Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
bringing ever-larger audiences into reach, telecommunications changed the
scale of the community in which people imagined themselves. Once-isolated
farmers came to rely on distant markets for their revenues. Among and within
fi
firms, the telegraph was widely used to allow managers to communicate with
one another, a vital process in the development of the multi-establishment
corporation and the spatial di
ce from the factory. In
world cities, the telegraph was central to the transmission of vast quantities
of data that coordinated the increasingly complex world economy. For
example, the introduction of ticker-tape machines in 1867 played a central
role in the national organization of
ff
erentiation of the of
ows
of capital. The price of goods and speed with which they could be conveyed
elsewhere became more important than their physical location. The telegraph
dramatically restructured the news, disembedding it from its local context
and accentuating the quest for “objective” reporting (Carey 1983). By 1851,
Reuters was using the telegraph to transmit stock prices between Paris and
London, and in 1866, between London and New York (Thrift and Leyshon
1994). The
fi
financial markets and international
fl
first use of the telegraph to report U.S. presidential election
returns was in 1892. By the 1890s, baseball games were being transmitted by
telegraph, and yachting races in New York were transmitted to the
Chicago
Times
in 75 seconds. In 1902, photographs were transmitted by telegraph for
the
fi
first time by German inventor Arthur Korn, allowing visual as well as
textual information to be sent electronically and transforming the look of
newspapers. In these and many other ways, electronic communications
became deeply embedded in daily life, helping to produce subjects who, for
the
fi
first time in human history, did not depend exclusively on face-to-face
contact to receive information.
In the burgeoning services sector, telegraphy was central to the new spatial
division of labor taking place within and among information workers during
a period of pronounced technological and organizational change. Typewriters
greatly enhanced the capacity to put words rapidly on paper, creating an
e
fi
ect comparable in scope to that of moveable type itself and facilitating the
introduction of female secretaries. For business executives, the pace of life
accelerated dramatically, and information overload became a common com-
plaint. In many cities, as banks, law
ff
fi
rms, accountancy, and other such
corporations
flourished, urban telegraph networks were often overloaded by
the tsunami of data and information
fl
flooding in from all quarters. One tech-
nique common in the 1860s to route messages among local o
fl
ces was
the use of pneumatic tubes, which appeared widely in the downtowns of
London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Berlin, and Paris, and shortly
thereafter in Vienna, Prague, Munich, Rome, Dublin, Naples, Milan, and
Marseilles (Standage 1998).
Some observers got carried away in the hyperbole surrounding the poten-
tial of telegraphy, predicting that it would lead to the end of prejudice and a
new era of world peace; one newspaper exulted “it seems as if this sea-
nymph, rising out of the waves, was born to be the herald of peace” (quoted
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