Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
in Standage 1998:104). Telegraphy led many observers to fantasize that
expanding circles of experience could be obtained within increasingly narrow
windows of time and space. Early analyses were typically utopian in nature,
arguing the telegraph and telephone would end jealous nationalisms and
usher in an era of universal peace free of xenophobia. Scienti
c American , for
example, concluded in 1881 that the telegraph fostered the “kinship of
humanity” (in Marvin 1988:199). Long before television, Edward Bellamy
foresaw the possibilities that electrical communications held in his novel
Equality (1897:347), when he argued “You stay at home and send your eyes
and ears abroad for you. . . . It is possible in slippers and dressing gown for
the dweller to take his choice of the public entertainments given that day in
every city of the earth.”
In 1865, problems in the coordination of international telegraph tra
fi
c
had grown to the point where the principal national actors of the time
formed the International Telegraph Union, which later evolved into the
International Telecommunications Union. In 1872, the International Tele-
graph Conference, held in Rome, brought representatives of 22 countries
together to regulate the emerging global telegraphic infrastructure. As with
the railroads, this process helped to standardize time on a worldwide basis.
Stanford Fleming, a Canadian engineer who promoted uniform time, argued
that the telegraph “subjects the whole surface of the globe to the observation
of civilized communities and leaves no interval of time between widely
separated places proportionate to their distances apart” (quoted in Kern
1983:11).
Telegraphy also initiated an historical geography of wireless telecommuni-
cations. Drawing upon Maxwell's work on electromagnetism, Guglielmo
Marconi developed a device in 1894 to receive and transmit radio waves.
Marconi demonstrated that signals could be propagated across the Atlantic
in 1901 using high-frequency, short-wave beam antennas, managing to bend
the waves around the curvature of the earth, a “mountain” of sea water
roughly 400 km high (Cardwell 1995). The technology was understandably
highly popular in civilian and military shipping circles. In 1908, the New York
Times pioneered the use of wireless telegraphy for news reporting, and within
a decade it had become the staple of news services. When the Titanic met its
famous end in 1912 and broadcast calls for help by means of its wireless, the
entire world knew of the disaster the next morning; as the London Times put
in on April 16, “The wounded monster's distress sounded through the lati-
tudes and longitudes of the Atlantic” (quoted in Kern 1983:67). Nonetheless,
many lives were saved.
Eventually, vacuum tube technology enhanced the power of wireless radio
and allowed costs to decline to the point where it could compete e
ectively
with submarine cables, a process that occurred during the gradual decline
of British hegemony in the early twentieth century and no doubt contributed
to it. Hugill (1999) notes that the British reluctance, particularly the Navy's
alarm that the new technology might undermine Britain's monopoly over
ff
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