预计阅读本页时间：-
(What Can One Expect of a Few Wretched Wires?)
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.
广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元
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 were just telegraphs: les télégraphes, invented and named by Claude Chappe in France during the Revolution.♦♦ They were optical; a “telegraph” was a tower for sending signals to other towers in line of sight. The task was to devise a signaling system more efficient and flexible than, say, bonfires. Working with his messaging partner, his brother Ignace, Claude tried out a series of different schemes, evolving over a period of years.
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 were a sensation in their time. In London, a Drury Lane entertainer and songwriter named Charles Dibdin put the invention into a 1794 musical show and foresaw a marvelous future:
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.
These stations are now silent. No movements of the indicators are to be seen. They are still upon their high positions, fast yielding to the wasting hand of time. The electric wire, though less grand in its appearance, traverses the empire, and with burning flames inscribes in the distance the will of the emperor to sixty-six millions of human beings scattered over his wide-spread dominions.♦
In Shaffner’s mind this was a one-way conversation. The sixty-six millions were not talking back to the emperor, nor to one another.
What was to be said, when writing in the air? Claude Chappe had proposed, “Anything that could be the subject of a correspondence.”♦ But his example—“Lukner has left for Mons to besiege that city, Bender is advancing for its defense”—made clear what he meant: dispatches of military and state import. Later Chappe proposed sending other types of information: shipping news, and financial quotations from bourses and stock exchanges. Napoleon would not allow it, though he did use the telegraph to proclaim the birth of his son, Napoleon II, in 1811. A communications infrastructure built with enormous government investment and capable of transmitting some hundreds of total words per day could hardly be used for private messaging. That was unimaginable—and when, in the next century, it became imaginable, some governments found it undesirable. No sooner did entrepreneurs begin to organize private telegraphy than France banned it outright: an 1837 law mandated imprisonment and fines for “anyone performing unauthorized transmissions of signals from one place to another, with the aid of telegraphic machines or by any other means.”♦ The idea of a global nervous system had to arise elsewhere. In the next year, 1838, the French authorities received a visit from an American with a proposal for a “telegraph” utilizing electrical wires: Samuel F. B. Morse. They turned him down flat. Compared to the majestic semaphore, electricity seemed gimcrack and insecure. No one could interfere with telegraph signals in the sky, but wire could be cut by saboteurs. Jules Guyot, a physician and scientist assigned to assess the technology, sniffed, “What can one expect of a few wretched wires?”♦ What indeed.
THE TELEGRAPH AT MONTMARTRE
The care and feeding of the delicate galvanic impulse presented a harsh set of technical challenges, and a different set appeared where electricity met language: where words had to be transmuted into a twinkling in the wire. The crossing point between electricity and language—also the interface between device and human—required new ingenuity. Many different schemes occurred to inventors. Virtually all were based in one way or another on the written alphabet, employing letters as an intermediate layer. This seemed so natural as to be not worth remarking. Telegraph meant “far writing,” after all. So in 1774 Georges-Louis Le Sage of Geneva arranged twenty-four separate wires to designate twenty-four letters, each wire conveying just enough current to stir a piece of gold leaf or a pith ball suspended in a glass jar or “other bodies that can be as easily attracted, and are, at the same time, easily visible.”♦ That was too many wires to be practicable. A Frenchman named Lomond in 1787 ran a single wire across his apartment and claimed to be able to signal different letters by making a pith ball dance in different directions. “It appears that he has formed an alphabet of motions,” reported a witness, but apparently only Lomond’s wife could understand the code. In 1809 a German, Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, made a bubble telegraph. Current passing through wires in a vessel of water produced bubbles of hydrogen; each wire, and thus each jet of bubbles, could indicate a single letter. While he was at it, von Sömmerring managed to make electricity ring a bell: he balanced a spoon in the water, upside down, so that enough bubbles would make it tilt, releasing a weight, driving a lever, and ringing the bell. “This secondary object, the alarum,” he wrote in his diary, “cost me a great deal of reflection and many useless trials with wheelwork.”♦ Across the Atlantic, an American named Harrison Gray Dyer tried sending signals by making electric sparks form nitric acid that discolored litmus paper.♦ He strung a wire on trees and stakes around a Long Island race track. The litmus paper had to be moved by hand.
Then came needles. The physicist André-Marie Ampère, a developer of the galvanometer, proposed using that as a signaling device: it was a needle deflected by electromagnetism—a compass pointing to a momentary artificial north. He, too, thought in terms of one needle for every letter. In Russia, Baron Pavel Schilling demonstrated a system with five needles and later reduced that to one: he assigned combinations of right and left signals to the letters and numerals. At Göttingen in 1833 the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, working with a physicist, Wilhelm Weber, organized a similar scheme with one needle. The first deflection of the needle gave two possible signals, left or right. Two deflections combined gave four more possibilities (right + right, right + left, left + right, and left + left). Three deflections gave eight combinations, and four gave sixteen, for a total of thirty distinct signals. An operator would use pauses to separate the signals. Gauss and Weber organized their alphabet of deflections logically, beginning with the vowels and otherwise taking letters and digits in order:
right = a
left = e
right, right = i
right, left = o
left, right = u
left, left = b
right, right, right = c (and k)
right, right, left = d
etc.
This scheme for encoding letters was binary, in a way. Each minimal unit, each little piece of signal, amounted to a choice between two possibilities, left or right. Each letter required a number of such choices, and that number was not predetermined. It could be one, as in right for a and left for e. It could be more, so the scheme was open-ended, allowing an alphabet of as many letters as needed. Gauss and Weber strung a doubled wire over a mile of houses and steeples between the Göttingen observatory and the physics institute. What they managed to say to each other has not been preserved.
Far away from these inventors’ workrooms, the telegraph still meant towers, semaphores, shutters, and flags, but enthusiasm for new possibilities was beginning to build. Lecturing to the Boston Marine Society in 1833, a lawyer and philologist, John Pickering, declared, “It must be evident to the most common observer, that no means of conveying intelligence can ever be devised, that shall exceed or even equal the rapidity of the Telegraph, for, with the exception of the scarcely perceptible relay at each station, its rapidity may be compared with that of light itself.”♦ He was thinking particularly of the Telegraph on Central Wharf, a Chappe-like tower communicating shipping news with three other stations in a twelve-mile line across Boston Harbor. Meanwhile, dozens of young newspapers around the nation were modernistically calling themselves “The Telegraph.” They, too, were in the far-writing business.
