POSTGRADUATE COURSE
REFLEXIONES APORTADAS POR LOS PARTICIPANTES
but the telegrapher was a self-made auditor. Sound telegraphy itself was not handed down through textbooks and institutionalized training; rather, it developed as a result of workers’ changing orientations to the machines that they used. The telegrapher’s auditory skill drove the acceleration of telegraphic communication, and hearing became a hallmark of its effi- ciency — a synecdoche for the effectiveness of the network itself.
By the time technologies for reproducing sound became commercially available, there were already well-established and well-known repertoires of audile techniques. While some authors argued that sound-reproduction technologies made novel use of hearing, this chapter will demonstrate that their novelty was in the innovation of longer-standing cultural practice rather than in creating new modes of listening from scratch. The construct of a private, individual acoustic space is especially important for commod- ifying sound-reproduction technologies and sound itself since commodity exchange presupposes private property. The audile techniques articulated to these new technologies emerged out of smaller domains of middle-class life to encapsulate a larger middle-class sensibility. Through audile tech- nique, people could inhabit their own private acoustic space and still come together in the same room or even across long distances. They could listen alone and listen together at the same time.
Even as the specific techniques of listening varied across contexts, the basic outlines of audile technique remained fairly constant. Techniques of listening articulated listening to reason and rationality. They separated hearing from the other senses so that it could be extended, amplified, and otherwise modified; listening became a discrete skill. Audile technique re- constructed acoustic space as a private, interior phenomenon belonging to a single individual. It problematized sound and constructed an auditory field with “interior” and “exterior” sounds. Techniques of listening instru- mentalized and promoted physical distance and epistemological and social mediation. The long history of audile technique thus stands as a crucial component of sound’s history in the modern era. Many of the meanings that we commonly attribute to listening — along with a few that scholars have forgotten —were articulated and elaborated over the long nineteenth century.
Telegraphy: “Ancient and Modern”
A cartoon from the 1870s (figure 15a –b) bearing the same title as this sec- tion depicts two telegraph offices. The first office, which is clearly meant to
15a-b
Figure 15a – b. Telegraphy — ancient and modern (courtesy University of Illinois Libraries)
represent the “ancient” way of doing things, portrays a beleaguered tele- graph operator sitting at a table in an open room, amid a mess of telegraph tape, trying to read it as messages come off the wire. To his side, a man and three smiling boys look on from the window; one of the children points and either laughs or speaks. The second office shows no public at all— sug- gesting a greater level of organization. The telegraph operators are now kept separate from the public. The door to the office remains closed. Inside
the room, the picture simply depicts two telegraph operators seated across from one another at a table divided into cubicles. They appear comfortable in their chairs, and each is taking messages neatly on a pad while listening to the sound of the telegraphic messages coming in. One operator has two notes neatly hung in his cubicle. Both wear the visors that had become the distinctive mark of a professional telegrapher. There is a general impres- sion of calm and of organization. As he listens to the sound of his own ma- chine, each telegrapher has his own private space.
This is a professionalization narrative: the changing characteristics of the office, changes in dress, and changes in telegraphic technique all coin- cide to valorize the modern, professional telegrapher. But, for our purposes, the message of the cartoon is even more basic: visual or written telegraphy is ancient and outdated, while sound telegraphy is modern, clean, efficient, and even somewhat professional. The message is unremarkable except when read in the contexts of telegraph history and media history more gen- erally. In these broader terms, this simple cartoon is suggestive of a histor- ical shift from vision to hearing widely acknowledged in accounts of te- legraphy but rarely considered at any length as having a significance of its own. The following pages thus consider the history of sound telegraphy and its significance for the history of listening.
Many of the key accounts of telegraph history place it as the first ma- jor electronic medium in American history and often as a precursor of the modern mass media. Harold Innis considered the telegraph a major turn- ing point in media history. Although he was mainly concerned with the control of knowledge, he considered the telegraph unrivaled in its power to strengthen or weaken organizations’ control over the flow of news. Menahem Blondheim follows Innis’s lead to cast telegraphy as a turning point in the history of news and information, arguing that the telegraph helped destroy old monopolies of knowledge but promoted new ones in the guise of the Associated Press and Western Union.1Daniel Czitrom con-
nects the rise of American telegraphy with the birth of a kind of media consciousness and shifting attitudes toward technology. Along with James Carey, Czitrom sees the telegraph as the first medium to separate the social facts of transportation and communication; he emphasizes that, through its telegraph business, Western Union became the first major corporate monopoly. Each author uses the telegraph to “stand metaphorically for all the innovations that ushered in the modern phase of history and deter- mined, even to this day, the major lines of development of American com-
munication”— to quote Carey.2In addition to the narratives of the tele-
graph’s own development, Carey and Czitrom consider its importance in the rationalization and reorganization of news production and dissemina- tion and even in transformations of cultural sensibilities around language and time. More recent writings from other perspectives have challenged the notion of the telegraph’s “revolutionary” nature and its foundational role in American media history.3Yet the telegraph retains its importance
in media histories for many reasons: its connection with the commodifi- cation of news; the solidification of a newspaper elite; the promotion of the tendency toward monopoly in local markets; as well as the mythical status of the telegraph as the first medium to use electricity for long-distance communication.
