Getting the Message: A History of Communications, Second Edition

377 Pages·2021·8.479 MB·English

by  Laszlo Solymar

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/04/21, SPi
Getting the Message
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/04/21, SPi
A nineteenth- century prediction of the state of the art in the year 2000.
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Getting the Message
A History of Communications
Second Edition
Laszlo Solymar
1
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1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
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© Laszlo Solymar 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First edition published in 1999
Second edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932103
ISBN 978–0–19–886300–7
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863007.001.0001
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
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To my grandchildren Juliet, Oscar,
Georgina, and Tanya
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Preface to the Second Edition
The history of communications is a branch of the history of technology.
However, most of technology delivers something tangible: a piece of
machinery, a piece of furniture, a road, a bridge, or a plastic bag, to
name a few. The goods produced by communications are quite different.
They are messages: nearly always useless but occasionally very useful.
They were already used at the dawn of civilisation for early warning, for
receiving information about approaching armies.
The first edition, published in 1999, was mainly about point- to- point
communications as realized by the telegraph (mechanical or electrical),
the telephone, the fax machine, the telex, microwave links, satellite and
optical communications. I excluded broadcasting whether radio or
television. I made though a concession, by describing a kind of broad-
casting by telephone that was founded in 1893 in Budapest, and even
survived the First World War. I did include the fledgling Internet and
made some predictions about the future.
In the new edition, as in the old one, I start with some correspond-
ence some 4,000 years ago between the King of Mari (a city on the banks
of the Tigris) and whoever was in charge of communications at the
time. The historical context is always emphasized, e.g. the Kruger tele-
gram that caused the cooling of relations between Germany and the UK
prior to the First World War, or the Ems telegram that led to the 1870 war
between France and Germany. Social history related to communica-
tions like scandals, murder, and bankruptcy has also been included as
much as genius, inventiveness, and steady progress.
Twenty- one years is a long time and particularly in communications
that is probably the fastest advancing discipline. There has been enor-
mous expansion in satellite communications, and similarly in optical
communications, which jointly cover by now every corner of the Earth.
And there is the Internet, in its infancy at the time, that has turned
into an aggressive and robust adult. I am going to discuss both the
advantages (Internet is so all- embracing that it is difficult to imagine life
without it) and the abuses which are numerous. The same applies to
smartphones, and particularly to the younger generation. I have a few
photographs in Chapter 20 showing their obsession.
A notable inclusion into the new edition is the story of the Soviet
InterNyet. It shows the difficulty of a dictatorship to cope with a tech-
nique that cannot be easily controlled. They never managed to set up an
all- embracing computer network.
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viii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
A discipline that is still in its infancy is artificial intelligence. It is
included in a separate chapter in order to discuss its potential. Are the
claims advanced by those doing research in the subject sustainable?
Finally, I add a chapter on the future. Technical advances are quite pre-
dictable but otherwise (peace, politics, society) predictions are risky and
it is not easy to be optimistic.
Dictionary: NOSD
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Acknowledgements First Edition
First of all I wish to acknowledge my debt to the Oxford College system
which permits, nay, encourages the contacts between the practitioners
of the arts and of the sciences. I had the good luck to be able to discuss
Mesopotamia with Stephanie Dailey, the Holy Scriptures with John
Barton, Classics with Stephanie West, Byzantine times with Philip
Pattenden (actually, from Cambridge), science in the seventeenth cen-
tury with Scott Mandelbrot, Napoleonic times with Geoffrey Ellis, the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with Bob Evans, citations
from Goethe with Kevin Hilliard, a translation from Confucius with
Z. Cui, post-S econd World War politics with Nigel Gould-D avies, the
standard of living indices with Charles Feinstein, and matters in eco-
nomics with Roger van Noorden and Tony Courakis.
Concerning the history of communications I wish to acknowledge
the help I received from Patrice Carré and Christine Duchesne- Reboul
of France Telecom; John Bray, Peter Cochrane, David Hay, Neil
Johannesen, and H. Lyons of British Telecom; Alan Roblou of the BBC;
Karoly Geher of the Technical University of Budapest; Tony Karbowiak
of the University of New South Wales; Peter Kirstein of University
College, London; David Payne of the University of Southampton; Victor
Kalinin of Oxford Brookes University; and Dominic O’Brien, David Dew-
Hughes, Terry Jones, Lionel Tarassenko, Don Walsh, and David Witt of
the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford.
For help with the literature search I wish to thank Stephen Barlay,
Leon Freris, Margaret Gowing, George Lawrence, Gabriella Netting,
Sandor Polgar, Klaus Ringhofer, and Jeno Takacs. I am indebted to
Michael Allaby, Eric Ash, Frank Ball, Mike Brady, Godfrey Hodgson,
Gillian Lacey- Solymar, Avril Lethbridge, Lucy Solymar, and David Witt
for reading various parts of the manuscript and for helpful comments.
The whole of the manuscript was read and a large number of stimulat-
ing comments were made by Jonathan Coopersmith, Richard Lawrence,
Julia Tompson, and Peter Walker.
I am greatly indebted to David Clark, the Head of the Department of
Engineering Science, and Chris Scotcher, who is in charge of adminis-
tration, for providing generous facilities while this book was written.
Special thanks are due to Jeff Hecht who let me read the manuscript
of his book The City of Light, to Geoffrey Wilson who let me use any
material from his book The Old Telegraph, and to Mark Neill for providing
the pixellated pictures of Napoleon in Chapter 15. I have to mention sep-
arately Pierre-L ouis Dougniaux, the picture archivist of France Telecom,