The Victorian Internet (13 page)

As troops departed for the Crimean peninsula following the declaration of war on Russia by France and Britain in March 1854,
the War Ministry in London issued precise details of the number and nature of the forces being deployed. This information
was faithfully reproduced in the
Times,
which wanted to capitalize on enthusiasm for the war by providing its readers with as much information as possible. Normally
the troops would have outstripped the news of their arrival. But with the telegraph network reaching across Europe to the
enemy in St. Petersburg, daily reports of the British plans, lifted from that day's copy of the
Times,
could be telegraphed to Russia.

The incompetence of the Rritish government served to complicate matters; some officials quickly realized the dangers of revealing
too much information, while others thought that being open with the newspapers was a good way to maintain morale and show
that the government was responsive to public enthusiasm for the war. Inevitably, the government and the
Times
were soon at loggerheads. The Rritish commander in chief, General Simpson, com plained: "Our spies give us all manner of reports,
while the enemy never spends a farthing for information. He gets it all for five pence from a London paper."

In addition to being the first war in which a government had to take the existence of the telegraph into account when making
news public, the Crimean War was the first in which the telegraph played a strategic role. Initially, messages were sent by
telegraph as far as Marseilles, and then by steamer to the Crimea, arriving as much as three weeks later. Rather than wait
for a private telegraph company to step in, the Rritish and French governments decided to extend the telegraph network to
the Crimea themselves. The line was extended overland from Bucharest, the farthest extremity of the Austrian network, to Varna
on the Black Sea, and a British company was then contracted to lay a 340-mile submarine cable across to the Crimean peninsula.
For the first time, French and British governments could communicate directly with commanders on a distant battlefield. This
was further bad news for General Simpson, who was so exasperated by trivial inquiries from his incompetent superiors in London
that he is said to have complained that "the confounded telegraph has ruined everything."

For who was better placed to make strategic decisions: the commander at the scene or his distant superiors? In his history
of the Crimean War, the historian A. W. King-lake referred to the telegraph as "that new and dangerous magic" that played
into the hands of meddling officials who were nowhere near the battlefield. "Our government did not abuse it," he declared,
"but, exposed to swift dictation from Paris, the French had to learn what it was to carry on a war with a Louis Napoleon planted
at one of the ends of the wire, and at the other, a commander like Canrobert, who did not dare to meet Palace strategy with
respectful evasions, still less with plain, resolute words."

The telegraph was to cause further complications when it was used to send reports to London from the front revealing the chaotic
nature of the campaign. The war was very badly organized, and although public sentiment in Britain was in favor of military
action, there was widespread exasperation at the government's mismanagement, spelled out in dispatches from the front line
by the
Times's
reporter William Howard Russell. He exposed stories of soldiers being sent to the front wrongly or inadequately equipped,
and highlighted the lack of proper medical support (which led to a public appeal that funded Florence Nightingale's mercy
mission). It was perhaps hardly surprising that the
Times
was not allowed to use the Rlack Sea cable to send back its stories. Instead, reports were sent by steamer to Varna or Constantinople
and then by wire to London.

The telegraph had annihilated the distance between the soldiers at the front and the readers back home, and between the government
and its generals. Rather less conveniently, it had also annihilated the distance between the enemy capitals. Suddenly, the
world had shrunk— something that diplomats found particularly hard to swallow.

T
RADITIONALLY, diplomats prefer slow, measured responses to events, but the telegraph encouraged instant reaction—"and I do
not know that with our business it is very desirable that it should be so," warned Edmond Hammond, a British diplomat at the
time of the Crimean War. He feared that diplomats would end up responding to "off-hand points which had much better be considered."
Charles Mazade, a French historian, even went so far as to suggest that the Franco Prussian War of 1870—71 was a direct result
of diplomats reacting too hastily to telegraphic dispatches. But they had no choice; once the newspapers got hold of news,
they would demand a statement from the government, which would then fond its way into the hands of foreign governments via
the media, circumventing conventional diplomatic channels.

There was only one thing for it: Diplomats would have to embrace the telegraph. So they did, albeit slowly. Until 1859, the
British Foreign Ofhce was just another customer at the telegraph office, and sent messages only during business hours; but
by 1870, there were permanent lines installed at the Foreign and Colonial offices. Some officials were so keen on using the
telegraph that they even had lines installed at their London homes and country houses, so that they could stay in touch with
goings-on around the world. The effect was to centralize power in London; and for officials in distant countries who found
their independence from central government undermined by the telegraph, the new technology was a curse. Sir Horace Rumbold,
the British ambassador in Vienna, lamented "the telegraphic demoralization of those who formerly had to act for themselves."

