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This chapter explores the role of the British Post Office in the formation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It explains that F.J. Brown was the Post Office official directly concerned with the organisation of broadcasting and that the legal power of the Postmaster-General to concern himself with broadcasting derived from two pieces of legislation. These were the 1869 Telegraph Act and the 1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act. It discusses the Post Office's recognition of the importance of the commercial interests in the future of broadcasting.

This chapter examines the relationship between “China” and the emergence of globalized telecommunications. Starting from Paul Valéry’s response to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, I analyze his articulation of a modern “crisis of the spirit” in part defined by the transformation of History into something that can no longer be defined in opposition to an ahistorical Orient. Technological media challenge this imagined Chinese difference from two directions: on the one side, they transform the character of spatiotemporal experience in ways that bring China “closer”; on the other side, they make conventionally Orientalist conceptions of the Chinese ahistoricity seem increasingly appropriate figures of the West’s own modernity. From Valéry’s reflections on the collapse of the West’s imagined world-space, I conclude by returning to Kafka’s Chinese allegories of impossible spaces.

The fourth chapter proposes a new way to read Keats’s most famous letters and his two fragmentary attempts at epic, Hyperion (1819–1820). There is a major, although overlooked, dissonance throughout Keats’s letters and poetry. On the one hand, they dramatize his wish for rapid, intuitive communication between individuals at a distance, a fantasy fueled by the period’s advancements in telegraphy. On the other, Keats’s writing reveals a commitment to laborious, meandering reading—a mode of encouraged by the densely figurative poetic language of the literary tradition that he idolizes, and which has its origins in the allegorical language of scripture and the rhetorical concept of ductus. Ranging over Keats’s letters as well as different moments from his verse, this chapter culminates in a reading of Hyperion. The discordance between Keats’s two tendencies or “ways”—rapid transmission and slow reading—precipitates the impasses that prevent him from continuing Hyperion.

This chapter addresses a number of electrical products devised by the Enlightenment community of visionary inventors. The electric orrery was simply a clever device for showing that electricity could produce rotary motion. The Franklin motor demonstrated that electrostatic forces could produce nontrivial mechanical effects. It is suggested that the electric ignition of internal combustion engines, and perhaps the engines themselves, had their beginnings in eighteenth-century electrostatic technology. Since the 1740s, lecturers had used the mechanical effects of electricity to produce sound. The case of telegraphy brings into sharp relief the obstacles faced by inventors working on electrical systems at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Franklin and his friends bequeathed to Thomas Edison and other nineteenth-century workers fundamental scientific principles and terminology, a plethora of technological effects, many fascinating devices and product ideas, and the fervent and infectious belief that electrical science and technology could create a better world.

Beginning from the premise that technology gains meaning through its use in specific social contexts and situations, this chapter complicates previous accounts of electric telegraphy in colonial South Asia by attempting to recover the diversity of practice and discourse that surrounded it. To this end, a distinction is drawn between telegraphy-in-use and telegraphy-in-discourse. The chapter shows how the telegraph was used and debated in a variety of contexts, from the conduct of imperial administration and commercial transactions to private affairs such as communicating family news, conveying blessings, or sending money. The chapter shows how the telegraph fuelled utopias of community and improvement, but also generated counter- and alternative narratives that raised concerns about its role as an instrument of empire, or about changing patterns of life, work, and human interaction.

For all the emphasis on Marinetti and his wireless imagination, the actual parameters of his interaction with wireless telegraphy and later radio remain largely unknown. This chapter turns to these encounters. Recuperating the details of wireless invention in the figure of Guglielmo Marconi, the chapter begins by focusing on the wireless medium itself as well as the principal features of the wireless operator, or marconista, as he was known in Italy. After outlining the technical characteristics of the wireless operator and the nature of the wireless transmission, it turns to the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”. It shows how Marinetti's wireless imagination denies its Romantic lineage, becoming instead a dictating machine whose transmissions to the medium Marinetti have little to do with sense.

The entwined stories of Charles Wheatstone and Michael Faraday interwove sound and electromagnetism, as had Hans Christian Ørsted’s original discoveries in that field. Though Faraday lacked mathematical education, his feeling for music complemented his visual and experimental turn of mind. Wheatstone also lacked scientific education but came from a family of instrument builders and invented a number of musical devices, including the concertina. Wheatstone extended Ernst Chladni’s work to investigate dynamic, transient vibrations of bodies, especially the transmission of sound along rods. In his lectures at the Royal Institution, Faraday demonstrated Wheatstone’s ongoing work, including some experiments involving Javanese instruments and guimbardes (“Jew’s harp”). This chapter discusses how their unusual collaboration led Wheatstone to discover telegraphy and Faraday to the intensive investigations of sound immediately preceding and preparing his discovery of electromagnetic induction, as indicated by his notebooks and letters. Throughout the book where various sound examples are referenced, please see http://mitpress.mit.edu/musicandmodernscience (please note that the sound examples should be viewed in Chrome or Safari Web browsers).

