TO GO, BUT NOT TO MOVE

The story goes that in 1861 the chief of the Shoshone Indians, whom his white visitors had come to know as Sho-kup, declared his belief that the electric telegraph, whose metal wires were beginning to sprout across his people’s lands, was some kind of mysterious and ill-intentioned animal. The chief especially could not understand how this animal was to be fed. The white men told him it ate lightning, but Sho-kup remained suspicious.

The men told the chief he could use this instrument to communicate with his pair of wives (at the time of the reported conversation, one was said to be under the weather) no matter how many miles separated them. But Sho-kup was not as impressed by this as they hoped. He said he would prefer to talk to each of them in the customary way, face-to-face. Nevertheless, he was grateful to them for suggesting the idea, and now he felt a little calmer and somewhat reassured—indeed, so calmed that he now probably could accept the telegraph’s inexplicable magic. He decided he could best deal with its mysteriousness by naming it, by giving it a sesquipedelian Shoshone word of his own making. He thought for a while, consulting those of his fellow chiefs who had some linguistic skills, before declaring the suitable word to be we-ente-mo-ke-te-bope. An interpreter quietly told the listening white men that this elaborate confection of sounds signified the phrase “wire rope express.”

A name was nice, but it was still not exactly what the white men wanted. And so they waited, for they had come on an urgent mission. They were from the Overland Telegraph Company, and long-distance telegraphy was their business. They were trying for the first time to string a line right across America. In places this was not an easy task, the simple engineering difficulties of the project aside. In a place like this remote corner of the Rocky Mountains, for instance, there was still much nervousness among the local native people about the new inventions and what they were bringing with them. The men of the Overland Company needed the local chief’s permission to arrange the lines across his people’s mountains. They also needed to be assured that their line—here suspected of being an animal, but feared for many other reasons in many other places—would not be attacked, torn down, destroyed.

After some further thought, Sho-kup told the visitors that he by no means liked their wire rope express, nor did he trust its intent, and given his continuing belief that it was some kind of beast, he feared its appetite. But in an act of great magnanimity, he finally agreed to treat it kindly and with respect. Moreover, he promised he would send out an order to his men never to do it an injury. If the visitors truly wanted to build their poles across his land and hang their wire rope express from one pole to another, then that was acceptable, more or less.

After saying their farewells to the old man and his council of chiefs, the white men set off in their small convoy of wagons. They left behind a detachment who then dug deep circular holes to hold the thirty-foot-high poles of stripped and treated pine, with crossbars from which the wire rope could be suspended. Once they had the poles firmly set in place, the detachment galloped out of the rugged lands of the Shoshone, and headed westward toward California, all of them in a confident mood.

Neither Sho-kup and his people, nor indeed the men who put up the poles and stretched the wire between them, had any true idea what would eventually take place. The wire up above them looked so modest and innocent and incapable. It was just a wire. It didn’t move, except when the wind made it vibrate and send out a plangent whistling, somewhat akin to the grass on the plains when the breezes ruffle it like the sea, and it bends and waves and seems to sigh.

The all-too-rapid changes afflicting some quarters of American society brought about by the invention of the telegraph were famously caught by the Cincinnati artist Henry Farny in his 1904 painting Song of the Talking Wire, in which a puzzled Plains Indian tries to listen to the conversation supposedly passing overhead.

There was something odd about the metal wire. It had to do with movement. Things that shifted their ways along roads and canals and railways and even through the air above—eagles, for instance—could be seen to proceed from place to place. Such normal, traditional progress was an entirely visible thing, easy to understand. The whole arrangement—whether from a team of horses being lashed along, gouts of steam pouring from a locomotive funnel, the flap of a bird’s wing, or in later years the whirl of an airplane propeller—gave the clear impression of the frantic expenditure of some kinetic energy, which roared and thundered and zoomed and collided and perhaps had accidents but still shipped people and goods from place to place on time, or not, as the case might be.

But the wire was something quite different. Small wonder it was so feared, so suspected, so much the target of attack. For it was always quite silent, yet it was said by those who knew that things were moving along it—and yet the peculiar thing was that if anything, either cramped and crammed inside its narrow interior or crawling precariously along its insignificant outer surfaces, was moving, it never showed.

To a mid-nineteenth-century person—whether an Indian or a Scottish or German farmer newly arrived on the prairies or a slave survivor of the Middle Passage—the business of the telegraph wire was so unfathomable as to verge on the impossible and the magical.

The telegraph was carrying information—and it was doing so in a manner that required no agency of man to transport it. The taking, the sending, the shifting, the transporting—all of this could be done instantly, while the carrier seemed to remain perfectly still. The invention marked a climactic moment in the history of the United States. The implications were enormous, and they were recognized immediately. The moment instant communication was within the grasp of all—banker, baker, merchant, soldier, doctor, farmer, and yes, even a hesitant Indian chief—America was bonded and annealed into an almost unbreakable and indivisible one.

If the ultimate effects of the telegraph were to be of great benefit, its proximate effects were less so—at least, for one particular and legendary corps of ambitious and courageous men. The Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Company—the Pony Express—had begun its heroic runs between Missouri and Sacramento in April 1860, but within months the message-bearing horsemen galloping frantically between the transfer stations could see the poles rising along the roadway beside them, could see the insulators being set in place, the copper wires being strung across them.

