The Information (20 page)

During the Great Exhibition of 1851, when England showcased its industrial achievement in a Crystal Palace, Babbage placed an oil lamp with a moveable shutter in an upstairs window at Dorset Street to create an “occulting light” apparatus that blinked coded signals to passersby. He drew up a standardized system for lighthouses to use in sending numerical signals and posted twelve copies to, as he said, “the proper authorities of the great maritime countries.” In the United States, the Congress approved $5,000 for a trial program of Babbage’s system. He studied sun signals and “zenith-light signals” flashed by mirrors, and Greenwich time signals for transmission to mariners.
^♦
For communicating between stranded ships and rescuers on shore, he proposed that all nations adopt a standard list of a hundred questions and answers, assigned numbers, “to be printed on cards, and nailed up on several parts of every vessel.” Similar signals, he suggested, could help the military, the police, the railways, or even, “for various social purposes,” neighbors in the country.

These purposes were far from obvious. “For what purposes will the electric telegraph become useful?” the king of Sardinia, Charles Albert, asked Babbage in 1840. Babbage searched his mind for an illustration, “and at last I pointed out the probability that, by means of the electric telegraphs, his Majesty’s fleet might receive warning of coming storms.…”

As for the engine, it had to be forgotten before it was remembered. It had no obvious progeny. It rematerialized like buried treasure and inspired a sense of puzzled wonder. With the computer era in full swing, the historian Jenny Uglow felt in Babbage’s engines “a different sense of anachronism.”
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Such failed inventions, she wrote, contain “ideas that lie like yellowing blueprints in dark cupboards, to be stumbled on afresh by later generations.”

Meant first to generate number tables, the engine in its modern form instead rendered number tables obsolete. Did Babbage anticipate that? He did wonder how the future would make use of his vision. He guessed that a half century would pass before anyone would try again to create a general-purpose computing machine. In fact, it took most of a century for the necessary substrate of technology to be laid down. “If, unwarned by my example,” he wrote in 1864, “any man shall undertake and shall succeed in really constructing an engine embodying in itself the whole of the executive department of mathematical analysis upon different principles or by simpler mechanical means, I have no fear of leaving my reputation in his charge, for he alone will be fully able to appreciate the nature of my efforts and the value of their results.”
^♦

As he looked to the future, he saw a special role for one truth above all: “the maxim, that knowledge is power.” He understood that literally. Knowledge “is itself the generator of physical force,” he declared. Science gave the world steam, and soon, he suspected, would turn to the less tangible power of electricity: “Already it has nearly chained the ethereal fluid.” And he looked further:

Some years before his death, he told a friend that he would gladly give up whatever time he had left, if only he could be allowed to live for three days, five centuries in the future.

As for his young friend Ada, countess of Lovelace, she died many years before him—a protracted, torturous death from cancer of the womb, her agony barely lessened by laudanum and cannabis. For a long time her family kept from her the truth of her illness. In the end she knew she was dying. “They say that ‘
coming events cast their shadows before
,’ ”
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she wrote to her mother. “May they not sometimes cast their
lights
before?” They buried her next to her father.

She, too, had a last dream of the future: “my being
in time
an
Autocrat
, in my own way.”
^♦
She would have regiments, marshaled before her. The iron rulers of the earth would have to give way. And of what would her regiments consist? “I do not at present divulge. I have however the hope that they will be most
harmoniously
disciplined troops;—consisting of vast
numbers
, & marching in irresistible power to the sound of
Music
. Is not this very mysterious? Certainly
my
troops must consist of
numbers
, or they can have no existence at all.… But then,
what
are these
Numbers
? There is a riddle—”

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Leibniz dreamed grandly of mechanizing algebra and even reason itself. “We may give final praise to the machine,” he wrote. “It will be desirable to all who are engaged in computations … the managers of financial affairs, the administrators of others’ estates, merchants, surveyors, geographers, navigators, astronomers.… For it is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation.”

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Another guest, Charles Dickens, put something of Babbage into the character of Daniel Doyce in Little Dorrit. Doyce is an inventor mistreated by the government he tries to serve: “He is well known as a very ingenious man.… He perfects an invention (involving a very curious secret process) of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures. I won’t say how much money it cost him, or how many years of his life he had been about it, but he brought it to perfection.” Dickens added: “A composed and unobtrusive self-sustainment was noticeable in Daniel Doyce—a calm knowledge that what was true must remain true.”

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)
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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:

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?”
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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.