This chapter examines how new literacies impacted the protest and petitioning movements of the early twentieth century. Older forms of communication and writing were adapted to the changing discourses and technologies of the era as individuals and groups sought to channel discussions on nationalism, education, and Egyptian-ness to press their cases and attempt to influence the official course of Egyptian politics. The chapter culminates in the events and aftermath of the 1919 revolution in Egypt, when many of the new technologies of public literacies were deployed by various segments of the Egyptian populace in their attempt to throw off the yoke of the British Protectorate. Ultimately, though many people engaged with these literacies, written forums also imposed their own unevenness, as access to printers and more expensive “modern” forms of literacy determined who could be “seen” in the public spaces of literary production.

Dickson makes Wheatstone’s Enchanted Lyre or “Acoucryptophone” the point of departure for a study of fantasies about the materialisation and sight of sound. The Acoucryptophone was one device on display in the young Wheatstone’s “Musical Museum.” It consisted of a lyre suspended from the ceiling by a brass wire connected to other musical instruments in the room above; when these were played, their sounds would seem to emanate directly from the lyre. For acousticians, the apparatus demonstrated the principle that sound travelled more effectively through metal than through air. But the case of the Enchanted Lyre allows us to see how, in early nineteenth-century London, scientific demonstration could be elided with discourses of the supernatural, or marked with indices of the conjurer’s act. Dickson considers emerging telegraphic conceptions of “musical sound” as necessarily “abstract, intangible, and ethereal,” showing how such popular-scientific devices as the Enchanted Lyre and Invisible Girl rendered sound-waves visible while displacing the labor of performance. Ultimately, the Enchanted Lyre became both a tangible model of sound waves in action and the means by which to cultivate newly idealized notions of musical sound, sound being configured here as a matter beyond physical embodiment or sensory perception.

This chapter links the island of Java with metropolitan London and rural South Africa. It invokes visions of a “global nineteenth century” in order to present a critical archeology of modern concepts of “sound” and of the “wired worlds” that so characterize global built environments today. The focus is on geographies of empire, and nineteenth-century musical instruments conceived to achieve that space, or to “annihilate distance,” particularly in the work of Charles Wheatstone. In Wheatstone’s work, sound was reconfigured as an enigmatic force for propagation: a way of collapsing space – extolled as an annihilator, or (more benignly) as a political force for cross-cultural communication and understanding. In the sixth of his popular 1835 “Lectures on Sound,” for example, Wheatstone laid before his audience a free-reed talking machine or vowel synthesizer, a Chinese sheng, Chladni figures, and an oversized Javanese gendèr, which Sir Thomas Raffles, former Lieutenant-General of Java, had recently brought back from the East. The paper draws connections between Wheatstone’s experiments on sound conductance, his telegraphic/telephonic fantasies, popular science, and the liberal-humanitarian search for a truly global instrument – one tuned to the so-called “scale of nature” and capable of “speaking” a supposedly universal musical language.

This chapter talks about how submarine telegraphy has influenced and helped modify diplomatic relations to how it is today. In fact, there were those who saw the expansion of submarine telegraphy as an instrument for peace due to its potential to create mutual comprehension and respect. The chapter further explores the history of telegraphy with diplomatic culture and cites how some were suspicious of the benefits of the telegraph in diplomacy. Some believed the passage of time was their ally in the sense that when decisions and events were accelerated, they could result in dangerous outcomes. Ultimately, this exploration of the history of telegraphy provides a historical context for improving international relations. Henry Kissinger, in fact, expressed his concern for the state of diplomatic affairs in relation to telecommunications, and how we remain politically unprepared for its fruits.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the contents of the book as well as the conclusion and implications laid out by each chapter included in the collection. The constant presence of submarine telecommunication is said to define an important era of development in a truly global economy. Some of the works in this book have addressed the role of submarine telegraphy in relation to diplomacy, wireless, and imperialism, though these are mostly of an American and Atlanticist context. Its role in political events and relations, however, cannot be denied, nor can how these economic and political events affected the prevalence of submarine telecommunication. The chapter concludes with the argument that the failure to embrace high-frequency wireless carries a geopolitical price.