“Telegraphy is an element of power and order,”♦ Abraham Chappe had said, but the rising financial and mercantile classes were the next to grasp the value of information leaping across distance. Only two hundred miles separated the Stock Exchange on Threadneedle Street in London from the Bourse at the Palais Brongniart, but two hundred miles meant days. Fortunes could be made by bridging that gap. For speculators a private telegraph would be as useful as a time machine. The Rothschild banking family was using pigeons as postal carriers and, more reliably, a small fleet of boats to carry messengers across the Channel. The phenomenon of fast information from a distance, having been discovered, generated a cascade of excitement. Pickering in Boston did the math: “If there are now essential advantages to business in obtaining intelligence from New York in two days, or less, or at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour, any man can perceive that there may be a proportionate benefit, when we can transmit the same information for that distance by telegraph at the rate of four miles in a minute, or in the space of a single hour, from New York to Boston.”♦ The interest of governments in receiving military bulletins and projecting authority was surpassed by the desires of capitalists and newspapers, railroads and shipping companies. Still, in the sprawling United States, even the pressure of commerce was not enough to make optical telegraphy a reality. Only one prototype succeeded in linking two cities: New York and Philadelphia, in 1840. It transmitted stock prices and then lottery numbers and then was obsolete.
All the would-be inventors of the electrical telegraph—and there were many—worked from the same toolkit. They had their wires, and they had magnetic needles. They had batteries: galvanic cells, linked together, producing electricity from the reaction of metal strips immersed in acid baths. They did not have lights. They did not have motors. They had whatever mechanisms they could construct from wood and brass: pins, screws, wheels, springs, and levers. In the end they had the shared target at which they all aimed: the letters of the alphabet. (Edward Davy thought it was necessary to explain, in 1836, how and why the letters would suffice: “A single letter may be indicated at a time, each letter being taken down by the attendant as it arrives, so as to form words and sentences; but it will be easy to see that, from the infinite changes upon a number of letters, a great number of ordinary communications may be conveyed.”♦) Along with this common stock list, in Vienna, Paris, London, Göttingen, St. Petersburg, and the United States, these pioneers shared a sense of their excited, competitive landscape, but no one knew clearly what anyone else was doing. They could not keep up with the relevant science; crucial advances in the science of electricity remained unknown to the people who most needed them. Every inventor ached to understand what happened to current flowing through wires of different lengths and thickness, and they continued to struggle for more than a decade after Georg Ohm, in Germany, worked out a precise mathematical theory for current, voltage, and resistance. Such news traveled slowly.
It was in this context that Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, in the United States, and, in England, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone made the electric telegraph a reality and a business. In one way or another, all of them later claimed to have “invented” the telegraph, though none of them had done so—certainly not Morse. Their partnerships were destined to end in brutal, turbulent, and bitter patent disputes embroiling most of the leading electrical scientists on two continents. The trail of invention, leading through so many countries, had been poorly recorded and even more poorly communicated.
In England, Cooke was a young entrepreneur—he saw a prototype needle telegraph while traveling in Heidelberg—and Wheatstone a King’s College, London, physicist with whom Cooke formed a partnership in 1837. Wheatstone had performed experiments on the velocity of sound and of electricity, and once again the real problem lay in connecting the physics with language. They consulted England’s authority on electricity, Michael Faraday, and Peter Roget, author of a Treatise on Electro-Magnetism as well as the system of verbal classification he called the Thesaurus. The Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph went through a series of prototypes. One used six wires to form three circuits, each controlling a magnetic needle. “I worked out every possible permutation and practical combination of the signals given by the three needles, and I thus obtained an alphabet of twenty-six signals,”♦ noted Cooke, somewhat obscurely. There was also an alarm, in case the operator’s attention wandered from the apparatus; Cooke said he had been inspired by the only mechanical device he knew well: a musical snuffbox. In the next version, a synchronized pair of rotating clockwork disks displayed the letters of the alphabet through a slot. More ingenious still, and just as awkward, was a five-needle design: twenty letters were arranged on a diamond-shaped grid and an operator, by depressing numbered buttons, would cause two of five needles to point, uniquely, to the desired letter. This Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph managed to do without C, J, Q, U, X, and Z. Their American competitor, Vail, later described the operation as follows:
Suppose the message to be sent from the Paddington station to the Slough station, is this, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” The operator at Paddington presses down the buttons, 11 and 18, for signalizing upon the dial of the Slough station, the letter W. The operator there, who is supposed to be constantly on watch, observes the two needles pointing at W. He writes it down, or calls it aloud, to another, who records it, taking, according to a calculation given in a recent account, two seconds at least for each signal.♦
Vail considered this inefficient. He was in a position to be smug.
As for Samuel Finley Breese Morse, his later recollections came in the context of controversy—what his son called “the wordy battles waged in the scientific world over the questions of priority, exclusive discovery or invention, indebtedness to others, and conscious or unconscious plagiarism.”♦ All these thrived on failures of communication and record-keeping. Educated at Yale College, the son of a Massachusetts preacher, Morse was an artist, not a scientist. In the 1820s and 1830s he spent much of his time traveling in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy to study painting. It was on one of these trips that he first heard about electric telegraphy or, in the terms of his memoirs, had his sudden insight: “like a flash of the subtle fluid which afterwards became his servant,” as his son put it. Morse told a friend who was rooming with him in Paris: “The mails in our country are too slow; this French telegraph is better, and would do even better in our clear atmosphere than here, where half the time fogs obscure the skies. But this will not be fast enough—the lightning would serve us better.”♦ As he described his epiphany, it was an insight not about lightning but about signs: “It would not be difficult to construct a system of signs by which intelligence could be instantaneously transmitted.”♦
TELEGRAPHIC WRITING BY MORSE’S FIRST INSTRUMENT
ALFRED VAIL’S TELEGRAPH “KEY”
Morse had a great insight from which all the rest flowed. Knowing nothing about pith balls, bubbles, or litmus paper, he saw that a sign could be made from something simpler, more fundamental, and less tangible—the most minimal event, the closing and opening of a circuit. Never mind needles. The electric current flowed and was interrupted, and the interruptions could be organized to create meaning. The idea was simple, but Morse’s first devices were convoluted, involving clockwork, wooden pendulums, pencils, ribbons of paper, rollers, and cranks. Vail, an experienced machinist, cut all this back. For the sending end, Vail devised what became an iconic piece of user interface: a simple spring-loaded lever, with which an operator could control the circuit by the touch of a finger. First he called this lever a “correspondent”; then just a “key.” Its simplicity made it at least an order of magnitude faster than the buttons and cranks employed by Wheatstone and Cooke. With the telegraph key, an operator could send signals—which were, after all, mere interruptions of the current—at a rate of hundreds per minute.
