The Information by James Gleick
Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)♦
THREE CLERKS IN A SMALL ROOM UPSTAIRS in the Ferry House of Jersey City handled the entire telegraph traffic of the city of New York in 1846 and did not have to work very hard.♦ They administered one end of a single pair of wires leading to Baltimore and Washington. Incoming messages were written down by hand, relayed by ferry across the Hudson River to the Liberty Street pier, and delivered to the first office of the Magnetic Telegraph Company at 16 Wall Street.
In London, where the river caused less difficulty, capitalists formed the Electric Telegraph Company and began to lay their first copper wires, twisted into cables, covered with gutta-percha, and drawn through iron pipes, mainly alongside new railroad tracks. To house the central office the company rented Founders’ Hall, Lothbury, opposite the Bank of England, and advertised its presence by installing an electric clock—modern and apt, for already railroad time was telegraphic time. By 1849 the telegraph office boasted eight instruments, operated day and night. Four hundred battery cells provided the power. “We see before us a stuccoed wall, ornamented with an electric illuminated clock,” reported Andrew Wynter, a journalist, in 1854. “Who would think that behind this narrow forehead lay the great brain—if we may so term it—of the nervous system of Britain?”♦ He was neither the first nor the last to liken the electric telegraph to biological wiring: comparing cables to nerves; the nation, or the whole earth, to the human body.♦
The analogy linked one perplexing phenomenon with another. Electricity was an enigma wrapped in mystery verging on magic, and no one understood nerves, either. Nerves were at least known to conduct a form of electricity and thus, perhaps, to serve as conduits for the brain’s control of the body. Anatomists examining nerve fibers wondered whether they might be insulated with the body’s own version of gutta-percha. Maybe nerves were not just like wires; maybe they were wires, carrying messages from the nether regions to the sensorium. Alfred Smee, in his 1849 Elements of Electro-Biology, likened the brain to a battery and the nerves to “bio-telegraphs.”♦ Like any overused metaphor, this one soon grew ripe for satire. A newspaper reporter in Menlo Park, discovering Thomas A. Edison in the grip of a head cold, wrote: “The doctor came and looked at him, explained the relations of the trigeminal nerves and their analogy to an electric telegraph with three wires, and observed incidentally that in facial neuralgia each tooth might be regarded as a telegraph station with an operator.”♦ When the telephone arrived, it reinforced the analogy. “The time is close at hand,” declared Scientific American in 1880, “when the scattered members of civilized communities will be as closely united, so far as instant telephonic communication is concerned, as the various members of the body now are by the nervous system.”♦ Considering how speculative the analogy was, it turned out well. Nerves really do transmit messages, and the telegraph and telephone did begin to turn human society, for the first time, into something like a coherent organism.
In their earliest days these inventions inspired exhilaration without precedent in the annals of technology. The excitement passed from place to place in daily newspapers and monthly magazines and, more to the point, along the wires themselves. A new sense of futurity arose: a sense that the world was in a state of change, that life for one’s children and grandchildren would be very different, all because of this force and its uses. “Electricity is the poetry of science,”♦ an American historian declared in 1852.
Not that anyone knew what electricity was. “An invisible, intangible, imponderable agent,”♦ said one authority. Everyone agreed that it involved a “peculiar condition” either of molecules or of the ether (itself a nebulous, and ultimately doomed, conception). Thomas Browne, in the seventeenth century, described electrical effluvia as “threads of syrup, which elongate and contract.” In the eighteenth, the kite-flying Benjamin Franklin proved “the sameness of lightning with electricity”—identifying those fearsome bolts from the sky with the odd terrestrial sparks and currents. Franklin followed the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet, a natural philosopher and a bit of a showman, who said in 1748, “Electricity in our hands is the same as thunder in the hands of nature” and to prove it organized an experiment employing a Leyden jar and iron wire to send a shock through two hundred Carthusian monks arranged in a circle one mile around. From the monks’ almost simultaneous hops, starts, jerks, and cries, onlookers judged that the message—its information content small but not zero—sped round the circle at fantastic speed.
