Media and the American Mind

From Morse to McLuhan

Daniel J. Czitrom

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780807841075, 9780807815007
• eBook ISBN: 9780807899205
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In a fascinating and comprehensive intellectual history of modern communication in America, Daniel Czitrom examines the continuing contradictions between the progressive possibilities that new communications technologies offer and their use as instruments of domination and exploitation.

Part One: Contemporary Reactions to Three New Media

Chapter 1: “Lightning Lines” and the Birth of Modern Communication, 1838–1900

The success of the first electric telegraph line in 1844 opened the era of modern communication in America. Before the telegraph there existed no separation between transportation and communication. Information traveled only as fast as the messenger who carried it. The telegraph dissolved that unity and quickly spread across the land to form the first of the great communication networks. Contemporaries of the early telegraph had no way of foreseeing the intricate wonders of our current communications media, many of them institutional and technological descendants of the “lightning lines.” The awesome fact of instantaneous communication provided cause enough for intense speculation; no future possibilities seemed as dazzling as present reality.

But in puzzling over the implications of the telegraph, “this most remarkable invention of this most remarkable age,” as many styled it, mid-nineteenth century Americans opened an important cultural debate that has steadily intensified and expanded through the present. The intellectual and popular responses to the telegraph included the first attempts at comprehending the impact of modern communication on American culture and society. Then as today, reckoning with new forms of communication provided a forum to consider rather ancient issues charged with new meaning and urgency by technological advance. What might the telegraph, “annihilator of space and time,” augur for thought, politics, commerce, the press, and the moral life?

Consideration of these questions paralleled and often interlocked with the issues raised by the economic development of the telegraph system: those of corporate power, monopoly, and government regulation. The institutional history of the telegraph forms only a necessary background for exploring the cultural reception given the first breakthrough into modern communication. But the tension between what the communications revolution implied and what the telegraph became, between fervent visions and prosaic reality, make up a key portion of that story.

In 1858, speaking during a mammoth New York jubilee celebrating completion of the Atlantic cable, the American scientist Joseph Henry hailed the telegraph as the ultimate demonstration of the nation’s genius. “The distinctive feature of the history of the Nineteenth Century,” he declared, “is the application of abstract science to the useful arts, and the subjection of the innate powers of the material world to the control of the intellect as the obedient slave of civilized man.” Henry’s statement also serves to accurately define contemporary understanding of that curious new word, technology. He was certainly not alone in holding up the telegraph as perhaps the most remarkable technological triumph of the age, the clearest demonstration yet of the harvest to be reaped from the application of science to the arts.¹

Only after numerous fundamental discoveries in chemistry, magnetism, and electricity could a practical electromagnetic (as opposed to semaphoric) telegraph take shape. Nineteenth-century accounts of telegraph history invariably begin with the discovery of electricity by Thales of Miletus and other ancients. Watson of England and Franklin of America pioneered in the sending of electricity through wires in the eighteenth century. In the 1790s the Italians Galvani and Volta revealed the nature of galvanism, or the generation of electricity by the chemical action of acids upon metals. Oersted of Denmark and Ampere of France discovered electromagnetism about 1820. By 1831 Joseph Henry, then at Princeton University, solved the critical problem of creating a strong electromagnet capable of producing mechanical effects at a distance; he did this by substituting a battery of many small cells for the customary battery of one large cell. In the 1820s and 1830s scientists from all over the world worked to create a viable electric telegraph: Ampere in France; Schilling in Russia; Steinheil in Germany; Davy, Cooke, and Wheatstone in England.²

Samuel Finley Breese Morse, artist, daguerrotypist, “the American Leonardo,” gave the world its first practical electromagnetic telegraph in 1838. Morse’s career exemplified that union of science and art so lauded by nineteenth-century boosters of technology. As a youth he had studied painting and sculpture in Europe and he achieved some prominence in America with his portraiture and landscapes. He became a professor of painting and design at the University of the City of New York in 1832; later he served as first president of the National Academy of Design. Morse had also exhibited an avid interest in scientific and mechanical experiments, particularly those involving electricity. In 1832 he conceived a plan for applying sequential electrical impulses through wires for the transmission of intelligence. His original motivation lay in the hope of obtaining an income from his invention that might free him to pursue painting full time.