So at one end they had a lever, for closing and opening the circuit, and at the other end the current controlled an electromagnet. One of them, probably Vail, thought of putting the two together. The magnet could operate the lever. This combination (invented more or less simultaneously by Joseph Henry at Princeton and Edward Davy in England) was named the “relay,” from the word for a fresh horse that replaced an exhausted one. It removed the greatest obstacle standing in the way of long-distance electrical telegraphy: the weakening of currents as they passed through lengths of wire. A weakened current could still operate a relay, enabling a new circuit, powered by a new battery. The relay had greater potential than its inventors realized. Besides letting a signal propagate itself, a relay might reverse the signal. And relays might combine signals from more than one source. But that was for later.
The turning point came in 1844, both in England and the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone had their first line up and running along the railway from the Paddington station. Morse and Vail had theirs from Washington to the Pratt Street railway station in Baltimore, on wires wrapped in yarn and tar, suspended from twenty-foot wooden posts. The communications traffic was light at first, but Morse was able to report proudly to Congress that an instrument could transmit thirty characters per minute and that the lines had “remained undisturbed from the wantonness or evil disposition of any one.” From the outset the communications content diverged sharply—comically—from the martial and official dispatches familiar to French telegraphists. In England the first messages recorded in the telegraph book at Paddington concerned lost luggage and retail transactions. “Send a messenger to Mr Harris, Duke-street, Manchester-square, and request him to send 6 lbs of white bait and 4 lbs of sausages by the 5.30 train to Mr Finch of Windsor; they must be sent by 5.30 down train, or not at all.”♦ At the stroke of the new year, the superintendent at Paddington sent salutations to his counterpart in Slough and received a reply that the wish was a half-minute early; midnight had not yet arrived there.♦ That morning, a druggist in Slough named John Tawell poisoned his mistress, Sarah Hart, and ran for the train to Paddington. A telegraph message outraced him with his description (“in the garb of a kwaker, with a brown great coat on”♦—no Q’s in the English system); he was captured in London and hanged in March. The drama filled the newspapers for months. It was later said of the telegraph wires, “Them’s the cords that hung John Tawell.” In April, a Captain Kennedy, at the South-Western Railway terminus, played a game of chess with a Mr. Staunton, at Gosport; it was reported that “in conveying the moves, the electricity travelled backward and forward during the game upwards of 10,000 miles.”♦ The newspapers loved that story, too—and, more and more, they valued any story revealing the marvels of the electric telegraph.
When the English and the American enterprises opened their doors to the general public, it was far from clear who, besides the police and the occasional chess player, would line up to pay the tariff. In Washington, where pricing began in 1845 at one-quarter cent per letter, total revenues for the first three months amounted to less than two hundred dollars. The next year, when a Morse line opened between New York and Philadelphia, the traffic grew a little faster. “When you consider that business is extremely dull [and] we have not yet the confidence of the public,” a company official wrote, “you will see we are all well satisfied with results so far.”♦ He predicted that revenues would soon rise to fifty dollars a day. Newspaper reporters caught on. In the fall of 1846 Alexander Jones sent his first story by wire from New York City to the Washington Union: an account of the launch of the USS Albany at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.♦ In England a writer for The Morning Chronicle described the thrill of receiving his first report across the Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph line,
the first instalment of the intelligence by a sudden stir of the stationary needle, and the shrill ring of the alarum. We looked delightedly into the taciturn face of our friend, the mystic dial, and pencilled down with rapidity in our note-book, what were his utterances some ninety miles off.♦
This was contagious. Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers, heretofore “the rapid and indispensable carrier of commercial, political and other intelligence,”♦ as an American journalist put it.
For this purpose the newspapers will become emphatically useless. Anticipated at every point by the lightning wings of the Telegraph, they can only deal in local “items” or abstract speculations. Their power to create sensations, even in election campaigns, will be greatly lessened—as the infallible Telegraph will contradict their falsehoods as fast as they can publish them.
Undaunted, newspapers could not wait to put the technology to work. Editors found that any dispatch seemed more urgent and thrilling with the label “Communicated by Electric Telegraph.” Despite the expense—at first, typically, fifty cents for ten words—the newspapers became the telegraph services’ most enthusiastic patrons. Within a few years, 120 provincial newspapers were getting reports from Parliament nightly. News bulletins from the Crimean War radiated from London to Liverpool, York, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Birmingham, and Hull. “Swifter than a rocket could fly the distance, like a rocket it bursts and is again carried by the diverging wires into a dozen neighbouring towns,”♦ one journalist noted. He saw dangers, though: “Intelligence, thus hastily gathered and transmitted, has also its drawbacks, and is not so trustworthy as the news which starts later and travels slower.” The relationship between the telegraph and the newspaper was symbiotic. Positive feedback loops amplified the effect. Because the telegraph was an information technology, it served as an agent of its own ascendency.
The global expansion of the telegraph continued to surprise even its backers. When the first telegraph office opened in New York City on Wall Street, its biggest problem was the Hudson River. The Morse system ran a line sixty miles up the eastern side until it reached a point narrow enough to stretch a wire across. Within a few years, though, an insulated cable was laid under the harbor. Across the English Channel, a submarine cable twenty-five miles long made the connection between Dover and Calais in 1851. Soon after, a knowledgeable authority warned: “All idea of connecting Europe with America, by lines extending directly across the Atlantic, is utterly impracticable and absurd.”♦ That was in 1852; the impossible was accomplished by 1858, at which point Queen Victoria and President Buchanan exchanged pleasantries and The New York Times announced “a result so practical, yet so inconceivable … so full of hopeful prognostics for the future of mankind … one of the grand way-marks in the onward and upward march of the human intellect.”♦ What was the essence of the achievement? “The transmission of thought, the vital impulse of matter.” The excitement was global but the effects were local. Fire brigades and police stations linked their communications. Proud shopkeepers advertised their ability to take telegraph orders.