But despite its adoption by diplomats, the telegraph was used to order troops into battle just as often as it was used to
defuse a crisis. It was widely deployed during the American Civil War, with soldiers on each side stringing up a total of
15,000 miles of telegraph wire as they advanced, and engaging in much skulduggery with tapped wires and secret codes. Similarly,
the telegraph proved its value as a military tool in Europe, where it was used by the Prussians to coordinate a pincer movement
that led directly to their victory over the French at Konniggratz.

Nevertheless, many people were still fervent believers in the peacemaking potential of the telegraph. In 1894, Sir John Pender,
chairman of the company that had previously been the Gutta Percha Company and is known today as Cable & Wireless, suggested
that telegraphy had "prevented diplomatic ruptures and consequent war, and been instrumental in promoting peace and happiness.
. . . no time was allowed for the growth of bad feeling or the nursing of a grievance. The cable nipped the evil of misunderstanding
leading to war in the bud."

Well, sort of. But sometimes misunderstanding was deliberate. In 1898, the Fashoda Incident, a standoff between the British
and French armies in Sudan, illustrated the new power of information—and disinformation. French forces led by Major Jean-Baptiste
Marchand were crossing Africa with the intention of laying claim to land from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, while a rival British
expedition led by Lord Kitchener was hoping to establish control over the whole of East Africa, from Cairo to the southern
Cape. Inevitably, the paths of the two armies crossed—at the Sudanese village of Fashoda. Rather than risk starting a war
between two major powers, Kitchener and Marchand decided that the whole business was best left to the governments of France
and Rritain to sort out through diplomatic channels.

But Kitchener had a crucial advantage over Marchand: access to the British-controlled Egyptian telegraph network. He was able
to send to London an immediate report on the situation, which traveled via the Egyptian railway telegraph network and then
by submarine cable. He then followed up with a more detailed report, in which he suggested that Marchand's forces, which were
in fact comparable in strength to his own, were demoralized, anxious, and in danger of running out of water—none of which
was strictly true. But Marchand's only means of communication with his superiors in Paris was to send a messenger overland
to the Atlantic coast and then on by sea—a process that would have taken nine months. As a result, the first the French government
heard of the matter was when the British ambassador in Paris read Kitchener's report to the French foreign minister. Anxious
to hear Marchand's side of the story, the French asked for permission to communicate with Fashoda via the British-controlled
telegraph lines. The British refused but offered a compromise: If Marchand sent a messenger to Cairo, he could send messages
from there. In the month it took for Marchand's representative to reach Cairo and file his report, the French had only Kitchener's
version of events to go on, and took the decision to back down. The telegraph had, arguably, prevented bloodshed, if only
through the use of misinformation.

O
PTIMISM ABOUT THE peacemaking potential of the telegraph was still widespread at the close of the century, even though there
was no evidence that it had made any real difference one way or the other. "If the peoples have been brought more in touch
with each other, so also have their rulers and statesmen," wrote the British electrician and telegraph expert Charles Bright
in his book,
Submarine Telegraphs,
published in 1898. "An entirely new and much-improved method of conducting diplomatic relations between one country and another
has come into use with the telegraph wire and cable. The facility and rapidity with which one government is now enabled to
know the 'mind'—or, at any rate, the professed mind—of another, has often been the means of averting diplomatic ruptures and
consequent wars during the last few decades. At hrst sight, the contrary result might have been anticipated; but, on the whole,
experience distinctly pronounces in favour of the pacific effects of telegraphy."

Further optimism arose from the feeling of shared experience felt by newspaper readers around the world as they followed unfolding
events. One such example was the slow and lingering death of President James Garfteld in 1881, two months after being shot
and wounded.

