To many people in the nineteenth century, the railroad and the telegraph were powerful, transformative forces, ones that seemed to work closely together to shape the economy, society, and politics of ...the United States. However, the perception—both popular and scholarly—of the intrinsic connections between these two institutions has largely obscured a far more complex and contested relationship, one that created profound divisions between entrepreneurial telegraph promoters and warier railroad managers.
In The Train and the Telegraph, Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes argues that uncertainty, mutual suspicion, and cautious experimentation more aptly describe how railroad officials and telegraph entrepreneurs hesitantly established a business and technical relationship. The two industries, Schwantes reveals, were drawn together gradually through external factors such as war, state and federal safety regulations, and financial necessity, rather than because of any perception that the two industries were naturally related or beneficial to each other.
Complicating the existing scholarship by demonstrating that the railroad and telegraph in the United States were uneasy partners at best—and more often outright antagonists—throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The Train and the Telegraph will appeal to scholars of communication, transportation, and American business history and political economy, as well as to enthusiasts of the nineteenth-century American railroad industry.
The single-wire telegraph revolutionized long distance communication but it was not the brainchild of one inventor, Samuel Morse. His colleagues and employees-specifically Ezra Cornell and Joseph ...Henry-made crucial contributions. Examining the careers of the three men and the key events, this book presents Morse as primarily a businessman and consolidator of ideas who, frequently in conflict with his associates, sought to present the telegraph as a uniform system under his sole imprimatur. The battle between Morse and Cornell over the invention of the magnetic relay was central to the drama. What emerges is a complex portrait of three ambitious and brilliant innovators and the age in which they lived.
Telegraphy in the nineteenth century approximated the internet in our own day. Historian and electrical engineer David Hochfelder offers readers a comprehensive history of this groundbreaking ...technology, which employs breaks in an electrical current to send code along miles of wire. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920, examines the correlation between technological innovation and social change and shows how this transformative relationship helps us to understand and perhaps define modernity.
The telegraph revolutionized the spread of information—speeding personal messages, news of public events, and details of stock fluctuations. During the Civil War, telegraphed intelligence and high-level directives gave the Union war effort a critical advantage. Afterward, the telegraph helped build and break fortunes and, along with the railroad, altered the way Americans thought about time and space. Hochfelder thus supplies us with an introduction to the early stirrings of the information age.
Provider: - Institution: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek - Austrian National Library - Data provided by Europeana Collections- All metadata published by Europeana are available free of restriction ...under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. However, Europeana requests that you actively acknowledge and give attribution to all metadata sources including Europeana
In this book, based on previously unpublished archival sources, George F. Botjer examines the importance of time and place in the launch of Samuel F. B. Morse's invention and his resulting fame and ...how the invention affected the inventor himself.
Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism focuses on American romantic writers' attempts to theorize aesthetic experience through the language of electricity. In response to ...scientific and technological developments, most notably the telegraph, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century electrical imagery reflected the mysterious workings of the physical mind as well as the uncertain, sometimes shocking connections between individuals. Writers such as Whitman, Melville, and Douglass drew on images of electricity and telegraphy to describe literature both as the product of specific economic and social conditions and as a means of transcending the individual determined by such conditions. Aesthetic Materialism moves between historical and cultural analysis and close textual reading, challenging readers to see American literature as at once formal and historical and as a product of both aesthetic and material experience.
Network Nation John, Richard R
2010, 2015-10-05, 20100101
eBook
Network Nation places the history of telecommunications within the broader context of American politics, business, and discourse. This engrossing and provocative book persuades us of the critical ...role of political economy in the development of new technologies and their implementation.
Provider: - Institution: Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache - Bibliothek - Data provided by Europeana Collections- Der Beitrag stellt drei wichtige Etappen in der Entwicklungsgeschichte der ...Telekommunikation in den Mittelpunkt: den optischen Telegraf, den elektrischen Telegraf und das Telefon. Die exemplarische Behandlung verschiedener Texte aus Wissenschaft, Technik und Alltag soll die facettenreichen Auseinandersetzungen zeigen, die zu den drei Basisinnovationen des 19. Jahrhunderts geführt wurden. Dabei soll die vielfältige sprachliche Aneignung der neuen Techniken auf mehreren Ebenen analysiert werden: Welcher Ausdrucksmittel bedient sich eine zeittypische und technikeuphorische Beschreibungssprache? Welche neuen Kommunikationsgewohnheiten, Dialogformen und Textstrukturen bilden sich aus? Welche Begriffe der neuen Technik werden zu Leitbegriffen und zentralen metaphorischen Bildern in der öffentlichen Sprache des 19. Jahrhunderts?- All metadata published by Europeana are available free of restriction under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. However, Europeana requests that you actively acknowledge and give attribution to all metadata sources including Europeana