Before I continue, a qualification is in order. What we now commonly call telegraphy is really electric telegraphy, which is a comparatively recent de- velopment in a longer history of telegraphy. An older form of telegraphy, now called semaphoric telegraphy, can be traced back to the Greeks and the Old Testament. A semaphoric telegraph uses lines of sight and relay sta- tions to convey messages over a distance. With the aid of hills or towers, fires or flags, and a system of agreed-on signs, simple messages can be quickly relayed over very long distances. At the beginning of Aeschylus’
Agamemnon, for instance, the watchman is depicted as hopelessly bored,
waiting for the fire from a distant hill, “the sign of the beacon,” so that he can report that Troy has fallen.4This basic system of semaphoric teleg-
raphy would remain in place for about two thousand years. The first major improvement was proposed by the British natural philosopher Robert Hooke in 1664, who suggested using telescopes, thereby greatly increas- ing the possible distance between relay points. Although mechanical tele- graphs were first proposed in ancient Rome, one was not built until 1794 in France. Devised by Claude Chappe, the French mechanical telegraph used a system of bars and levers that allowed for 92 possible positions (ac- tually, it allowed for 192, but, for reasons of clarity, the French used only 92). Each position corresponded to a numbered word in one of three books, so the mechanical telegraph had a vocabulary of 25,392 words.5
Semaphoric and mechanical-semaphoric telegraphs were visual-tactile media: they relied on the sense of sight for the transmission of information over a distance. The electric telegraph, however, was another story alto- gether. From the outset, the electric telegraph allowed for an interchanga- bility among the senses: electric telegraphy could produce visual or sonic
data. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use sound telegraphy to refer to a specific set of practices involved in telegraph operators listening to the Morse-based electric system. There were a number of experiments with more properly “sonic” telegraph devices over the course of the nineteenth century. The most well-known is the harmonic telegraph, which used multiple pitches to send multiple messages down a single line. Hermann Helmholtz also made some efforts to connect his tuning-fork apparatus with a telegraph. But these are not my main concern here.
As I will discuss below, the interchangability among senses in the elec- tric Morse system is actually central to the practical development of teleg- raphy in the United States. Yet the electric telegraph has been relatively neglected in the history of the senses, and the history of the senses has been neglected in accounts of telegraphy. Redressing this absence is not simply a matter of completeness or further inclusion. Rather, unlike many other media, the electric telegraph spent time as both an apparently visual me- dium and an apparently acoustic medium. Historians of the senses often tend to think in terms of binary logics: thinking, practice, or technology is either visual or auditory. Rick Altman has called this the ontological fal-
lacy, where scholars extrapolate from historically specific practices to make
transhistorical claims about the nature of a medium.6The history of sound
telegraphy requires a shift in focus from the essential sensory characteris- tics of a particular technology to the history of its deployment. It requires a shift in focus from the sensory classification of media to the history of the deployment of the senses through and around media. It also shifts in focus from the essential or natural aspects of listening to those that were histor- ically contingent. Telegraphic listening actually consisted of many learned practices that developed over time. Precisely because of the electric tele- graph’s sensory interchangeability (or at least complementarity), we should consider telegraphy and listening to the telegraph from the standpoint of
technique. The electrical telegraph could be configured to be apprehended
by either eye or ear. As we will see, the choice of one or the other was a prac- tical question. While the senses are technically interchangeable in telegra- phy, vision and hearing play very distinct roles in its cultural and indus- trial history.
Widely regarded as the first intimation of electric telegraphy, an anony- mous letter (from one C.M.) to the Scots’ Magazine in 1753 entitled “An Expeditious Method of Conveying Intelligence” outlined an electric- telegraphic system that consisted of one wire for each different character
that it would transmit. The wires would run between the two points to be put into communication, and the apparatus worked by connecting the wires to an electric machine, in the order of the characters to be conveyed. At the receiving end, the electric pulse would lift a piece of paper lab- eled with the appropriate character, and an operator at the receiving end would write down the message. But the author thought this method to be interchangeable with an acoustic method, which would involve replacing the paper with bells decreasing in size from A to Z, each wire being con- nected to a bell “and the electrical spark, breaking on bells of different size, . . . [informing] the correspondent, by the sound, what wires have been touched. And thus, by some practice, they may come to understand the language of chimes in whole words, without being put to the trouble of noting down every letter.”7At its very outset, there is a sensory inter-
changeability in electric telegraphy: sheets of paper or tuned bells produce the same effect as far as the author is concerned. This exchangeability is based on an instrumentality of perception. Electricity here takes the form of “pure” information that is conveyed from one node of the network to an- other and rendered intelligible through the route that it takes. Sensation and action occur at either end of the network. The route is the fixed thing, the perception the variable.