In an article published in 1881,
Scientific American
assessed the "moral influence of the telegraph," which had enabled a global community to receive regular updates about his
condition. Citing this as "a signal demonstration of the kinship of humanity," the article explained how "the touch of the
telegraph key welded human sympathy and made possible its manifestation in a common universal, simultaneous heart throb. We
have just seen the civilized world gathered as one family around a common sick bed, hope and fear alternately fluctuating
in unison the world over as hopeful or alarming bulletins passed with electric pulsations over the continents and under the
seas." It was, the magazine declared, "a spectacle unparalleled in history; a spectacle impossible on so grand a scale before,
and indicative of a day when science shall have so blended, interwoven and unified human thoughts and interests that the feeling
of universal kinship shall be, not a spasmodic outburst of occasional emotion, but constant and controlling, the usual, everyday,
abiding feeling of all men toward all men."

This sort of hyperbole shows just how easy it was to assume that world peace would inevitably follow from shared experience.
As one writer put it in 1878, the telegraph "gave races of men in various far-separated climes a sense of unity. In a very
remarkable degree the telegraph confederated human sympathies and elevated the conception of human brotherhood. By it the
peoples of the world were made to stand closer together." The rapid distribution of news was thought to promote universal
peace, truthfulness, and mutual understanding. In order to understand your fellow men, you really couldn't have too much news.

Or could you? Not everyone wanted to know what was going on in far-flung countries. The precedence given to what it saw as
irrelevant foreign news over important local stories even led the
Alpena Echo,
a small newspaper in Michigan, to cut off its daily telegraph service in protest. According to a contemporary account, this
was because "it could not tell why the telegraph company caused it to be sent a full account of a flood in Shanghai, a massacre
in Calcutta, a sailor fight in Bombay, hard frosts in Siberia, a missionary banquet in Madagascar, the price of kangaroo leather
from Borneo, and a lot of nice cheerful news from the Archipelagoes—and not a line about the Muskegon fire." The seeds had
been sown for a new problem: information overload.

10.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

At its very birth, the telegraph system became the handmaiden of commerce.

—NATIONAL TELEGRAPH REVIEW AND

OPERATOR'S
COMPANION,
1853

I
S MORE INFORMATION always a good thing? Certainly in business, the more you know the better, and the more information you
have access to, the greater your advantage over your competitors. Knowledge—about distant markets, the rise and fall of foreign
empires, the failure of a crop—is, quite literally, worth money. But those in business, traditionally thirsty for the latest
news, got more than they bargained for from the telegraph.

Messages between New York and Chicago, which had previously taken a month to arrive, could be delivered al most instantly;
national and global markets were galvanized by the increasing flow of information. Any business that wanted to stay competitive
had no choice but to embrace the new technology. The result was an irreversible acceleration in the pace of business life,
which has continued to this day. And it led to a new and unexpected problem, as W. E. Dodge, a New York businessman, explained
in a speech in 1868. "If the army and navy, diplomacy, science, literature and the press can claim special interest in the
telegraph, surely the merchant must have as deep an interest," he said, "but I am not prepared to say that it has proved to
be an unmixed blessing."

Before the telegraph, Dodge explained, New York merchants dealing in international commerce received updates from their foreign
associates once or twice a month, though the information obtained in this way was usually several weeks old by the time it
arrived. Those involved in national trade would be visited by their country customers twice a year on their semiannual visits
to the city, and spent the summer and winter resting, looking over accounts and making plans for the future. "Comparatively,
they had an easy time," said Dodge.

"But now all this is changed, and there are doubts whether the telegraph has been so good a friend to the merchant as many
have supposed. Now, reports of the principal markets of the world are published every day, and our customers are continually
posted by telegram. Instead of making a few large shipments in a year, the merchant must keep up constant action, multiplying
his business over and over again. He has to keep up constant intercourse with distant correspondents, knows in a few weeks
the result of shipments which a few years ago would not have been known for months, orders the proceeds invested in commodities,
the value of which is well understood, and which are again sold before their arrival. He is thus kept in continual excitement,
without time for quiet and rest.

"The merchant goes home after a day of hard work and excitement to a late dinner, trying amid the family circle to forget
business, when he is interrupted by a telegram from London, directing, perhaps, the purchase in San Francisco of 20,000 barrels
of flour, and the poor man must dispatch his dinner as hurriedly as possible in order to send off his message to California.
The businessman of the present day must be continually on the jump, the slow express train will not answer his purpose, and
the poor merchant has no other way in which to work to secure a living for his family. He
must
use the telegraph."

The information supplied by the telegraph was like a drug to businessmen, who swiftly became addicted. In combination with
the railways, which could move goods quickly from one place to another, the rapid supply of information dramatically changed
the way business was done.