Information that just two years earlier had taken days to arrive at its destination could now be there—anywhere—in seconds. This was not a doubling or tripling of transmission speed; it was a leap of many orders of magnitude. It was like the bursting of a dam whose presence had not even been known. The social consequences could not have been predicted, but some were observed and appreciated almost immediately. People’s sense of the weather began to change—weather, that is, as a generalization, an abstraction. Simple weather reports began crossing the wires on behalf of corn speculators: Derby, very dull; York, fine; Leeds, fine; Nottingham, no rain but dull and cold.♦ The very idea of a “weather report” was new. It required some approximation of instant knowledge of a distant place. The telegraph enabled people to think of weather as a widespread and interconnected affair, rather than an assortment of local surprises. “The phenomena of the atmosphere, the mysteries of meteors, the cause and effect of skiey combinations, are no longer matters of superstition or of panic to the husbandman, the sailor or the shepherd,”♦ noted an enthusiastic commentator in 1848:
The telegraph comes in to tell him, for his every-day uses and observances, not only that “fair weather cometh out of the north,” but the electric wire can tell him in a moment the character of the weather simultaneously in all quarters of our island.… In this manner, the telegraph may be made a vast national barometer, electricity becoming the handmaid of the mercury.
This was a transformative idea. In 1854 the government established a Meteorological Office in the Board of Trade. The department’s chief, Admiral Robert FitzRoy, formerly a captain of HMS Beagle, moved into an office on King Street, furnished it with barometers, aneroids, and stormglasses, and dispatched observers equipped with the same instruments to ports all around the coastline. They telegraphed their cloud and wind reports twice daily. FitzRoy began issuing weather predictions, which he dubbed “forecasts,” and in 1860 The Times began publishing these daily. Meteorologists began to understand that all great winds, when seen in the large, were circular, or at least “highly curved.”
The most fundamental concepts were now in play as a consequence of instantaneous communication between widely separated points. Cultural observers began to say that the telegraph was “annihilating” time and space. It “enables us to send communications, by means of the mysterious fluid, with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space,”♦ announced an American telegraph official in 1860. This was an exaggeration that soon became a cliché. The telegraph did seem to vitiate or curtail time in one specific sense: time as an obstacle or encumbrance to human intercourse. “For all practical purposes,” one newspaper announced, “time, in the transit, may be regarded as entirely eliminated.”♦ It was the same with space. “Distance and time have been so changed in our imaginations,” said Josiah Latimer Clark, an English telegraph engineer, “that the globe has been practically reduced in magnitude, and there can be no doubt that our conception of its dimensions is entirely different to that held by our forefathers.”♦
Formerly all time was local: when the sun was highest, that was noon. Only a visionary (or an astronomer) would know that people in a different place lived by a different clock. Now time could be either local or standard, and the distinction baffled most people. The railroads required standard time, and the telegraph made it feasible. For standard time to prevail took decades; the process could only begin in the 1840s, when the Astronomer Royal arranged wires from the Observatory in Greenwich to the Electric Telegraph Company in Lothbury, intending to synchronize the clocks of the nation. Previously, the state of the art in time-signaling technology was a ball dropped from a mast atop the observatory dome. When faraway places were coordinated in time, they could finally measure their longitude precisely. The key to measuring longitude was knowing the time someplace else and the distance to that place. Ships therefore carried clocks, preserving time in imperfect mechanical capsules. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition used the first Morse line in 1844 to locate the Battle Monument in Baltimore at 1 minute, 34.868 seconds east of the Capitol in Washington.♦
Far from annihilating time, synchrony extended its dominion. The very idea of synchrony, and the awareness that the idea was new, made heads spin. The New York Herald declared:
Professor Morse’s telegraph is not only an era in the transmission of intelligence, but it has originated in the mind an entirely new class of ideas, a new species of consciousness. Never before was any one conscious that he knew with certainty what events were at that moment passing in a distant city—40, 100, or 500 miles off.♦
Imagine, continued this exhilarated writer, that it is now 11 o’clock. The telegraph relays what a legislator is now saying in Washington.
It requires no small intellectual effort to realize that this is a fact that now is, and not one that has been.
This is a fact that now is.
History (and history making) changed, too. The telegraph caused the preservation of quantities of minutiae concerning everyday life. For a while, until it became impractical, the telegraph companies tried to maintain a record of every message. This was information storage without precedent. “Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting therefrom the salient features of the social and commercial life of England in the nineteenth century,” mused one essayist. “What might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?”♦ In 1845, after a year’s experience with the line between Washington and Baltimore, Alfred Vail attempted a catalogue of all the telegraph had conveyed thus far. “Much important information,” he wrote,
consisting of messages to and from merchants, members of Congress, officers of the government, banks, brokers, police officers; parties, who by agreement had met each other at the two stations, or had been sent for by one of the parties; items of news, election returns, announcement of deaths, inquiries respecting the health of families and individuals, the daily proceedings of the Senate and House of Representatives, orders for goods, inquiries respecting the sailing of vessels, proceedings of cases in the various courts, summoning of witnesses, messages in relation to special and express trains, invitations, the receipt of money at one station and its payment at the other, for persons requesting the transmission of funds from debtors, consultations of physicians …♦
These diverse items had never before been aggregated under one heading. The telegraph gave them their commonality. In patent applications and legal agreements, too, the inventors had reason to think about their topic in the broadest possible terms: e.g., the giving, printing, stamping, or otherwise transmitting of signals, or the sounding of alarms, or the communication of intelligence.♦
In this time of conceptual change, mental readjustments were needed to understand the telegraph itself. Confusion inspired anecdotes, which often turned on awkward new meanings of familiar terms: innocent words like send, and heavily laden ones, like message. There was the woman who brought a dish of sauerkraut into the telegraph office in Karlsruhe to be “sent” to her son in Rastatt. She had heard of soldiers being “sent” to the front by telegraph. There was the man who brought a “message” into the telegraph office in Bangor, Maine. The operator manipulated the telegraph key and then placed the paper on the hook. The customer complained that the message had not been sent, because he could still see it hanging on the hook. To Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, which recounted this story in 1873, the point was that even the “intelligent and well-informed” continued to find these matters inscrutable:
The difficulty of forming a clear conception of the subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses.♦
A message had seemed to be a physical object. That was always an illusion; now people needed consciously to divorce their conception of the message from the paper on which it was written. Scientists, Harper’s explained, will say that the electric current “carries a message,” but one must not imagine that anything—any thing—is transported. There is only “the action and reaction of an imponderable force, and the making of intelligible signals by its means at a distance.” No wonder people were misled. “Such language the world must, perhaps for a long time to come, continue to employ.”
