Introduction to Part IV

The invention of the telegraph is a very interesting development that played a large role in the progress of America and Europe in the 19^th century. It is fascinating to learn about the separation of communication and transportation and how that changed society forever. I can’t imagine what a difference the telegraph made for businesses and governments. Information could now be transferred immediately instead of delayed along with the time of travel. While reading this article I found that I was able to make a strong connection between the telegraph and the printing press. Before the telephone was invented, a skilled master in Morse code was needed to translate and send any message. This prevented the telegraph from every really reaching the common household which was achieved by the telephone soon after. Before the invention of the printing press, society was in a similar situation. Most information was controlled and only understood by few scribes that were literate and had access. Academic texts were not available to everyone and it took information a long time to travel across countries. Before the telegraph was invented communication was slowed down by the time needed for transportation. Although once the telegraph was invented, its interesting to see how communication still followed the means of transportation. It makes sense that telegraph lines followed the pathway of railroads, but its funny to see how transportation and communication stayed together even though they became completely separated. MY favorite part of this article was seeing how people attempted optical forms of communication to speed up the transmission of information. It would’ve been crazy to see how older civilizations were able to use fire, or direct sunlight with metal to transfer messages across distances in a shorter amount of time. Even though the telegraph was outdone and fixed by the telephone, it did amazing things for the distribution of information. By looking back at the biggest inventions in communication history, it is easy to identify trends and similarities in the way each invention changed society at the time. Through a simple transmission of short and long beeps, Samuel Morse was able to reinvent communication for the betterment of business and society as a whole.

The telegraph

As technology continues to advance it is not uncommon for each generation to think of its own advances as the best around or in other words the bees knees. This article by Tom Standage entitled “Telegraphy – the victorian internet” explores, in the driest way possible, how the telegraph so explosively went from being almost non existent to the point when you could not get your hands on a reliable schedule of where the lines were running that day. So basically something that in the early 1840s was seen more like a fun little experiment for the rich people could now send messages great distances in a short period of time and if they kept the message short it was almost affordable for special occasions. Soon there were so many lines running everywhere it was hard to think of life without the option of sending a telegram. In 1861 they finished the transcontinental telegraph line effectively putting the Pony Express, which is like the equivalent of our modern USPS or snail mail,  out of business; the only difference is they were able to get rid of their snail mail for something that was more efficient and easier to use while we are still wallowing in our slow hand to hand mail service. Of course after the success of the transcontinental telegraph line as well as the great success of Morse’s invention in other countries that had thousands of miles now lined with lines carrying as many messages through them daily; people now began to tinker around with the idea of running wires not along the railroad lines but across water to reach an even greater amount of people. One of the first people to really have this problem to solve were the British who had the obstacle of crossing the English channel. this is not to say that no one had tried it before this, Morse himself had tried it in 1843 although it did not go that great. Morse coated the wire in rubber then encased it in a lead pipe and succeeded in passing short messages across short distances then immediately proclaimed that it would not be long before they were able to send  messages across the atlantic with little trouble. Well, back in Britain they were working on finding something to coat the wire in order to get it to last and still be able to send messages through it. Their solution was to use gutta-percha, which is this rubbery gum stuff that is hardened in room temperature and could be softened with the use of hot water and could be then be molded easily. So, turned out this stuff was awesome insolation for the wire but it would not sink dow to the bottom when the dropped in the water, well long story short Thomas Crampton came along and invented a new cable that was wound together and smothered in tar, the first direct message sent from London to Paris was in 1852, supposedly the message was “Can you hear me now?”

Removing Geography from Communication

People tend to forget about how important the telegraph was to the rest of communication that followed until the Internet. It’s easy for later generations to appreciate the phone, radio and television because these inventions stuck around for us to use. The telegraph became obsolete but we have to remember that it really was the Grand-daddy of the modern media way that followed it into the twentieth century.

The telegraph became the first “social nervous system” as James W. Carey calls explains in his article, “Time, Space, and the Telegraph”. As most innovations do in the beginning, it first started as principally a producer’s good and had the most impact on commerce, government and the military.

With the telegraph, communication was decisively separated from the means of transporting it. Though acknowledge that there were earlier forms of pre-electric telegraphs – mainly line-of-sight optical transmissions like those created by French architect Claude Chappe.

Theoretically, with the introduction of telegraph networks, the product market “shrunk” down and evened out across the country because, with the ability to communicate nationally instead of regionally, buyers and sellers were now aware of prices in other markets. The distance between the buyer and seller mattered much less since that the consumer could access perfect information available to them (as opposed to arbitrage, the principal method of trading prior to the telegraph). Product could now become widely distributed commodities.

This brings us to the point that I found most interesting about this innovation in media history – the way trade became not money for commodity, but time over price. Instead of delivering the actually commodity, the buyer could have “receipt” of its ownership, therefore a commodity must be able to lend itself to future trading by being mixed, standardized, and diluted in order to be reduced to a specific, but abstract, grade.
Carey goes into depth about the way that sharing market information forever altered the history of economics as well. Consider now the way the Stock Exchange and large market and economics works, its no accident that these collaborations formed through the ability to share market information quickly. Carey then explains this relevance:

“the process of divorcing receipt from the product can be thought of as a part of a general social process initiated by the use of money and widely written about in contemporary semiotics; the progressive divorce of the signifier from the signified, a process in which the world of signifier progressively overwhelms and moves independently of real objects.”