Suddenly, the price of goods and the speed with which they could be delivered became more important than their geographic
location. Tradesmen could have several potential suppliers or markets at their disposal and were able to widen their horizons
and deal directly with people whom it would have taken days to reach by mail. Direct transactions between producers and customers
were made possible without having to go through middlemen; retailers, farmers, and manufacturers found that by bypassing intermediaries
they could offer more competitive prices and save on commissions paid to wholesalers. Suppliers could keep smaller inventories,
since there was less need to guard against uncertainties, and stock could be ordered and replenished quickly. Telegraphy and
commerce thrived in a virtuous circle. "The telegraph is used by commercial men to almost as great an extent as the mail,"
remarked the superintendent of a telegraph line from Wall Street to Boston in 1851.

Those places beyond the reach of the network in the early days were acutely aware of their disadvantage. "The telegraph has
become one of the essential means of commercial transactions," declared the
St. Louis Republican
in 1847. "Commerce, wherever lines exist, is carried on by means of it, and it is impossible, in the nature of things, that
St. Louis merchants and businessmen can compete with those of other cities if they are without it. Steam is one means of commerce;
the telegraph now is another, and a man may as well attempt to carry on successful trade by means of the old flatboat and
keel against a steamboat, as to transact business by the use of the mails against the telegraph."

The same year, the business journalist J. D. B. De Bow noted in
The Commercial Review
"the almost incredible instances of the facilities for dispatch in business by telegraph. Every day affords instances of the
advantages which our business men derive from the use of the telegraph. Operations are made in one day with its aid, by repeated
communications, which could not be done in from two to four weeks by mail—enabling them to make purchases and sales which
otherwise would be of no benefit to them, in consequence of the length of time consumed in negotia­tions."

The impact of the telegraph on commerce was greatest in the United States where a vast telegraph and rail network soon spanned
the continent. "In a country in which business is spread over a vast area, and thousands of miles interpose between one commercial
emporium and another, the telegraph answers to a use the complexion of which is unique," declared De Bow.

In Europe, the telegraph was seen as a public utility, and the telegraph industry wanted to maintain a balance between business
and public use of the telegraph. As a result, social use of the network was more widespread than in the United States. One
writer, Gardiner Hubbard, described the American telegraph system as "peculiarly a business system; eighty per cent of the
messages are on business matters. . . . the managers of the telegraph know that their business customers want the quickest
and best service, and care more for dispatch than low tariffs. Thus the great difference between the telegraph systems of
Europe and America is that [in Europe], the telegraph is used principally for social correspondence, here by businessmen for
business purposes."

The telegraph was nonetheless embraced by business in Europe. In Britain, for example, fishermen and fish traders used it
to notify markets of catches and to determine market prices—something that was particularly important given the perishable
nature of the goods. In Aberdeen, fish merchants were able to receive orders by telegraph while they attended sales, thanks
to a pneumatic tube system that linked the fish market to the main post office. Similarly, different towns that dealt with
the same commodities—such as Glasgow and Middlesborough, both of which were involved in the iron trade—became closely knit
by the telegraph. The stock exchanges of principal towns were connected with the Stock Exchange in London, which was in turn
linked to other exchanges around Europe and the rest of the world.

The telegraph made world produce markets a possibility; it was used to send cotton and corn prices between Liverpool, New
York, and Chicago. Metal markets, ship brokering, and insurance became global businesses.

Business and telegraphy were inextricably linked. As one writer put it in 1878: "All over the earth, in every clime, throughout
the territories of every civilized nation, wherever human language is known, or commerce has marts, or the smelting furnaces
flash out their ever-burning fores, or the groan of giant engines work out the products of human skill or tell the story of
human industry, the electric wires which web the world in a network of throbbing life utter their voices in all their varied
tongues."

T
HE MORE INDUSTTY and commerce came to rely upon the telegraph, the more profitable the telegraph industry itself became.
Indeed, the extent of their interdependence was such that in 1870, William Orton, president of the Western Union company,
which by that time had a near monopoly of the telegraph industry in the United States, told a congressional committee that
the level of telegraphic traffic was as good a means as any of measuring economic activity.

"The fact is, the telegraph lives upon commerce," he said. "It is the nervous system of the commercial system. If you will
sit down with me at my office for twenty minutes, I will show you what the condition of business is at any given time in any
locality in the United States. This last year the grain business in the West has been very dull; as a consequence, the receipts
from telegrams from that section have fallen off twenty-five per cent. Business in the South has been gaining a little, month
by month, for the last year or so; and now the telegraphic receipts from that quarter give stronger indications of returning
prosperity than at any previous time since the war."