But over the next twelve years, a period marked by personal poverty and public indifference, Morse gradually turned his attentions entirely to the telegraph. Morse remained ignorant of most of the work that preceded him. The conception of the telegraph, its early mechanical form, and the signaling code were his achievements. After 1837 he received important scientific, mechanical, and financial assistance from several associates: Leonard Gale, Joseph Henry, Alfred Vail, and later Ezra Cornell. Morse’s sending apparatus was a crude version of the familiar telegraph key; the receiver consisted of an electromagnet that attracted an iron armature mounting a pen or stylus. A clockwork motor drew a paper tape under the pen or stylus, which marked the tape in accordance with the pulse of current in the circuit. Alfred Vail later worked out a simplified receiving device, allowing the operator to read messages by listening to the clicks emitted by a sounder.

After a series of public demonstrations of his device in early 1838, Morse petitioned Congress for an appropriation to build an experimental line. These exhibitions, at the Vail family iron works in Morristown, New Jersey, at the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, and in Washington before the House Committee on Commerce, provoked keen local curiosity wherever they took place. Morse himself reported that the Morristown showing of 13 January 1838, at which he sent a long letter through two miles of wire, was “the talk of all the people round, and the principal inhabitants of Newark made a special excursion on Friday to see it.” President Van Buren and his cabinet requested and received a private viewing on 21 February 1838. Yet the doubts, disbelief, and ridicule surrounding Morse’s efforts were not easily overcome. Five lonely and frustrating years passed before he obtained a thirty-thousand-dollar grant to construct a line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Even then, the appropriation passed the House only after a jocular discussion of a satirical amendment that would have required half the sum to be spent “for trying mesmeric experiments.” Morse finally opened the nation’s first telegraph line on 24 May 1844 with the famous query, “What hath God wrought?”

Morse and his partners had hoped to sell their invention to the federal government, but though Congress subsidized the initial line, it refused offers to buy the patent rights. A period of wildcat speculation and building followed, marked by byzantine legal tangles involving Morse, his partners, and the various individuals who were leased construction rights under the patents. Still, only eight years later, the nation boasted over twenty-three thousand miles of telegraph lines. During these early years, a host of astonished Americans pondered the answer to Morse’s first telegraphic message.³

The public greeted the first “lightning lines” with a combination of pride, excitement, and sheer wonder. But there were plenty of expressions of doubt, incredulity, and superstitious fear. Not infrequently, observers recorded an uneasy mixture of these feelings. In dozens of cities and towns, as telegraph construction proceeded quickly in all directions, skeptics, believers, and the merely curious flocked to get a firsthand look.

While readying the experimental line in early May, Morse reported from Washington that “there is great excitement about the Telegraph and my room is thronged.” He understood the need for publicity to counter widespread incredulity. “A good way of exciting wonder,” he advised Alfred Vail on the Baltimore end, “will be to tell the passengers to give you some short sentence to send me; let them note time and call at the Capitol to verify the time I received it.” In the days immediately following the 24 May message, the telegraph played a sensational role in the Democratic National Convention being held in Baltimore. Morse and Vail astounded crowds in Washington with the news of James Polk’s nomination. Silas Wright, nominated for vice president, declined by telegraph. A dubious convention verified the report by sending a committee by train to interview Wright in Washington. A committee tried to change Wright’s mind by telegraph the next day, but failed.

The attendant press coverage and eyewitness accounts from government officials helped legitimize Morse’s breakthrough. On 31 May the exultant inventor described the scene: “The enthusiasm of the crowd before the window of the Telegraph Room in the Capitol was excited to the highest pitch at the announcement of the nomination of the Presidential candidate, and the whole of it afterward seemed turned upon the Telegraph.” Alfred Vail reported from Baltimore that crowds besieged the office daily, pressing for a glimpse of the machine. They promised “they would not say a word or stir and didn’t care whether they understood or not, only they wanted to say they had seen it.”⁴

A palpable scepticism no doubt fueled the desire to observe the telegraph in person. As a Rochester newspaper put it, anxiously awaiting the extension of the telegraph to that city in May 1846: “The actual realization of the astonishing fact, that instantaneous personal conversation can be held between persons hundreds of miles apart, can only be fully attained by witnessing the wonderful fact itself.” The press referred variously to “that strange invention,” “that almost superhuman agency,” or “this extraordinary discovery.” Noting the large numbers of people visiting the first Philadelphia telegraph office in early 1846, a local paper concluded, “It is difficult to realize, at first, the importance of a result so wholly unlike anything with which we have been familiar; and the revolution to be effected by the annihilation of time . . . will not be appreciated until it is felt and seen.”⁵

Western and southern communities, reached later, were no less enthusiastic. Telegraph entrepreneurs and stock promoters toured frontier districts, offering exhibitions to audiences in public halls. Telegraph offices set aside ample space for spectators, usually allowing visitors to have their name sent and returned for a small fee. “One of the greatest events ever,” exulted a Cincinnati daily upon the telegraph’s arrival: “We shall be in instantaneous communication with all the great Eastern cities.” As the “lightning” reached Zanesville, Ohio, in the summer of 1847, the press described local response: “The Wires and other apparatus of the Telegraph are exciting considerable discussion among our fellow citizens. With those by far the larger part, who view it understandingly, there are some gentlemen who are perfectly incredulous of all its boasted capacity for the transmission of news.”⁶