Chapter 1 focuses on the emergence of the class of 1866 as gatekeepers of the global media system to come by re-telling the story of the Great Atlantic Cable project (1854-1866) from their perspective. It shows how their transatlantic network formed, drawing on pre-existing local structures, such as the cable entrepreneurs of the British national telegraph system, the group of “American expatriates” in London or the elite circle of New Yorkers residing at Gramercy Park.

This chapter explores the movement that flourished between 1839 and 1851 that limited the involvement of the federal government on the postal system and the telegraph network, which at the time provided the two principal forms of long-distance communication: mail delivery and telegraphy. It highlights certain features of this regulatory regime to provide better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of what is called communications deregulation, or what contemporaries called private enterprise.

This chapter focuses on the innovation of submarine telegraphy, and discusses the history of the development of underwater cables, first proposed by John and Jacob Brett in 1845, and how they differed considerably from landlines. The Brett brothers were able to develop Permalloy, an iron–nickel magnetic material that made up the wrappings of the core of the cable to provide “inductive loading.” Manufacturing this new innovation was accompanied by some difficulties, as witnessed by Charles Bright. It is suggested that the process through which underwater cables were manufactured and developed allowed the cable industry to demonstrate a certain entrepreneurial exuberance that pushed the industry towards the edge of what was technically feasible.

This chapter examines the influence of the Great Northern Telegraph Company (GNTC) on international telegraphy and its business environment, and discusses international relations between different national telegraph networks and the first treaty agreed upon by Prussia and Austria. Belgium, France, and Prussia converged together to form the International Telegraph Union in 1865. The chapter moves on to discuss how GNTC was constantly threatened by government intervention and how it realized from the beginning that managing submarine cables was complex and entailed a political imperative, which meant that opportunities and risks were politically determined. It narrates the actions taken against the GNTC during and after the war, and how these actions were motivated by one purpose: To gain control over the flow of information in and out of the country.

This chapter puts an end to a characteristic strain of critical grief bemoaning the dissolution of idyllic country habits including, in particular, the pealing of soundscapes past. Thomas Hardy understood that Britain was by no means a closed or stable acoustic haven, and that its structures of communication – from bell ringing to electric telegraphy – were always already susceptible to rival systems of affect and pleasure. Beginning with a short introduction to Hardy’s early experiments in transmission – in Desperate Remedies (1871) – Edward Allen elucidates the texture of that early novel before moving through the ‘soundways’ of his verse and late fiction. Arguing that Hardy’s ‘rural erotics’ kindled a new desire for urban-pastoral connection in the early decades of the twentieth century, the chapter ends with the first sustained inquiry into Hardy’s radio habit in the 1920s, interpreting this sign of a countrified personality gone live as a template for rural modernity.

This chapter revisits the politics of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida by exploring the media ecology that underpinned early stagings of the opera in Cairo (1871) and Milan (1872). By attending to the technologies that constituted Aida’s production and reception networks, and to the aesthetic stances nurtured by some of these media, the chapter suggests that the opera’s politics cannot be fully captured if examined through the prism of Orientalism alone. A concern with temporality underlay Aida’s history from inception to performance and beyond: from Verdi’s plans to premiere it near-simultaneously in Egypt and in Europe, to repeated blurring of the dates of its premieres, to “instantaneous” telegrams that conjured socio-operatic connectivities both old and new. When in 1873–74 the composer advocated that Aida be produced contemporaneously in multiple theaters, Italians’ temporal experience had been going through a process of gradual standardization, which was making distant simultaneity not only conceivable in abstract, scientific terms, but also perceivable. The chapter, which begins by evoking telegraphy as a set of figurative possibilities that might have informed Verdi’s aesthetics, therefore ends by suggesting that late-nineteenth-century operatic stagings fed—or aspired to feed—back into the larger technological and political endeavors of the time.

Helmholtz’s use of the galvanometer as an electro-magnetic timing device was embedded in an emerging culture of telegraphic networks for communicating time signals. This chapter shows that the procedure used by Helmholtz was adopted from the French physicist Claude Pouillet (1790-1868). In 1845, Pouillet’s ideas were taken up and used by telegraph pioneers, e.g. Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), Louis Breguet (1804-1883) and Werner Siemens. Besides Helmholtz, physiologists such as Carlo Matteucci (1811-1868) and Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896) introduced electromagnetic timing devices into physiological research. Around 1900, Proust worked in a technical environment saturated by technologies of standardized time.