So while the telegraph may have been eclipsed by its later successors, it contributed a crucial change to the world of media and communication – the ability to allow symbols and information to move independently of geography and even literal space and time. These were the original third party networks that allowed people to communicate over distances with relative ease and speed. Soon more advances in the medium of communication across these lines and airwaves will soon be created and usher in an even speedier mode of communication.

The Telegraph Creates New Opportunities for Communication

The invention of the telegraph created many new opportunities for not only the United States but many other countries around the world. It spread quickly and became the main form of communication for people. One can compare this invention to the earlier forms of communication because it used short abbreviations to convey messages. For example, the dots and dashes of Morse code translated to letters such as “S F D” which meant “Stop for dinner”. Earlier forms of communication like that of pictographs and hieroglyphics could be understood the same way. The telegraph can be see as an evolved version of these early forms of communication.

The extreme spread of this form of communication to countries around the world produced an amazing result as people were able to send messages very quickly. It was responsible for shutting down the famous Pony Express, which was the only way written letters and messages were sent before this invention. Because of this, people were able to receive messages in a very short amount of time rather than days or weeks or even months when the message was being sent via the Pony Express.

The way messages, or telegrams, were sent made it difficult for average people to send a lot of messages back and forth, since messages were charged by the word. Wealthier people were able to send many more, while others could only send urgent news or information.

The way telegrams were sent can be compared to communication of today with that of e-mail or text messaging. Back then, the speed of a telegram probably seemed instant compared to mail or Pony Express, just as sending a text message seems instant to us today rather than sending it through the telegram. As we can see the forms of communication and sending and receiving messages is evolving all the time into something more efficient.

The First Communication Cables

It seems like communication history is a snowball of inventions that revolutionize the masses somewhat quickly, but at their own rate. I’ve noticed that the faster the message can travel, the quicker that the technology catches on.

Section IV follows one expounding into the creation of the early print and how it hastened the copying and distribution of text. It took a few hundred years for that technology wave to roll over. Tom Standage, science and technology journalist, writes the following segment looking at how messages starts being traveling over long areas faster than a messenger could with the use of the telegraph. Morse code, named for Samuel Morse, who invented the dot and dash code, was transmitted on a wire-based system interpreted by other connected telegraphers. The message could be delivered without a person traveling with it. So it had happened, America had its working cable-line pole, being a forty mile cable between Washington and Baltimore. Imagine now the uncountable amount of cables there are connecting our globe.

Between 1846 and 1852, six years, the network of telegraph stations grew 600 fold, and began to rival the Postal Service. Since the American government chose not to create their own telegraph industry, the first corporate monopoly emerged, the still thriving Western Union. Telegraph stations were set up in major towns with other lines radiating from the central ones hat could communicate with the other central ones across the nation. Like scribes for the era of first written recordings, this era had telegraph interpreters and messenger boys, a solid career for the time. Men were eager for jobs in the emerging industry, even the inventor Thomas Edison and steel giant Andrew Carnegie were messenger boys.

That’s just some of what happened in America.

Don’t forget about a large portion of the world who steadily built up their own connections with the telegraph. Prussia didn’t hesitate to set up thousands of stations by 1852, and even participated in the first station collaboration with Austria. Then they began experimenting with putting cables through bodies of water for trans-continental communication. Even the first guy who tried it, John Brett, didn’t have raving success, he still contributed to the steppling stone process that is communication history.

Standage calls this article “Telegraphy – The Victorian Internet”, because suddenly, in a matter of less than a generation, a communication development occurred that people had to rapidly adapt to. People didn’t understand how it worked and could be confused with the logistics of it, a problem we all have with our hundreds of technologies today. But then telegraphers, the only people who knew the code, could communicate relatively freely, it was an open network community that the other telegraphers could make noise to be understood through. It didn’t have to be put down permanently to receive and was relatively immediate. So now I presume, the section following this one will account the future technology that will eventually build on top of this layer. The vivid learners of one generation will go on to participate in the next revolution in communication history.

The Telegraph and The Market

In the essay ” Time, Space, and the Telegraph”, author James Carey talks about the introduction of the telegraph, and how it changed the American market system. He gives a really interesting opening statement that really shows us what Carey is trying to put across. ” The simplest and most important point about the telegraph is that it marked the decisive separation of ” transportation” and ” communication”. Until the telegraph these words were synonymous. The telegraph ended that identity and allowed symbols to move independently of geography and independently of and faster than transport.”

I really liked this quote because Carey gives the reader this clear idea that the telegraph made the separation of the words transportation and communication. Before the telegraph, to get information out, you would have to transport that information. Whether it be with a letter, or the person themselves traveling to get the information across. Carey then goes into start talking about the market in America before the introducion of the telegraph. He says before the telegraph, the price of a commodity would be vastly different from city to city. This was mainly because the prices were set by local markets, and not a national

Carey also puts forward a clear and interesting statement on this effect. ” It was a normal expectation of early nineteenth century Americans that the price of a commodity would diverge from city to city so that the cost of wheat, corn, or whatever would be radically different in, say, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. This belief reflected the fact the before the telegraph, markets were independent of on another, or, more accurately, that the effect of one market on another was so gradually manifested as to be virtually unnoticed. In short, the prices of commodities were largely determined by local conditions of supply and demand.”

This essay was interesting in that it makes the reader realize just how important the telegraph was in shaping American markets. It make the market from thousands of small local ones, to one national one, with the same prices. A price in New York would the been affecting the prices in New Orleans almost immediately. I really like this essay in that it made intriguing comparisons of the US market, and the telegraph.