The physical landscape changed, too. Wires everywhere made for strange ornamentation, on city streets and country roads. “Telegraphic companies are running a race to take possession of the air over our heads,”♦ wrote an English journalist, Andrew Wynter. “Look where we will aloft, we cannot avoid seeing either thick cables suspended by gossamer threads, or parallel lines of wire in immense numbers sweeping from post to post, fixed on the house-tops and suspended over long distances.” They did not for some time fade into the background. People looked at the wires and thought of their great invisible cargo. “They string an instrument against the sky,”♦ said Robert Frost, “Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken / Will run as hushed as when they were a thought.”
The wires resembled nothing in architecture and not much in nature. Writers seeking similes thought of spiders and their webs. They thought of labyrinths and mazes. And one more word seemed appropriate: the earth was being covered, people said, with an iron net-work. “A net-work of nerves of iron wire, strung with lightning, will ramify from the brain, New York, to the distant limbs and members,”♦ said the New York Tribune. “The whole net-work of wires,” wrote Harper’s, “all quivering from end to end with signals of human intelligence.”♦
Wynter offered a prediction. “The time is not distant,”♦ he wrote, “when everybody will be able to talk with everybody without going out of the house.” He meant “talk” metaphorically.
In more ways than one, using the telegraph meant writing in code.
The Morse system of dots and dashes was not called a code at first. It was just called an alphabet: “the Morse Telegraphic Alphabet,” typically. But it was not an alphabet. It did not represent sounds by signs. The Morse scheme took the alphabet as a starting point and leveraged it, by substitution, replacing signs with new signs. It was a meta-alphabet, an alphabet once removed. This process—the transferring of meaning from one symbolic level to another—already had a place in mathematics. In a way it was the very essence of mathematics. Now it became a familiar part of the human toolkit. Entirely because of the telegraph, by the late nineteenth century people grew comfortable, or at least familiar, with the idea of codes: signs used for other signs, words used for other words. Movement from one symbolic level to another could be called encoding.
Two motivations went hand in glove: secrecy and brevity. Short messages saved money—that was simple. So powerful was that impulse that English prose style soon seemed to be feeling the effects. Telegraphic and telegraphese described the new way of writing. Flowers of rhetoric cost too much, and some regretted it. “The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness,”♦ wrote Andrew Wynter:
“May I ask you to do me the favour” is 6d. for a distance of 50 miles. How many of those fond adjectives therefore must our poor fellow relentlessly strike out to bring his billet down to a reasonable charge?
Almost immediately, newspaper reporters began to contrive methods for transmitting more information with fewer billable words. “We early invented a short-hand system, or cipher,”♦ boasted one, “so arranged, that the receipts of produce and the sales and prices of all leading articles of breadstuffs, provisions, &c., could be sent from Buffalo and Albany daily, in twenty words, for both cities, which, when written out, would make one hundred or more words.” The telegraph companies tried to push back, on the grounds that private codes were gaming the system, but ciphers flourished. One typical system assigned dictionary words to whole phrases, organizing them semantically and alphabetically. For example, all words starting with B referred to the flour market: baal = “The transactions are smaller than yesterday”; babble = “There is a good business doing”; baby = “Western is firm, with moderate demand for home trade and export”; button = “market quiet and prices easier.” It was necessary, of course, for sender and recipient to work from identical word lists. To the telegraph operators themselves, the encoded messages looked like nonsense, and that, in itself, proved an extra virtue.
As soon as people conceived of sending messages by telegraph, they worried that their communication was exposed to the world—at the very least, to the telegraph operators, unreliable strangers who could not help but read the words they fed through their devices. Compared to handwritten letters, folded and sealed with wax, the whole affair seemed public and insecure—the messages passing along those mysterious conduits, the electric wires. Vail himself wrote in 1847, “The great advantage which this telegraph possesses in transmitting messages with the rapidity of lightning, annihilating time and space, would perhaps be much lessened in its usefulness, could it not avail itself of the application of a secret alphabet.”♦ There were, he said, “systems”—
by which a message may pass between two correspondents, through the medium of the telegraph, and yet the contents of that message remain a profound secret to all others, not excepting the operators of the telegraphic stations, through whose hands it must pass.
This was all very difficult. The telegraph served not just as a device but as a medium—a middle, intermediary state. The message passes through this medium. Distinct from the message, one must also consider the contents of that message. Even when the message must be exposed, the contents could be concealed. Vail explained what he meant by secret alphabet: an alphabet whose characters have been “transposed and interchanged.”
Then the representative of a, in the permanent alphabet, may be represented by y, or c, or x, in the secret alphabet; and so of every other letter.
Thus, “The firm of G. Barlow & Co. have failed” becomes “Ejn stwz ys & qhwkyf p iy jhan shtknr.” For less sensitive occasions, Vail proposed using abbreviated versions of common phrases. Instead of “give my love to,” he suggested sending “gmlt.” He offered a few more suggestions:
mhii My health is improving
shf Stocks have fallen
ymir Your message is received
wmietg When may I expect the goods?
wyegfef Will you exchange gold for eastern funds?
All these systems required prearrangement between sender and recipient: the message was to be supplemented, or altered, by preexisting knowledge shared at both ends. A convenient repository for this knowledge was a code book, and when the first Morse line opened for business, one of its key investors and promoters, the Maine congressman Francis O. J. Smith, known as Fog, produced one: The Secret Corresponding Vocabulary;♦ adapted for use to Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph: and also in conducting written correspondence, transmitted by the mails, or otherwise. It was nothing but a numbered, alphabetical list of 56,000 English words, Aaronic to zygodactylous, plus instructions. “We will suppose the person writing, and the person written to, are each in possession of a copy of this work,” Smith explained. “Instead of sending their communications in words, they send numbers only, or partly in numbers, and partly in words.” For greater security, they might agree in advance to add or subtract a private number of their own choosing, or different numbers for alternate words. “A few such conventional substitutes,” he promised, “will render the whole language a perfectly dead letter to all persons not conusant to the concerted arrangement.”