Orton's statement also reflected the extent to which his company dominated the telegraph industry. Run as a franchise operation,
much like a fast-food restaurant chain today, Western Union indirectly employed thousands of operators who worked for the
railroad companies that were its franchisees, leading to widespread concern that too much power was concentrated in the hands
of one company. Ry 1880, Western Union handled 80 percent of the country's message traffic and was making a huge profit.

(Not surprisingly, the company regarded its near monopoly as a good thing. Far from encouraging progress, Orton claimed, competition
between rival companies had actively hindered it, resulting in a lack of "unity and despatch in conducting the telegraph business.
. . . the public failed to secure everywhere the benefits of direct and reliable communication. Telegraph correspondence was
not only burdened with several tariffs, but with unnecessary delays for copying and retransmission at the termini of each
local line. Another serious evil which the system had to contend with was the existence of competing lines upon the more important
routes. The effect is to augment the expenses without increasing the business." Western Union insisted that its monopoly was
in everyone's interests, even if it was unpopular, because it would encourage standardization. "Notwithstanding the clamor
in regard to telegraphic monopoly," the company's in-house journal declared in 1871, "it is the result of an inevitable law
that business shall be mainly conducted under one great orga­nization.")

In Europe, the telegraphs had in most countries been government controlled from the start, and Rritain's private telegraph
companies were taken into public control and absorbed by the Post Office in 1869. Having a single organization controlling
a whole country's network did, admittedly, make a lot of sense; in Rritain, for example, it meant that a centralized "nickname"
system could be introduced. Under this scheme, companies and individuals could reserve a special word as their "telegraphic
ad­dress" to make life easier for anyone who wanted to send them a telegram. Telegraphic addresses were easier to remember
than full postal addresses, and after 1885 the pricing scheme was changed so that it cost more to send a message to someone
with a longer address. Telegraphic addresses were assigned on a first-come, first-served basis, and a book in the main telegraph
office of each town listed them alphabetically and gave the actual postal delivery address in each case. More than 35,000
telegraphic addresses had been registered at the Post Office by 1889, generating a hefty income, since an annual charge was
payable for each one.

The telegraphic address was just one example of how businesses were prepared to pay extra for the latest telegraphic innovations.
Private leased lines, which ran from telegraph exchanges to the post rooms of large offices and government buildings to speed
the sending and delivery of telegrams, became increasingly popular. And starting in the 1870s, large companies with several
offices began to lease private lines for internal communication between different sites, since internal messages could then
be sent for free, and large organizations could be centrally controlled from a head office. This led to the rise of large,
hierarchical companies and financial organizations—big business as we know it today.

Another of the special premium services offered by telegraph companies eager to exploit the craving for information was the
delivery of regular bulletins. Companies could subscribe to a digest of the morning papers or a summary of the most recent
market prices. But for some businesses, a daily or twice-daily report of the price of a commodity was not enough; they needed
a more frequent fix. The demand for more frequently updated information led to the development of stock tickers: machines
that spewed out information in a continuous, merciless flow.

I
n TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY, investors seek refuge in gold. The vast increase in the U.S. national debt during the American Civil
War and the corresponding growth in the volume of paper money meant that gold was increasingly sought after during the 1860s.
Since the price of gold determined the prices of other commodities, the tiniest fluctuations in its value were of immense
significance to the business community and needed to be reported quickly and accurately.

A Gold Room was established at the Stock Exchange on Wall Street specifically for gold trading, where the latest price was
chalked up on a board. But such was the clamor for information, with messenger boys making regular trips from nearby offices
to read the figure off the blackboard, that Dr. S. S. Laws, the presiding officer of the Gold Exchange and a part-time inventor,
decided a more sophisticated system was needed. Laws had studied electricity under Joseph Henry and was quickly able to devise
an electrically operated "gold indicator" consisting of rotating drums marked with figures. The indicator was mounted high
up on the wall of the Gold Room and was controlled via two switches, which caused the indicated price to increase or decrease
a small fraction at a time. The switches also operated a second indicator, which was visible from the street outside the Gold
Exchange. As the price of gold rose and fell, the indicators kept track of its movements.