The Tyranny of E-mail (8 page)

The post office kept trying, though, as telex machines and the fax began to eat into its market share. A new era of communication was coming, and given that it was already being subsidized at a rate of up to $2 billion a year by the U.S. government, the post office couldn’t afford to be behind the curve: early estimates suggested that 17 billion pieces of mail could be electronically redirected by the mid-1980s. In the early 1980s, the post office spent close to a million dollars trying out the “electronic mail” solution between two American cities and several European countries. It was refined and labeled E-COM, “a special service for businesses with a sufficient volume of mail and enough computer capacity to take advantage of it,” as described in
The New York Times.

To pull it off, the post office turned to an old player in the communications game: Western Union. Organizations that sent large volumes of mail would transmit computer-generated messages over Western Union lines to twenty-five important post offices. Upon arrival, the messages would be printed out and put into envelopes, with the rate at thirty cents for customers who sent fifty thousand letters in four weeks and fifty-five cents for customers who sent only five thousand messages in the same period. It was a bold step into the future—but it was ultimately not to be, as the post office kept running into one obstacle: the U.S. government.

Time and again the post office’s electronic mail schemes ran into opposition from the Federal Communications Commission, which unanimously blocked its first official attempt to enter the electronic mail age, citing a lack of data from Western Union, which had applied for a license to carry mail over wires on the
post office’s behalf. The FCC also believed that since the mail had been sent electronically, it fell under its jurisdiction, not the post office’s. Later the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, and senators beholden to large industry fought against the scheme. The program was short-lived. Begun in 1982, it sent 16 million messages per year; it was folded in 1985. As a result of its failing, today we can send e-mail without a stamp.

As the post office discovered, systems, especially those that deal with the shipment and transportation of tangible objects, have a terminal velocity. Conveyor belts can spin only so fast before the objects they’re transporting fly off. Trucks and buses have to obey speed limits; aside from the now-defunct Concorde, commercial airliners’ speeds have remained constant for decades. Mail that is electronic on one end and physical on the other—as E-COM was, its regulatory issues aside—solves only half the problem. The second a letter was printed out, it crashed into the bedrock of reality and slowed to a crawl.

In order for terminal communicative velocity to be reached, however, time and space didn’t just have to be destroyed, they needed to be reinvented. Mail, by closing the gap between California and Connecticut, let alone Calcutta and the Cotswolds, began to bring about this change. The written word became an intimate tool that everyone could use, and as a result the sphere of intimacy expanded. But the lightning bolt that truly changed our sense of time was the telegram, which didn’t just speed up words but instituted a kind of new reality—one that found an echo in the burgeoning newspaper industry, on battlefields, and in that mundane symbol of modern man: timepieces.

Had there been stretched across the Continent yesterday a line of clocks extending from the extreme eastern point of Maine to the extreme western position on the Pacific coast, and had each clock sounded an alarm at the hour noon, local time, there would have been a continuous ringing from the east to the west lasting for 3¼ hours. At noon today, there will undoubtedly be confusion.

—The New York Times, 1883

On November 18, 1883, one man stopped time in New York City for nearly four minutes. The fellow thumbing the watch springs to a halt was one James Hamblet, the general superintendent of the Time Telegraph Company and manager of the time service of Western Union. In this capacity, Hamblet was effectively Gotham’s archduke of time, a role he had earned through hard work and creativity. Hamblet had invented an electric clock that could chime in a remote location, a device of great use for railway stations, which were required to display the time. Hamblet
also managed Western Union’s own finely calibrated clock in room 48 of its 195 Broadway office. On that day, the regulator, as it was called, kicked off the mammoth task of synchronizing railroad timetables—no small feat, since as late as 1882 American railroads had a blizzard of time standards and therefore possessed more than seventy different answers to one very simple question: What time is it?

Hamblet’s was not as dangerous a juggling act as one might think. Even though early American rail lines were constructed to travel on a single track, a small glitch in scheduling would not send a huffing Yellowstone Park Line crashing into a Northern Pacific waiting at the station. Telegraphic control of train movements, which began around 1855, prevented such accidents. Before that, complicated timetables invented by the French engineer Charles Ybry kept the rails safe.

Still, passengers and station agents constantly wrestled with a persistent irritation: railroad time was often slightly different from local time—even more so outside major cities. As a result, “any traveler… upon leaving home, loses all confidence in his watch and is in fact without any reliable time,” wrote Charles F. Dowd in 1869. If a passenger planned to travel from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., he would have an even more niggling problem: to keep up with local time, he would have to change his watch more than two hundred times along the way.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the converging needs of geophysics—for uniformity of observations—and railroads led to a syncopated, haphazard, but effective push to fix this situation. In January 1882, Professor Cleveland Abbey, at a meeting of the New-York Electrical Society, proposed three standard times: Philadelphia time for the Atlantic coast, Saint Louis time for the Mississippi Valley, and San Francisco time for the Pacific coast. In October 1882, the heads of all the major railroads met in Chicago, where they agreed to work together to create standardized time.

A year later, at precisely 9 a.m. in New York, Hamblet stopped the regulator for 3 minutes and 58.33 seconds—so that he could standardize time to a reading taken from a nearby observatory—and then restarted the machine, creating a new 9 a.m. sharp. Three observatories—in Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Allegheny, Pennsylvania—then tested its accuracy by telegraph. Finally, at noon, a ball dropped from the top of the Western Union building, which triggered a telegram to be sent to the city’s more than two thousand jewelers, who, in addition to peddling diamond broaches and pearl chokers, sold time itself.