Cryptographers had a mysterious history, their secrets handed along in clandestine manuscripts, like the alchemists’. Now code making emerged into the light, exposed in the hardware of commerce, inspiring the popular imagination. In the succeeding decades, many other schemes were contrived and published. They ranged from penny pamphlets to volumes of hundreds of pages of densely packed type. From London came E. Erskine Scott’s Three Letter Code for Condensed Telegraphic and Inscrutably Secret Messages and Correspondence. Scott was an actuary and accountant and, like so many in the code business, a man evidently driven by an obsession with data. The telegraph opened up a world of possibilities for such people—cataloguers and taxonomists, wordsmiths and numerologists, completists of all kinds. Scott’s chapters included not only a vocabulary of common words and two-word combinations, but also geographic names, Christian names, names of all shares quoted on the London Stock Exchange, all the days in the year, all regiments belonging to the British army, registries of shipping, and the names of all the peers of the realm. Organizing and numbering all this data made possible a form of compression, too. Shortening messages meant saving money. Customers found that the mere substitution of numbers for words helped little if at all: it cost just as much to send “3747” as “azotite.” So code books became phrase books. Their object was a sort of packing of messages into capsules, impenetrable to prying eyes and suitable for efficient transmission. And of course, at the recipient’s end, for unpacking.
An especially successful volume in the 1870s and ’80s was The A B C Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code, devised by William Clauson-Thue.♦ He advertised his code to “financiers, merchants, shipowners, brokers, agents, &c.” His motto: “Simplicity and Economy Palpable, Secrecy Absolute.” Clauson-Thue, another information obsessive, tried to arrange the entire language—or at least the language of commerce—into phrases, and to organize the phrases by keyword. The result is a peculiar lexicographic achievement, a window into a nation’s economic life, and a trove of odd nuance and unwitting lyricism. For the keyword panic (assigned numbers 10054–10065), the inventory includes:
A great panic prevails in ———
The panic is settling down
The panic still continues
The worst of the panic is over
The panic may be considered over
For rain (11310–11330):
Cannot work on account of rain
The rain has done much good
The rain has done a great amount of damage
The rain is now pouring down in good earnest
Every prospect of the rain continuing
Rain much needed
Rain at times
Rainfall general
For wreck (15388–15403):
Parted from her anchors and became a wreck
I think it best to sell the wreck as it lies
Every attention will be made to save wreck
Must become a total wreck
Customs authorities have sold the wreck
Consul has engaged men to salve wreck
The world being full of things as well as words, he endeavored, too, to assign numbers to as many proper names as he could list: names of railways, banks, mines, commodities, vessels, ports, and stocks (British, colonial, and foreign).
As the telegraph networks spread under the oceans and across the globe, and international tariffs ran to many dollars per word, the code books thrived. Economy mattered even more than secrecy. The original trans-Atlantic rate was about one hundred dollars for a message—a “cable,” as it was metonymically called—of ten words. For not much less, messages could travel between England and India, by way of Turkey or Persia and Russia. To save on the tariff, clever middlemen devised a practice called “packing.” A packer would collect, say, four messages of five words each and bundle them into a fixed-price telegram of twenty words. The code books got bigger and they got smaller. In 1885 W. H. Beer & Company in Covent Garden published a popular Pocket Telegraphic Code, price one penny, containing “more than 300 one-word telegrams,” neatly organized by subject matter. Essential subjects were Betting (“To what amount shall I back for you at present odds?”), Bootmaker (“These boots don’t fit, send for them directly”), Washerwoman (“Call for the washing to-day”), and Weather—In Connexion with Voyages (“It is far too rough for you to cross to-day”). And a blank page was provided for “Secret Code. (Fill up by arrangement with friends.)” There were specialized codes for railways and yachts and trades from pharmacist to carpetmaker. The grandest and most expensive code books borrowed freely from one another. “It has been brought to the Author’s knowledge that some persons have purchased a single copy of the ‘A B C Telegraphic Code’ for service in compiling Codes of their own,”♦ complained Clauson-Thue. “The Author would intimate that such an operation is a breach of the Copyright Act, and liable to become a matter of legal and unpleasant procedure.” This was just bluster. By the turn of the century, the world’s telegraphers, through the medium of International Telegraphic Conferences held in Berne and in London, had systematized codes with words in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. The code books prospered and expanded through the first decades of the twentieth century and then vanished into obscurity.
Those who used the telegraph codes slowly discovered an unanticipated side effect of their efficiency and brevity. They were perilously vulnerable to the smallest errors. Because they lacked the natural redundancy of English prose—even the foreshortened prose of telegraphese—these cleverly encoded messages could be disrupted by a mistake in a single character. By a single dot, for that matter. For example, on June 16, 1887, a Philadelphia wool dealer named Frank Primrose telegraphed his agent in Kansas to say that he had bought—abbreviated in their agreed code as BAY—500,000 pounds of wool. When the message arrived, the key word had become BUY. The agent began buying wool, and before long the error cost Primrose $20,000, according to the lawsuit he filed against the Western Union Telegraph Company. The legal battle dragged on for six years, until finally the Supreme Court upheld the fine print on the back of the telegraph blank, which spelled out a procedure for protecting against errors:
To guard against mistakes or delays, the sender of a message should order it REPEATED; that is telegraphed back to the originating office for comparison.… Said company shall not be liable for mistakes in … any UNREPEATED message … nor in any case for errors in cipher or obscure messages.♦
The telegraph company had to tolerate ciphers but did not have to like them. The court found in favor of Primrose in the amount of $1.15, the price of sending the telegram.
Secret writing was as old as writing. When writing began, it was in itself secret to all but the few. As the mystery dissolved, people found new ways to keep their words privileged and recondite. They rearranged words into anagrams. They reversed their script in the mirror. They invented ciphers.
