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. Exploring Expedition used the first Morse line in 1844 to locate the Battle Monument in Baltimore at 1 minute, 34.868 seconds east of the Capitol in Washington.
♦
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 be a physical object. That was always an illusion; now people needed consciously to divorce their conception of the message from the paper on which it was written. Scientists,
Harper’s
explained, will say that the electric current “
carries
a message,” but one must not imagine that anything—any
thing
—is transported. There is only “the action and reaction of an imponderable force, and the making of intelligible signals by its means at a distance.” No wonder people were misled. “Such language the world must, perhaps for a long time to come, continue to employ.”
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 6
d
. 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 tried to push back, on the grounds that private codes were gaming the system, but ciphers flourished. One typical system assigned dictionary words to whole phrases, organizing them semantically and alphabetically. For example, all words starting with B referred to the flour market: baal = “The transactions are smaller than yesterday”; babble = “There is a good business doing”; baby = “Western is firm, with moderate demand for home trade and export”; button = “market quiet and prices easier.” It was necessary, of course, for sender and recipient to work from identical word lists. To the telegraph operators themselves, the encoded messages looked like nonsense, and that, in itself, proved an extra virtue.
As soon as people conceived of sending messages by telegraph, they worried that their communication was exposed to the world—at the very least, to the telegraph operators, unreliable strangers who could not help but read the words they fed through their devices. Compared to handwritten letters, folded and sealed with wax, the whole affair seemed public and insecure—the messages passing along those mysterious conduits, the electric wires. Vail himself wrote in 1847, “The great advantage which this telegraph possesses in transmitting messages with the rapidity of lightning, annihilating time and space, would perhaps be much lessened in its usefulness, could it not avail itself of the application of a secret alphabet.”
♦
There were, he said, “systems”—
by which a message may pass between two correspondents, through the medium of the telegraph, and yet the contents
of that message remain a profound secret to all others, not excepting the operators of the telegraphic stations, through whose hands it must pass.
This was all very difficult. The telegraph served not just as a device but as a
medium
—a middle, intermediary state. The message passes through this medium. Distinct from the message, one must also consider the contents of that message. Even when the message must be exposed, the contents could be concealed. Vail explained what he meant by
secret alphabet:
an alphabet whose characters have been “transposed and interchanged.”