#historic-developments #competence #invention
The First Internet
- System of telegraphy
- Samuel Morse - Ring a bell?
- Lots of tech exist as assemblages, complex systems
- In the right conditions, complex systems can evolve
- What are the right conditions? Why did the electrical telegraph win out?
- Brian Winston - Historian of science
- Developped framework to understand emergence of science
- History is a tool for making past make sense in the present
- If you’re going to make an utterance about something, you need a background first/competence
- Technology is scientific performance
- Ideas enable transformation into technology
- Different inventors moving in same kinds of circles, pulling from same scientific competence
- **Supervening social necessity
- Technology is more than scientific base, there has to be a broader social raison d’etre
- There must be a role to fill
Telegraph
- Competences required:
- Ability to convert language to electricity
- Purposes being shifted
- Social structure with people in a place where they want to communicate across distances
- British colonialism
- Colonial powers develop optical telegraphs, maintain control over citizens
- Repeat of French Revolution is not ideal
- Wedgewood
- Comes up with scheme using electrical signalling 1814
- Admirality says no
- Francis Ronald
- Scheme 1816, synchronized clock faces, letters of the alphabet, hitting letter sounding a pulse to other
- Admiralty says no
- Stating that due to semophore, telepgraphs are no longer needed socially
**- The invention of the Galvanometer
- Little device that suspends needle on silk thread, responds to current
- Early 1820s
- Same time as steam engine locomotive
- Social need for trains not crashing emerges
- galvanometer was invented independently multiple times
- Multiple men attribute to development of telegraph, due to galvanometer and social need to not crash trains
- Realized messages can be transported
- **No point in talking about who was first, it all emerges from the ‘soup’
- Enter Morse
- Born 1791, graduates from Yale 1810
- Futzed around with electricity, studied painting
- Became a painter to prominent american presidents
- Can’t solve problem of constant power
- Uses social connections to meet Joseph Henry, learns about how you can use magnets and sequential circuits to keep message going
- Morse uses galvanometer with single circuit, eliminating distance through relays
- Decided code would be more efficient @dooleyIntroductionRevolutionaryCipher2018sourcenote
- US military put out reward for telegraph system across coast
- Was given reward with tight deadline
- Baltimore -> Washington = one of the first telegraph lines, buries it using pipe
- Wire burns out first few tests
- Friend suggests stringing up the wire through trees
- Beats deadline, gets message through
- Are there forces pushing against technology?