The author devotes considerable attention to the role of encrypted telegrams in the Dreyfus affair but, sadly, has nothing about the infamous (post-Victorian) Zimmerman telegram of World War 1. Businesses discovered that phrases they frequently employed could be eliminated through the use of a single prearranged word. Effectively, such terms were a form of speech compression. Romances blossomed between male and female Morse code operators. One could make a nineteenth century version of the romantic Internet based movie “ You’ve Got Mail.” Harassed white collar professionals of our age who feel they cannot escape their job


because email brings it to their home or vacation spot might take small comfort in knowing that their suffering isn’t new. A businessman complains in 1868 that, “The merchant goes home after a day of hard work and excitement to a late dinner, trying amid the family circle to forget business, when he is interrupted by a telegram from London, directing, perhaps the purchase in San Francisco of 20,000 barrels of flour, and the poor man must dispatch his dinner....” Despite the similarities in the history of the telegraph and the Internet the differences are just as instructive and it is one of the failings of the book that they are not elucidated. An American of 100 years ago thought that Morse invented the telegraph. Ask an average American today, “Who invented the Internet?” and you’ll most likely get a shrug. Of course the Internet and its offspring, the Web, have inventors but these people worked in teams, for the Pentagon, government and private labs, and universities. No single name is identified with the invention, a reminder that the hero inventor disappeared nearly a century ago with the rise of industrial research laboratories. Ask your same average American if she knows who owns the Internet and you’ll get another shrug while our respondent would have blurted out “Western Union” when asked about the telegraph a century back. It is the failure of the Internet to be owned by either a government or a few powerful corporations that makes it unique in the history of electrical communication. In the space of 15 years the Internet has affected the daily home life of most middle-class Americans in such matters as an obsession with email , the tendency of elementary school students to turn to the Web as their first choice of reference in written assignments, and in all matter of consumerism. Curiously, the telegraph, which excited the imagination of the nineteenth-century American public to a remarkable degree, had little effect on home life of most people. True, it did change the character of their newspaper whose items were expected to be fresh and worldwide in scope, but its impact was felt primarily in the business place. The telegraph, unlike subsequent inventions such as radio and most especially the Internet itself remained, in the United States, true to the imagination of its creators — it was a tool of business, government and the military. A telegram entered the home infrequently. Most people over the age of 50 can remember the arrival of a telegram at their house. If the day wasn’t one of celebration, e.g., a wedding, there was a sense of foreboding — the message often announced a death. Notwithstanding the failure of the telegraph to greatly affect the lives of most people, completion of the first cable linking Great Britain and North America in the summer of 1858 set off great public outbursts of joy in both countries. New York City celebrated with a

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tumultuous celebration. Over 15 000 people marched half the length of Manhattan accompanied by fireworks and the pealing of church bells. Among the orotund writings occasioned by the event was one in the New York Times saying that this triumph of technology has “ metaphysical roots and relations that make it sublime.”1 The final word is significant — in the minds of the public, the cable was a pure example of what such

writers as Leo Marx and David Nye have popularized as “American technological sublime.” One cannot begin to imagine any such celebration marking the progress of our Internet. The technological sublime has withered and died in the American imagination and we are the poorer for it.

REFERENCES [1] Daniel Z. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind from Morse to McLuhan. Raleigh, NC: Univ. of North Carolina, 1982, p. 14.

As quoted in [1]

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Special Issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine on the Precautionary Principle Call for Papers Throughout the world there has been a growing movement inside and outside of government to adopt the precautionary principle for management of health and environmental risks in the face of scientific uncertainty, particularly where links between exposure and injury remain unproven. Its general approach is to err on the side of caution when risks are not well understood. In Europe, the precautionary principle has been applied extensively to regulation of potential risks of new technologies. These include regulation of introduction of genetically modified crops, and of human exposure human exposure to radiofrequency emissions from wireless communications systems. There are increasing calls to adopt “precautionary” approaches to regulation of risks in other parts of the world as well. This Special Issue seeks a range of views on the meaning and use of the precautionary principle, particularly as related to regulation of risks from electrical technologies. These may include possible risks from exposure to radiofrequency (RF) energy such as produced by mobile telephones and their base stations, possible environmental risks from the manufacture of semiconductors and electrical components, or possible risks from the use of electrical technologies. Articles should be carefully argued and substantive in nature. Authors can present case histories in the use of the precautionary principle, or discuss the application of the precautionary principle in relation to other strategies for protection against technological risks. All manuscripts will be submitted for peer review. Accepted articles will be edited for clarity and conciseness. Guest Editors Kenneth R. Foster Professor, Department of Bioengineering University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia PA 19104 [email protected]

Paolo Vecchia Head, NonIonizing Radiation National Institute of Health Physics Laboratory Viale Regina Elena 299 I 00161 Rome, Italy

Manuscripts should be sent (preferably as electronic attachments) to Guest Editor Kenneth Foster at the address above.

Deadline for receipt of articles: April 1, 2002 Publication Date: Winter (December) 2002

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