Page 77 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
important after midcentury. These added to the possibilities for the
movement of information in the United States, but they did not alter
in any fundamental way the features of the regime. The railroad meant
that information could move faster, but it did not alter the simple, spa-
tial characteristics of communication nor dislodge the newspaper as the
central medium.
Even the telegraph – the true antecedent to the Internet technically,
politically, and economically – only consolidated the first information
regime. 70 Interestingly, the very earliest telegraphed messages in the
United States were political, one of them transmitted by Morse in 1842
between congressional committee rooms in a bid to win funding for the
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telegraphitself. Thefirstgeographicallysignificanttelegraphlinelinked
Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. In 1844, developments at the Whig
convention occurring in Baltimore were telegraphed to Washington an
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hour before reporters could present the news in person. By 1848, there
were2,000milesoftelegraphcableintheUnitedStates,andby1850,some
12,000 miles. By at least one estimate, at the midcentury mark the tele-
graph was as important as the postal service to the American economy. 73
This explosive growth of the telegraph in the 1840s was a product almost
exclusively of commercial enterprise. The federal government provided
essentially no subsidy except for an initial grant to Morse of $30,000, de-
clined to purchase patent rights offered to it, and imposed no regulations.
Built and developed by private firms, the telegraph had vitally im-
portant effects on at least two areas of American society: business and
the press. Replacing slower ground transportation for the movement of
information, the telegraph increased the pace of business substantially.
In the late 1840s, the best travel time for information from the Atlantic
states to reach St. Louis by physical means had been six days, and an-
other eight to ten days to reach California. The telegraph put out of
business many enterprises that had been engaged in land transportation

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Technically, the telegraph was an electrical medium using a primitive form of binary
signal,notentirelyunlikethemoresophisticatedbinarylogicofelectroniccomputing.
Politically,thetelegraphwasadvancedearlyonbyitsmilitaryapplications,aswasradio
in World War I. While the Internet was not a battlefield tool, its early development
was funded and organized by the U.S. military establishment. Economically, both the
telegraph and the Internet were commercialized and distributed rapidly by market
forces in the near absence of government regulation, unlike radio and television.
71 Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the
Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (New York: Walker and Company, 1998).
72
Fang, A History of Mass Communication.
73
These data on the telegraph come from Standage, The Victorian Internet.
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