The incredulous were not limited to Zanesville, and neither were the nervous. Ezra Cornell, Morse’s assistant who had supervised the actual building of the first telegraph line, ran up against the gnawing anxiety which accompanied public acclaim. Traveling to New York City to put up demonstration lines in the autumn of 1844, Cornell found city authorities fearful of unspecified dangers to the populace. They forced Cornell to pay a fee for an eminent professor, Benjamin Silliman, to certify that the telegraph wires posed no threat to public safety.⁷

Reminiscing in 1902 about his days as a messenger boy for an early Pennsylvania line of the 1840s, the writer William Bender Wilson noted that “few can credit the curiosity and credulity which characterized the people in connection with the telegraph, and how few had even an idea of the principles governing it.” The wires swaying in the wind

gave the wintry blasts the opportunity of producing somewhat musical, weird, and fantastic sounds that could be heard for some distance, to the great discomfort of the rustics. The public mind having something of a superstitious bend, many people in the neighborhood of the line, alarmed by the sounds proceeding from the wire as the winds swept over it, would walk a very considerable distance out of their way, often placing themselves at great inconvenience, particularly after sundown, to avoid passing under or near it.⁸

The more cosmopolitan contemporaries of Wilson’s rustics took a bemused view of such popular fears. And newspapers were filled with glib anecdotes such as the one concerning a local who offered to bet his entire farm that his best team of horses could outrace the telegraph in delivery of a message. Yet even the most scientifically minded meditations on the significance of the telegraph revealed uneasiness about a new technology whose essence, electricity, no one really understood. And although the intellectual paeans to the telegraph’s possibilities were virtually unanimous, the cause for celebration was by no means agreed upon. At the root of this tension lay the changing meaning of communication itself.

Serious considerations of the telegraph usually touched upon the other technological marvels of the age, the railroad and the steamboat. Yet the inscrutable nature of the telegraph’s driving force made it seem somehow more extraordinary. Nineteenth-century science, although beginning to harness the power of electricity in several areas, could still not explain precisely what it was. Daniel Davis, a Boston electrician and mechanic who manufactured telegraph equipment for Morse, noted that electricity was a very familiar agent visible in lightning, the hair of animals, and other everyday contexts. But electricity was also unseen, “a central power . . . endowing matter with a large proportion of its chemical and mechanical properties.”

Although tamed by the telegraph, the electric spark, wrote a chronicler of electricity’s progress, remained “shadowy, mysterious, and impalpable. It still lives in the skies, and seems to connect the spiritual and the material.” Contemporary historians of telegraphy recurringly commented on the paradox. “The mighty power of electricity, sleeping latent in all forms of matter, in the earth, the air, the water, permeating every part and particle of the universe, carrying creation in its arms, is yet invisible and too subtle to be analyzed.” Its potential appeared boundless; “its mighty triumphs are but half revealed, and the vast extent of its extraordinary power but half understood.”⁹

Electricity, Reverend Ezra S. Gannett told his Boston congregation, was both “the swift winged messenger of destruction” and “the vital energy of material creation.” “The invisible, imponderable substance, force, whatever it be—we do not even certainly know what it is which we are dealing with . . . is brought under our control, to do our errands, like any menial, nay, like a very slave.”

Insofar as it markedly increased man’s control over the environment, electricity resembled that other grand force, the steam engine. But steam was gross and material in comparison; “there is little poetical or great in the rattle of the train or the roar of a monstrous engine.” As one typical historian argued: “Electricity is the poetry of science; no romance—no tale of fiction—excel in wonder its history and achievement.” The new science of electromagnetism promised further development and application; “the gigantic power of the steam engine may dwindle into insignificance before the powers of nature which are yet to be revealed.”¹⁰

“Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?” (Job 38:35). This Biblical quotation, one of the impossibilities enumerated to convince Job of his ignorance and weakness, frequently prefaced nineteenth-century writings on the telegraph. It expressed well the sense of miracle that these works invariably sought to convey. As the most astounding product of electrical science, the telegraph promised miraculous consequences. T. P. Shaffner, historian and early telegraph booster, concluded a his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Media and the American Mind
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Contemporary Reactions to Three New Media
• Part Two: Theorists of Modern Communication
• Epilogue: Dialectical Tensions in the American Media, Past and Future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index