It is here—at the jewelers’—that we get a fascinating window
into the metaphysical vertigo that overcomes us when the spacetime continuum is disrupted, sped up, or stopped altogether. On a small scale, November 18, 1883, sounds like a Y2K of the nineteenth century. Many New Yorkers who wandered into jewelry stores that day seemed to think that the hiccup in their clocks “would create a sensation, a stoppage of business, and some sort of disaster, the nature of which could not be exactly ascertained.” Storefronts did not flog duct tape or bottled water, but a similar letdown descended upon the befuddled when the fateful hour passed without catastrophe. “They were incredulous when informed that the change would probably be one which they would know nothing about at the time,” wrote a
New York Times
reporter in a story entitled “Time’s Backward Flight,” “and would not necessarily postpone the celebration of Evacuation Day for a week.” Shipmasters, arguably, faced a more practical problem: they would have to figure out how to coordinate their position in this new linked scheme when “sailing about out of the reach of time-balls.”

The way Hamblet and company went about melding railroad times brings back a lost world, one that seems quaint in our age of atomic clocks and handheld satellite navigators—we who always know exactly where and when we are, even if the road runs out. November 18, 1883, also highlights a truth that undergirds the grid of technology upon which modern life depends: all major new technologies affect our sense of space and time, and any technology that alters these elements also alters communication. The faster we relay information and the more we share what goes on in our heads with others, the busier
our society becomes—space that was once thought conquered, such as the vast stretches of the American West or the wide blue deeps of the oceans, reassert themselves into virtual spaces, which become crowded as people regroup, and what is shared within them approaches unmediated human thought.

The state of frenzy in which we live now was a long way off in the nineteenth century. People lived under the same darkening sky, but they did not live simultaneously. This is an important distinction to contemplate today, when so much of what we do—and especially what we communicate to one another— depends upon simultaneity. We wouldn’t have a media age without it. Everything from watching a television show broadcast out of New York while sitting on a couch in Chicago to sending an e-mail from one computer to the next to coordinating travel plans on the Eurostar could not happen without an agreed-upon sense of what “now” means. We could not travel by airplane or perform scientific experiments or trade stocks online or even clock into and out of work without it. Scientific experiments were, of course, completed in the nineteenth century and earlier, but the lack of standardized time was a constant stumbling block. And the now that we live in today—the now that many of us experience most intimately through the daily onslaught of e-mail, which has quickly developed a culture and expectation of instant response—has important roots in, but is vastly different from, the now people the world over were trying to wrap their heads around in 1883.

At the fin de siècle, people around the world—let alone in the next town over—did not occupy an agreed-upon sense of time and place. They lived on a multiplicity of slightly different schedules. The International Prime Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., in October 1884 set up a single prime meridian passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich
(Greenwich Mean Time) and adopted a twenty-four-hour day. But to the great disappointment of Sandford Fleming, a Canadian inventor, builder, and railway engineer, the meeting did not succeed at establishing standardized time for all nations. England was ahead of the game: it had used a standardized time system, based on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), for the railroads since 1847. Most English clocks were synchronized to GMT during 1855. France and Spain did not follow until the early twentieth century.

For most of the rest of the world, until the twentieth century, time was kept by the solar noon. It seems like an organic solution, but it was not very helpful for unifying nations, let alone cities. The sun keeps moving and the earth keeps revolving, twelve and a half miles per minute, which means that every twelve miles experiences a different noon. It wasn’t just that Cleveland was different from Calcutta, and Detroit was different from Denver;
neighborhoods within the same city
were on different timetables. “Adjacent villages clung jealously to their particular time with all the ferocity of a threatened identity,” wrote Clark Blaise in
Time Lord
, “accusing each other of keeping false time.” This myriad of time zones reinforced the nature and importance of distance; the context of life was local. People knew the earth was round, the oceans regulated by the moon. But most of the rest of the world was truly
elsewhere
.

This was not a confusing experience until two of the nineteenth century’s most powerful technological forces, the railroad and the telegram, combined. For the first time in the history of humankind, people on opposite sides of the globe could communicate almost instantaneously, and it was the railroad— which allowed them to get there eventually—that had made this possible, as telegraph lines traveled along the grid of physical tracks. Western Union, which was incorporated in April 1856
and by 1870 held a monopoly on U.S. telegraphic communication, franchised its offices out to station houses employing several thousand operators. When Samuel F. B. Morse sent his famous first telegram from the Law Library of the U.S. Capitol all the way to Baltimore, it hummed along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s rail line. The very second message sent was
HAVE YOU ANY NEWS
?

We human beings are known for transforming—and adapting to—our environments, but adjusting to a frame of reference created by electronic communication amounted to a vast change. After all, the speed at which words travel has implications not just for commerce but for how we mark our place in the world. It is hard to underestimate the way these new communications links helped to create a sense of nationality, especially in the United States. After all, it was here that the physical expansion of a nation—the gradual diminishment of “wilderness” by virtue of imperialist expansion into Indian territories, the connection of one state and city with the next by way of railroads—was inextricably linked with the country’s sense of time. It suggests that, whatever philosophers argue goes on in our minds, time and space do not exist independently in a body politic; they must be woven together to create a kind of national reality. Scientists the world over had been pressing for synchronized time. But it was the railroads and the burgeoning telegraph empire of Western Union, those two early monopolies at the heart of American power, that drew the country into a simultaneous now.

The hopes for what this new now would bring were enormous.
It aroused feelings of patriotism and, more important, a desire for unity that would prove a dream in the short term, with the Civil War around the corner. As one observer noted in 1846, “The power of the States will be broken up in some degree by this intensity and rapidity of communication, and the Union will be solidified…. We shall become more and more one people, thinking alike, acting more alike, and having one impulse.”