C.M.’s theory of telegraphy is a nascent cybernetics. This is no surprise since cybernetics itself was a communication theory developed on the ba- sis of technical issues in the communication network that replaced teleg- raphy in the United States: the telephone system. Still, the anachronism is tempting. The whole history can be read backward, with telegraphy as an instance of the cybernetic model of communication. In telegraphy, people’s sense organs and muscles become extensions of machines that convey mes- sages over a network: “When I give an order to a machine, the situation is not essentially different from that which arises when I give an order to a person. . . . Information [that man] receives is coordinated through his brain and nervous system until, after the proper process of storage, colla- tion, and selection, it emerges through the effector organs, generally his muscles.”8While this logic may have been present from the outset, the ac-
tual development of telegraphy was based on a series of sensory preferences, rather than a preference for interchangeability itself.
No other major examples of early electric telegraphy operated on the acoustic principle. When it finally broke in America (and in England as well), the electric telegraph was understood primarily as a visual medium.9
This is probably because of the legacy of semaphoric and mechanical tele- graphs: Chappe’s telegraph was in use in France by 1800 and was well known and imitated throughout the world. Two electric telegraph sys- tems were invented at roughly the same time. In 1837, William Cook and Charles Wheatstone (Cook was the entrepeneur, Wheatstone the inventor) devised an electric telegraph that moved a needle to convey information. In the same year, the American Samuel Morse devised an electric tele- graph — and it is the history of the Morse telegraph that I will discuss here. As did his contemporaries, Morse understood telegraphy as an essentially visual medium. In fact, his original patent application was for a specifically visual telegraph; writing in 1837, he claimed:
About five years ago, on my voyage home from Europe, the electrical experiment of Franklin, upon a wire some four miles in length was casually recalled to my mind in a conversation with one of the passengers, in which experiment it was as- certained that the electricity traveled through the whole circuit in a time not ap- preciable, but apparently instantaneous. It immediately occurred to me, that if the pres-
ence of electricity could be made visible in any desired part of this circuit, it would not be difficult to construct a system of signs by which intelligence could be instantaneously transmitted.10
Morse’s original telegraph worked through a relatively simple process: pressing down the transmitter key completed a circuit, and a receiver on the other end would use a stylus to make an indentation on a piece of pa- per, which would be drawn beneath the stylus by a clockwork mechanism set into motion when the circuit was completed. Vail’s meticulous descrip- tion of the early telegraph’s working suggests that the visuality of the tech- nology had now been hardwired in. Any sounds that the machine made at this point were incidental, mere epiphenomena of its making a visible recording (figure 16):
If, then, the hammer is brought in sudden contact with the anvil, and permitted as quickly as possible to break its contact by the action of the spring, and resume its former position, the galvanic fluid [electricity], generated at the battery, flies its round upon the circuit, no matter how quick the contact has been made and broken. It has made the iron of the electro magnet a magnet; which has attracted to it the armature of the pen lever; the pen lever, by its steel pen points, has in- dented the paper, and the pen lever has, also, by the connecting wire with the break, taken it from the friction wheel; this has released the clock work, which, through the agency of the weight, has commenced running, and the two rollers
Figure 16. Diagram of printing telegraph. The noise of the apparatus based on this model even- tually became the basis for sound telegraphy.
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have supplied the pen with paper. But, as only one touch of the key has been made, the clock work soon stops again, if no other touches are made, by the ac- tion of the break upon the friction wheel.11
If, as Friedrich Kittler suggests, nineteenth-century media transmo- grified a holy trinity of image, sound, and writing, telegraphy would com- mingle all three.12The Morse telegraph was a machine for writing at a dis-
tance; how that writing would be perceived was an open question. Initially, Morse and Vail’s machine produced a script to be viewed. The length of the indentation would depend on how long the operator at the transmitting end kept the key down. Thus, the code appeared as “dots and dashes” be- cause those were the two different indentations made by receivers. Morse’s famous “first” (i.e., public) message, “What hath God wrought?” was ac- complished through this means.13However, these technical facilities were
only half of the Morse telegraph’s innovation. The other was Morse code. Morse’s code was originally a simple cipher code, where a series of dots and dashes would arbitrarily stand for a number that corresponded to a word. It was improved by Alfred Vail in 1837 to a version of the modern Morse code alphabet (which was finalized in 1844) in which each letter was represented by a series of dots and dashes. As a result, a telegraph operator
would have to memorize only a limited number of series, one for each let- ter and symbol to be transmitted, rather than having to memorize a po- tentially infinite number of words. Morse was not the first to invent a tele- graphic code; he was simply the first to invent such a code that found wide use. In 1851, a European conference made Austro-Germanic code the stan- dard for international and land telegraphy everywhere except the United States.14
Morse and others spoke of his code in terms of signs, and the language here is not accidental. Morse code is a set of symbols. It is purely a set of conventions, a series of signals to be perceived by an operator, each series corresponding to a specific letter in the English alphabet. Because of the code’s conventionality, it obviates the need for C.M.’s elaborate system of papers or tuned bells. Thus, as with the development of mediate ausculta- tion, it is not simply the apparatus but the technique of perception and its codification that were the significant innovations in the early history of te-