Later, it was Michael Faraday in England who did more than anyone to turn electricity from magic to science, but even so, in 1854, when Faraday was at the height of his investigations, Dionysius Lardner, the scientific writer who so admired Babbage, could quite accurately declare, “The World of Science is not agreed as to the physical character of Electricity.”♦ Some believed it to be a fluid “lighter and more subtle” than any gas; others suspected a compound of two fluids “having antagonistic properties”; and still others thought electricity was not a fluid at all, but something analogous to sound: “a series of undulations or vibrations.” Harper’s Magazine warned that “current” was just a metaphor and added mysteriously, “We are not to conceive of the electricity as carrying the message that we write, but rather as enabling the operator at the other end of the line to write a similar one.”♦
Whatever its nature, electricity was appreciated as a natural force placed under human control. A young New York newspaper, The Times, explained it by way of contrast with steam:
Both of them are powerful and even formidable agents wrested from nature, by the skill and power of man. But electricity is by far the subtlest energy of the two. It is an original natural element, while steam is an artificial production.… Electricity combined with magnetism, is a more subjective agent, and when evolved for transmission is ready to go forth, a safe and expeditious messenger to the ends of the habitable globe.♦
Looking back, rhapsodists found the modern age foretold in a verse from the book of Job: “Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?”♦
But lightning did not say anything—it dazzled, cracked, and burned, but to convey a message would require some ingenuity. In human hands, electricity could hardly accomplish anything, at first. It could not make a light brighter than a spark. It was silent. But it could be sent along wires to great distances—this was discovered early—and it seemed to turn wires into faint magnets. Those wires could be long: no one had found any limit to the range of the electric current. It took no time at all to see what this meant for the ancient dream of long-distance communication. It meant sympathetic needles.
Practical problems had to be solved: making wires, insulating them, storing currents, measuring them. A whole realm of engineering had to be invented. Apart from the engineering was a separate problem: the problem of the message itself. This was more a logic puzzle than a technical one. It was a problem of crossing levels, from kinetics to meaning. What form would the message take? How would the telegraph convert this fluid into words? By virtue of magnetism, the influence propagated across a distance could perform work upon physical objects, such as needles, or iron filings, or even small levers. People had different ideas: the electromagnet might sound an alarum-bell; might govern the motion of wheel-work; might turn a handle, which might carry a pencil (but nineteenth-century engineering was not up to robotic handwriting). Or the current might discharge a cannon. Imagine discharging a cannon by sending a signal from miles away! Would-be inventors naturally looked to previous communications technologies, but the precedents were mostly the wrong sort.
Before there were electric telegraphs, there we
The first was peculiar and ingenious. The Chappe brothers set a pair of pendulum clocks to beat in synchrony, each with its pointer turning around a dial at relatively high speed. They experimented with this in their hometown, Brûlon, about one hundred miles west of Paris. Ignace, the sender, would wait till the pointer reached an agreed number and at that instant signal by ringing a bell or firing a gun or, more often, banging upon a casserole. Upon hearing the sound, Claude, stationed a quarter mile away, would read the appropriate number off his own clock. He could convert number to words by looking them up in a prearranged list. This notion of communication via synchronized clocks reappeared in the twentieth century, in physicists’ thought experiments and in electronic devices, but in 1791 it led nowhere. One drawback was that the two stations had to be linked both by sight and by sound—and if they were, the clocks had little to add. Another was the problem of getting the clocks synchronized in the first place and keeping them synchronized. Ultimately, fast long-distance messaging was what made synchronization possible—not the reverse. The scheme collapsed under the weight of its own cleverness.
Meanwhile the Chappes managed to draw more of their brothers, Pierre and René, into the project, with a corps of municipal officers and royal notaries to bear witness.♦ The next attempt dispensed with clockwork and sound. The Chappes constructed a large wooden frame with five sliding shutters, to be raised and lowered with pulleys. By using each possible combination, this “telegraph” could transmit an alphabet of thirty-two symbols—25, another binary code, though the details do not survive. Claude was pleading for money from the newly formed Legislative Assembly, so he tried this hopeful message from Brûlon: “L’Assembleé nationale récompensera les experiences utiles au public” (“The National Assembly will reward experiments useful to the public”). The eight words took 6 minutes, 20 seconds to transmit, and they failed to come true.
Revolutionary France was both a good and a bad place for modernistic experimentation. When Claude erected a prototype telegraph in the parc Saint-Fargeau, in the northeast of Paris, a suspicious mob burned it to the ground, fearful of secret messaging. Citizen Chappe continued looking for a technology as swift and reliable as that other new device, the guillotine. He designed an apparatus with a great crossbeam supporting two giant arms manipulated by ropes. Like so many early machines, this was somewhat anthropomorphic in form. The arms could take any of seven angles, at 45-degree increments (not eight, because one would leave the arm hidden behind the beam), and the beam, too, could rotate, all under the control of an operator down below, manipulating a system of cranks and pulleys. To perfect this complex mechanism Chappe enlisted Abraham-Louis Breguet, the well-known watchmaker.
