Accelerators and Breaks in the Telegraph, National Adoption
- Social necessity pushes invention
- Also responsible for multiple people inventing same thing at same time
- Things will accelerate/deccelerate use
- Railroads discover that telegraphy is not needed
- Semophore continues
- Different areas treat the same tech differently
Accelerating forces
- The stock market is invented (the corporation)
- Purpose of financing the railroads
- Between 1830s and 1860s, companies start via buying and selling of stocks
- Desire to trade faster than someone else has material impact on modern internet, location of important data centers, etc
- Repurposed for Newspapers which emerge in 19th century
- Not interested in ethics, interested in what sells
- Using information from other newspaper editors
- Compression of Space and Time
- Henry O’Reilly gets rights to run Morse powered telegraphs
- Cooke and Wheatstone have American patents prior to Morse
- Competing services
- Eventually Morse is triumphant
- American government’s did not intervene
- What was the Canadian approach?
- Only three companies survived
- Sending message from telegraph office, message gets repeated along line, different stations relaying/distributing
International Telegraphy
- Money can be made if messages go across bodies of water
- Scheme to cross the atlantic emerges
- Wire stops working in middle of ocean, machine that pays out cable snaps, 300 miles lost
- This time two boats, splice middle, cable also breaks
- Summer of 1858 uses same plan, works!
- fails within a few weeks
- Chief engineer on the Atlantic side was experimenting with making the sound clearer
- Turns nob up too high, fries system
- Cable quality develops quickly
- Space on a global scale has been annihilated
- Communications across countries
- Telegraphs and colonialism?
- Individual states began to realize that control of international communications matters
- Britain had control over colonies across the world, controlling gutta pecha, type of latex, as well as a lot of start/end lines
- 1875 Pres. Grand explains why French cable company was denied permission to land cable in US: US companies want free access to infrastructure
- Colonial implications
- 100 days to sail from London to Hong Kong
- Marx & Engels 1848: Need for constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere
- If distance is collapsed, what is there to stop a state from expanding its reach?
- Indian Mutiny 1857
- Industrialization of wires
- Gutta percha - tree gum
- Europeans knew about it for centuries, turns out it is easy to stretch/mold when heated
- Opens market for making most things we now make out of plastic
- Electrically resistant, great insulator
- By the 20th century, 88 million trees destroyed
- Trees must be cut near top, left over wasted