In 1641, just as the English Civil War began, an anonymous little book catalogued the many known methods of what it called “cryptographia.” These included special paper and ink:♦ the juice of lemons or onions, raw egg, or “the distilled Juice of Gloworms,” which might or might not be visible in the dark. Alternatively, writing could be obscured by substituting letters for other letters, or inventing new symbols, or writing from right to left, or “transposing each Letter, according to some unusual Order, as, suppose the first Letter should be at the latter End of the Line, the second at the Beginning, or the like.” Or a message could be written across two lines:
T e o l i r a e l m s f m s e s p l u o w e u t e l
h s u d e s r a l o t a i h d, u p y s r e m s y i d
The Souldiers are allmost famished, supply us or wee must yeild.
Through transposition and substitution of letters, the Romans and the Jews had devised other methods, more intricate and thus more obscure.
This little book was titled Mercury: or the Secret and Swift Messenger. Shewing, How a Man may with Privacy and Speed communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at any Distance. The author eventually revealed himself as John Wilkins, a vicar and mathematician, later to become master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a founder of the Royal Society. “He was a very ingenious man and had a very mechanical head,”♦ one contemporary said. “One of much and deep thinking,… lusty, strong grown, well set, broad shouldered.” He was also thorough. If he could not mention every cipher tried since ancient times, he nonetheless included all that could have been known to a scholar in seventeenth-century England. He surveyed secret writing both as a primer and a compendium.
For Wilkins the issues of cryptography stood near the fundamental problem of communication. He considered writing and secret writing as essentially the same. Leaving secrecy aside, he expressed the problem this way: “How a Man may with the greatest Swiftness and Speed, discover his Intentions to one that is far distant from him.”♦ By swiftness and speed he meant, in 1641, something philosophical; the birth of Isaac Newton was a year away. “There is nothing (we say) so swift as Thought,” he noted. Next to thought, the swiftest action seemed to be that of sight. As a clergyman, he observed that the swiftest motion of all must belong to angels and spirits. If only a man could send an angel on an errand, he could dispatch business at any distance. The rest of us, stuck with Organical Bodies, “cannot communicate their Thoughts so easie and immediate a way.” No wonder, Wilkins wrote, that angels are called messengers.
As a mathematician, he considered the problem from another side. He set out to determine how a restricted set of symbols—perhaps just two, three, or five—might be made to stand for a whole alphabet. They would have to be used in combination. For example, a set of five symbols—a, b, c, d, e—used in pairs could replace an alphabet of twenty-five letters:
“According to which,” wrote Wilkins, “these words, I am betrayed, may be thus described: Bd aacb abaedddbaaecaead.” So even a small symbol set could be arranged to express any message at all. However, with a small symbol set, a given message requires a longer string of characters—“more Labour and Time,” he wrote. Wilkins did not explain that 25 = 52, nor that three symbols taken in threes (aaa, aab, aac,…) produce twenty-seven possibilities because 33 = 27. But he clearly understood the underlying mathematics. His last example was a binary code, awkward though this was to express in words:
Two Letters of the Alphabet being transposed through five Places, will yield thirty two Differences, and so will more than serve for the Four and twenty Letters; unto which they may be thus applied.
Two symbols. In groups of five. “Yield thirty two Differences.”
That word, differences, must have struck Wilkins’s readers (few though they were) as an odd choice. But it was deliberate and pregnant with meaning. Wilkins was reaching for a conception of information in its purest, most general form. Writing was only a special case: “For in the general we must note, That whatever is capable of a competent Difference, perceptible to any Sense, may be a sufficient Means whereby to express the Cogitations.”♦ A difference could be “two Bells of different Notes”; or “any Object of Sight, whether Flame, Smoak, &c.”; or trumpets, cannons, or drums. Any difference meant a binary choice. Any binary choice began the expressing of cogitations. Here, in this arcane and anonymous treatise of 1641, the essential idea of information theory poked to the surface of human thought, saw its shadow, and disappeared again for four hundred years.
The contribution of the dilettantes is what the historian of cryptography David Kahn calls the excited era triggered by the advent of the telegraph.♦ A new public interest in ciphers arose just as the subject bloomed in certain intellectual circles. Ancient methods of secret writing appealed to an odd assortment of people, puzzle makers and game players, mathematically or poetically inclined. They analyzed ancient methods of secret writing and invented new ones. Theorists debated who should prevail, the best code maker or the best code breaker. The great American popularizer of cryptography was Edgar Allan Poe. In his fantastic tales and magazine essays he publicized the ancient art and boasted of his own skill as a practitioner. “We can scarcely imagine a time when there did not exist a necessity, or at least a desire,”♦ he wrote in Graham’s Magazine in 1841, “of transmitting information from one individual to another, in such manner as to elude general comprehension.” For Poe, code making was more than just a historical or technical enthusiasm; it was an obsession. It reflected his sense of how we communicate our selves to the world. Code makers and writers are trafficking in the same goods. “The soul is a cypher, in the sense of a cryptograph; and the shorter a cryptograph is, the more difficulty there is in comprehension,”♦ he wrote. Secrecy was in Poe’s nature; he preferred mystery to transparency.
“Secret intercommunication must have existed almost contemporaneously with the invention of letters,” he declared. This was for Poe a bridge between science and the occult, between the rational mind and the savant.♦ To analyze cryptography—“a serious thing, as the means of imparting information”—required a special form of mental power, a penetrating mind, and might well be taught in academies. He said again and again that “a peculiar mental action is called into play.” He published as challenges to his readers a series of substitution ciphers.
Along with Poe, Jules Verne and Honoré de Balzac also introduced ciphers into their fiction. In 1868, Lewis Carroll had a card printed on two sides with what he called “The Telegraph-Cipher,” which employed a “key-alphabet” and a “message-alphabet,”♦ to be transposed according to a secret word agreed on by the correspondents and carried in their memories. But the most advanced cryptanalyst in Victorian England was Charles Babbage. The process of substituting symbols, crossing levels of meaning, lay near the heart of so many issues. And he enjoyed the challenge. “One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering,” he asserted, “is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher. I have also observed that the cleverer the person, the more intimate is his conviction.”♦ He believed that himself, at first, but later switched to the side of the code breakers. He planned an authoritative work to be known as The Philosophy of Decyphering but never managed to complete it. He did solve, among others, a polyalphabetic cipher known as the Vigenère, le chiffre indéchiffrable, thought to be the most secure in Europe.♦ As in his other work, he applied algebraic methods, expressing cryptanalysis in the form of equations. Even so, he remained a dilettante and knew it.
