Odd Wisconsin Archive
Predecessor of the Web
No, not television. Not radio. Not even the telephone. No, the true predecessor of the Web was the telegraph, invented in 1837 by Samuel F.B. Morse. Its value was proven on May 24, 1844, when he sent the question, "What hath God wrought?" from Washington to Baltimore. The miraculous technology was introduced here just before Wisconsin became a state in 1848. One of the final acts of the Territorial Legislature was enactment of a law authorizing (and taxing) telegraph lines.
The Milwaukee press soon reported that to be in constant contact with Washington and New York was "more like magic than reality" and when the Janesville Gazette received its first news bulletins in 1848 it was full of praise for "this truly wonderful agent." Here's how it worked.
The sender printed a message on paper and handed it to an operator who typed letters as combinations of on/off signals -- "dots and dashes" -- called the Morse Code. This was not unlike the on/off digital bits inside your computer (or the hexagrams of the I-Ching). These combinations were clicked out at an amazing pace with impressive precision on a tiny key pad (shown here) and sent at lightning speed across electric wires strung on poles. On the receiving end, a similarly talented operator decoded the signals for delivery as a telegram printed on paper.
"In the early days," wrote an early chronicler of the telegraph, "it was supposed to require men of especial ability, education, and intelligence to act as operators." Sounds like your IT staff, doesn't it? The first such operator in Kenosha, Charles C. Sholes, was the town's newspaper editor; he rose to be a director of the Western Union Telegraph Co., which was the Internet of its day.
Everyone marveled that news could travel so rapidly between cities. When Wisconsin's first governor, Nelson Dewey, gave an address to the Legislature in Madison early in 1849, residents of Milwaukee were awestruck at the speed with which it reached them: a mere six and a half hours later. More than 40 miles of wire had been strung within the previous 24 hours to make the transmission possible.
Like the Internet, the telegraph produced consequences that did not please everyone. Henry Thoreau, always more concerned with moral issues than with popular culture, complained in Walden that the telegraph was only an "improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
Later in the book he argued a point that may still sound true if you are one of those who checks the news several times a day on the Web:
"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?... Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe" -- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself."
What, indeed, hath God wrought by immersing us in an ocean of mass media and leaving us to sink or swim? But there is no turning back. We use it to our benefit or harm, for enlightenment or for vice, as we choose.
:: Posted in Curiosities on October 17, 2006
Did You Know?
The Wisconsin Historical Museum is currently featuring Odd Wisconsin objects in the latest exhibit: Odd Wisconsin. And don't miss the Odd Wisconsin book by author Erika Janik published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
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