Network nation: inventing American telecommunications

529 Pages·2010·2.033 MB·English

by  John, Richard R

NETWORK NATION

N E T W O R K N AT I O N
Inventing American
Telecommunications
RICHARD R. JOHN
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2010
For Nancy,
who makes it all worthwhile
Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
John, Richard R., 1959–
Network nation : inventing American telecommunications /
Richard R. John.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-02429-8 (alk. paper)
1. Telecommunication—United States—History. I. Title.
TK5102.3.U6J64 2010
384—dc22 2009050825
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations and Tables vii
Introduction: Inventing American
Telecommunications 1
1 Making a Neighborhood of a Nation 5
2 Professor Morse’s Lightning 24
3 Antimonopoly 65
4 The New Postalic Dispensation 114
5 Rich Man’s Mail 156
6 The Talking Telegraph 200
7 Telephomania 238
8 Second Nature 269
9 Gray Wolves 311
10 Universal Serv ice 340
11 One Great Medium? 370
Epilogue: The Technical Millennium 407
vi Contents
Chronology of American Telecommunications 415
Notes 425
Ack now ledg ments 501
Index 505
ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES
Illustrations
“Napoleon’s Visual Telegraph: The First Long Distance
System” 15
“Amos Kendall” 71
“American Progress” 112
“Jupiter Ammonopoly Orton and His Victim the Press” 148
“Getting Ready to Cut the Melon” 168
“Consolidated” 187
“The Best Kind of Monopoly” 188
“In the Clutch of a Grasping Monopoly” 240
“Telephone Traffi c in Chicago” 288
“The Telephone Brings Companionship” 308
The relative size of the Bell and in de pen dent telephone
exchanges in Chicago in 1915 325
“I Hope Our Bell Boy Hurries with That Ordinance” 335
“The Triumph of Science” 391
viii Illustrations and Tables
Tables
1. Annual operating revenue of the Post Offi ce Department, Western
Union, and the Bell System, 1866–1 920 7
2. The fi ve largest telephone exchanges in the world, 1882, 1895,
1910, and 1920 218
3. The popularization of the telephone in Chicago,
1899– 1906 296
INTRODUCTION: INVENTING AMERICAN
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
This book is a history of the formative era of the fi rst electrical commu-
nications media in the United States. It considers how they worked and
why they mattered. Its theme is the infl uence on these media of the struc-
turing presence of the state, or what nineteenth- century contemporaries
called the po liti cal economy. The fi rst electrical communications media—
the telegraph and the telephone— were products not only of technologi-
cal imperatives and economic incentives, but also of governmental insti-
tutions and civic ideals.
The telegraph and the telephone are often associated with eponymous
inventors: the telegraph with Samuel F. B. Morse, the telephone with Al-
exander Graham Bell. This association is understandable. The Morse
code was long the most widely used telegraphic signaling language, and
the Bell System was for many de cades the largest telephone network in
the United States. Although Morse and Bell make frequent appearances
in the pages that follow, they are not the major protagonists. The inven-
tion of American telecommunications involved far more than the in-
vention of novel technical contrivances. Even more fundamental was
the scaling up of these contrivances into the spatially extensive and tem-
porally intensive communications networks that have become a hall-
mark of modernity. Invention is not innovation, and for the historian of
communications, the institutionalization of the fruits of invention is the
more compelling theme.
The telegraph and the telephone have dual identities as channels of
communications and as powerful institutions. The telegraph used electric-
ity to circulate written information; the telephone used electricity to am-
plify the human voice. In the formative era of American telecommunica-
tions, the dominant telegraph network was operated by Western U nion,
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