When Babbage attacked cryptography with a calculus, he was employing the same tools he had explored more conventionally in their home, mathematics, and less conventionally in the realm of machinery, where he created a symbolism for the moving parts of gears and levers and switches. Dionysius Lardner had said of the mechanical notation, “The various parts of the machinery being once expressed on paper by proper symbols, the enquirer dismisses altogether from his thoughts the mechanism itself and attends only to the symbols … an almost metaphysical system of abstract signs, by which the motion of the hand performs the office of the mind.”♦ Two younger Englishmen, Augustus De Morgan and George Boole, turned the same methodology to work on an even more abstract material: the propositions of logic. De Morgan was Babbage’s friend and Ada Byron’s tutor and a professor at University College, London. Boole was the son of a Lincolnshire cobbler and a lady’s maid and became, by the 1840s, a professor at Queen’s College, Cork. In 1847 they published separately and simultaneously books that amounted to the greatest milestone in the development of logic since Aristotle: Boole’s Mathematical Analysis of Logic, Being an Essay Towards a Calculus of Deductive Reasoning, and De Morgan’s Formal Logic: or, the Calculus of Inference, Necessary and Probable. The subject, esoteric as it was, had stagnated for centuries.
De Morgan knew more about the scholastic traditions of the subject, but Boole was the more original and free-thinking mathematician. By post, for years, they exchanged ideas about converting language, or truth, into algebraic symbols. X could mean “cow” and Y “horse.” That might be one cow, or a member of the set of all cows. (The same?) In the algebraic fashion the symbols were to be manipulated. XY could be “name of everything which is both X and Y” while X,Y stood in for “name of everything which is either X or Y.”♦ Simple enough—but language is not simple and complications reared up. “Now some Zs are not Xs, the ZYs,”♦ wrote De Morgan at one point. “But they are nonexistent. You may say that nonexistents are not Xs. A nonexistent horse is not even a horse; and (a fortiori?) not a cow.”
He added wistfully, “I do not despair of seeing you give meaning to this new kind of negative quantity.” He did not post this and he did not throw it away.
Boole thought of his system as a mathematics without numbers. “It is simply a fact,”♦ he wrote, “that the ultimate laws of logic—those alone on which it is possible to construct a science of logic—are mathematical in their form and expression, although not belonging to the mathematics of quantity.” The only numbers allowed, he proposed, were zero and one. It was all or nothing: “The respective interpretation of the symbols 0 and 1 in the system of logic are Nothing and Universe.”♦ Until now logic had belonged to philosophy. Boole was claiming possession on behalf of mathematics. In doing so, he devised a new form of encoding. Its code book paired two types of symbolism, each abstracted far from the world of things. On one side was a set of characters drawn from the formalism of mathematics: p’s and q’s, +’s and –’s, braces and brackets. On the other were operations, propositions, relations ordinarily expressed in the fuzzy and mutable speech of everyday life: words about truth and falsity, membership in classes, premises and conclusions. There were “particles”: if, either, or. These were the elements of Boole’s credo:
That Language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought.
The elements of which all language consists are signs or symbols.
Words are signs. Sometimes they are said to represent things; sometimes the operations by which the mind combines together the simple notions of things into complex conceptions.
Words … are not the only signs which we are capable of employing. Arbitrary marks, which speak only to the eye, and arbitrary sounds or actions … are equally of the nature of signs.♦
The encoding, the conversion from one modality to the other, served a purpose. In the case of Morse code, the purpose was to turn everyday language into a form suitable for near-instantaneous transmission across miles of copper wire. In the case of symbolic logic, the new form was suitable for manipulation by a calculus. The symbols were like little capsules, protecting their delicate cargo from the wind and fog of everyday communication. How much safer to write:
1 − x = y(1 − z) + z(1 − y) + (1 − y)(1 − z)
than the real-language proposition for which, in a typical Boolean example, it stood:
Unclean beasts are all which divide the hoof without chewing the cud, all which chew the cud without dividing the hoof, and all which neither divide the hoof nor chew the cud.♦
The safety came in no small part from draining the words of meaning. Signs and symbols were not just placeholders; they were operators, like the gears and levers in a machine. Language, after all, is an instrument.
It was seen distinctly now as an instrument with two separate functions: expression and thought. Thinking came first, or so people assumed. To Boole, logic was thought—polished and purified. He chose The Laws of Thought as the title for his 1854 masterwork. Not coincidentally, the telegraphists also felt they were generating insight into messaging within the brain. “A word is a tool for thinking, before the thinker uses it as a signal for communicating his thought,”♦ asserted an essayist in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1873.
Perhaps the most extended and important influence which the telegraph is destined to exert upon the human mind is that which it will ultimately work out through its influence on language.… By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage over indirect, words of precise meaning the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere at a disadvantage.
Boole’s influence was subtle and slow. He corresponded only briefly with Babbage; they never met. One of his champions was Lewis Carroll, who, at the very end of his life, a quarter century after Alice in Wonderland, wrote two volumes of instruction, puzzles, diagrams, and exercises in symbolic logic. Although his symbolism was impeccable, his syllogisms ran toward whimsy:
(1) Babies are illogical;
(2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile;
(3) Illogical persons are despised.
(Concl.) Babies cannot manage crocodiles.♦
The symbolic version—
, i.e. 
—having been suitably drained of meaning, allowed the user to reach the desired conclusion without tripping over awkward intermediate propositions along the lines of “babies are despised.”
As the century turned, Bertrand Russell paid George Boole an extraordinary compliment: “Pure mathematics was discovered by Boole, in a work which he called the Laws of Thought.”♦ It has been quoted often. What makes the compliment extraordinary is the seldom quoted disparagement that follows on its heels:
He was also mistaken in supposing that he was dealing with the laws of thought: the question how people actually think was quite irrelevant to him, and if his book had really contained the laws of thought, it was curious that no one should ever have thought in such a way before.
One might almost think Russell enjoyed paradoxes.
♦ But Count Miot de Melito claimed in his memoirs that Chappe submitted his idea to the War Office with the name tachygraphe (“swift writer”) and that he, Miot, proposed télégraphe instead—which “has become, so to speak, a household word.”