As intricate as the control problem was, the question of devising a suitable code proved even more difficult. From a strictly mechanical point of view, the arms and the beam could take any angle at all—the possibilities were infinite—but for efficient signaling Chappe had to limit the possibilities. The fewer meaningful positions, the less likelihood of confusion. He chose only two for the crossbeam, on top of the seven for each arm, giving a symbol space of 98 possible arrangements (7 × 7 × 2). Rather than just use these for letters and numerals, Chappe set out to devise an elaborate code. Certain signals were reserved for error correction and control: start and stop, acknowledgment, delay, conflict (a tower could not send messages in both directions at once), and failure. Others were used in pairs, pointing the operator to pages and line numbers in special code books with more than eight thousand potential entries: words and syllables as well as proper names of people and places. All this remained a carefully guarded secret. After all, the messages were to be broadcast in the sky, for anyone to see. Chappe took it for granted that the telegraph network of which he dreamed would be a department of the state, government owned and operated. He saw it not as an instrument of knowledge or of riches, but as an instrument of power. “The day will come,” he wrote, “when the Government will be able to achieve the grandest idea we can possibly have of power, by using the telegraph system in order to spread directly, every day, every hour, and simultaneously, its influence over the whole republic.”♦
With the country at war and authority now residing with the National Convention, Chappe managed to gain the attention of some influential legislators. “Citizen Chappe offers an ingenious method to write in the air, using a small number of symbols, simply formed from straight line segments,”♦ reported one of them, Gilbert Romme, in 1793. He persuaded the Convention to appropriate six thousand francs for the construction of three telegraph towers in a line north of Paris, seven to nine miles apart. The Chappe brothers moved rapidly now and by the end of summer arranged a triumphant demonstration for the watching deputies. The deputies liked what they saw: a means of receiving news from the military frontier and transmitting their orders and decrees. They gave Chappe a salary, the use of a government horse, and an official appointment to the post of ingénieur télégraphe. He began work on a line of stations 120 miles long, from the Louvre in Paris to Lille, on the northern border. In less than a year he had eighteen in operation, and the first messages arrived from Lille: happily, news of victories over the Prussians and Austrians. The Convention was ecstatic. One deputy named a pantheon of four great human inventions: printing, gunpowder, the compass, and “the language of telegraph signs.”♦ He was right to focus on the language. In terms of hardware—ropes, levers, and wooden beams—the Chappes had invented nothing new.
A CHAPPE TELEGRAPH
Construction began on stations in branches extending east to Strasbourg, west to Brest, and south to Lyon. When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, he ordered a message sent in every direction—“Paris est tranquille et les bons citoyens sont contents” (“Paris is quiet and the good citizens are happy”)—and soon commissioned a line of new stations all the way to Milan. The telegraph system was setting a new standard for speed of communication, since the only real competition was a rider on horseback. But speed could be measured in two ways: in terms of distance or in terms of symbols and words. Chappe once claimed that a signal could go from Toulon to Paris—a line of 120 stations across 475 miles—in just ten or twelve minutes.♦ But he could not make that claim for a full message, even a relatively short one. Three signals per minute was the most that could be expected of even the fastest telegraph operator. The next operator in the chain, watching through a telescope, had to log each signal by hand in a notebook, reproduce it by turning his own cranks and pulleys, and watch to make sure it was received correctly by the next station. The signal chain was vulnerable and delicate: rain, fog, or an inattentive operator would break any message. When success rates were measured in the 1840s, only two out of three messages were found to arrive within a day during the warm months, and in winter the rate dropped to one in three. Coding and decoding took time, too, but only at the beginning and end of the line. Operators at intermediate stations were meant to relay signals without understanding them. Indeed, many stationaires were illiterate.
THE FRENCH TELEGRAPH NETWORK IN ITS HEYDAY
When messages did arrive, they could not always be trusted. Many relay stations meant many chances for error. Children everywhere know this, from playing the messaging game known in Britain as Chinese Whispers, in China as , in Turkey as From Ear to Ear, and in the modern United States simply as Telephone. When his colleagues disregarded the problem of error correction, Ignace Chappe complained, “They have probably never performed experiments with more than two or three stations.”♦
Today the old telegraphs are forgotten, but they w
If you’ll only just promise you’ll none of you laugh,
I’ll be after explaining the French telegraph!
A machine that’s endow’d with such wonderful pow’r,
It writes, reads, and sends news fifty miles in an hour.
…
Oh! the dabblers in lott’ries will grow rich as Jews:
’Stead of flying of pigeons, to bring them the news,
They’ll a telegraph place upon Old Ormond Quay;
Put another ’board ship, in the midst of the sea.
…
Adieu, penny-posts! mails and coaches, adieu;
Your occupation’s gone, ’tis all over wid you:
In your place, telegraphs on our houses we’ll see,
To tell time, conduct lightning, dry shirts, and send news.♦
The telegraph towers spread across Europe and beyond, and their ruins dot the countrysides today. Telegraph Hill, Telegrafberget, Telegraphen-Berg are vestigial place names. Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium were early to develop systems on the French model. Germany soon followed. A line between Calcutta and Chunar began operating in 1823; between Alexandria and Cairo in 1824; and in Russia, Nicholas I organized 220 stations from Warsaw to St. Petersburg and Moscow. They held dominion over the world’s communication and then, faster than they had arisen, went obsolete. Colonel Taliaferro Shaffner, a Kentucky inventor and historian, traveled to Russia in 1859 and was struck by the towers’ height and their beauty, the care taken with their painting and landscaping with flowers, and by their sudden, universal death.