The end for the brave little horsemen was as swift and savage as it was inevitable. By October 1861, the cross-country connection of cables had been completed. Two days after the opening of its circuitry, with code being successfully received in California just seconds after it was tapped out in New York, the final orders went out to the Pony Express riders, too. No further men would be sent out from the stables, and the way stations built every ten miles along the two-thousand-mile route would be torn down or put up for sale. The staff who manned them would be sent home. The riders, Buffalo Bill and Frank Webner and Pony Bob Haslam and their other colleagues in the saddle, would be thanked, paid off, and their services dispensed with. Their fleet little horses would all be put out to pasture or sold off for glue.

The electron would now take over from the spur, the saddle, and the hammered iron shoe, and matters would never be the same again.

THE MAN WHO TAMED THE LIGHTNING

Most information is passed between human beings as conversation, the six-century-old word that signifies the interchange of thought in words, which is conventionally conducted face-to-face in what has come to be called real time. Over long distances, conversation was seldom possible, save for a bellow across a chasm, a wave from a point on high, a chain of fires, or a series of signals sent by smoke, reflected sunlight, or rattled sticks. For any exchange beyond single-syllable simplicity and for exchanges that were to be made across truly lengthy distances, conversation in a strict sense was not possible. Hand-carried messages and letters had long been the sole alternative.

Until the invention of the electric telegraph, which at last permitted a long-distance version of conversation. With it the transmission of information—gossip, news, or intelligence—could be accomplished, if not necessarily with perfect ease, then at least rapidly, in the blink of an eye.

This immediacy of communication is what made the electric telegraph and its successor inventions so mystifyingly different from what had gone before. It was a development involving a new magic that until then had never been much discussed: electricity.

Long known but long uncomprehended, electricity was recognized first as the strange attractive charge that came from rubbing chunks of natural amber with cloth. It was also realized to be lightning, which, as Benjamin Franklin had almost fatally discovered, could be brought from the sky down to earth along a conductive filament like the wet string of a kite. Electricity was also thought to be in some way related to the invisible force that made magnets attract great masses of iron and lift them unaided in a way no man could do.

Then it was found that electricity could be hoarded and stored. A pair of Italian inventors created a voltaic pile, so-called, that produced conductible electricity, while a team of French doctors managed to bottle up already-made electricity and then use it, by discharging it, to shock patients into what they imagined might be better health. In time, man would generate this strange force, and once there was enough of it and it was massaged in certain ways to allow it to pass across great distances, it would be persuaded to do innumerable things—produce light and heat, turn wheels, calculate numbers, make sparks, help lift weights, and move objects small distances.

In the earliest days of discovery, one possible use of electricity stood above all others. It could be made to power a subtle kind of device that would move information—a weightless thing, after all, requiring little power to transmit it—along conducting wires. If such a thing worked, it could move this information invisibly and very fast.

Samuel Morse, who died in 1872, probably was the first to come up with the idea of an information-transmitting electric device and, if technically beaten by a nose by some other contender, he was certainly the man who perfected it. But he did so only by chance, and the achievement was not at all what was expected of him. Morse had begun work as a portrait painter, a photographer, and a professor of fine arts, yet despite his own high hopes and best efforts (but fortunately for American communications), he is unremembered in these fields, because he was not especially distinguished in any of them.

When he came up with the idea, he was a sad and disappointed man, and not without reason. His descent into melancholy began in 1825, when he had traveled from his atelier in New York down to Washington, ostensibly to paint two portraits of the Marquis de Lafayette.* While there, he was informed by a horse messenger that his wife, back in New York, was desperately ill. By the time he returned home, he was too late; she had not only quite unexpectedly died during the birth of their fourth child, but had already been buried. It is said, perhaps fancifully, that his belief in the importance of high-speed communication—which might have allowed him to reach her bedside while she was still alive—was born at this moment.

Nor was this to be the only tragedy of his year. Shortly afterward, Morse’s adored father died, and then a few months later, his mother. Stunned by all this, he fled to Europe, hoping to forget, to win painting commissions beyond the America that was for him now so freighted with misery. He prayed in particular that his artistic labors in Washington would be recognized and he would be invited to paint a great mural inside the Capitol rotunda. But that wish turned to ashes, too. The works he produced in Paris and on his tours to Italy were widely thought to be indifferent at best, and his hopes of winning commissions came to nothing. He then learned—Pelion heaped upon Ossa—that a rival, an Italian named Constantino Brumidi, had been selected by Congress to paint the ceiling of the dome.

In October an utterly dejected and demoralized Morse, embarrassed at the prospect of being shunned by many of his more successful artist friends, decided to come home, an admitted failure. He journeyed to Le Havre in October 1832 and there boarded the French packet ship Sully, bound for New York. It was halfway across the Atlantic aboard her that he experienced the epiphany that would help him change the world.

Voyaging through strange seas has a way of bringing together the unusual and the unanticipated, and this passage was no exception. Twenty-six American passengers were on board, not including half a dozen farmers in steerage. Each night Morse dined with the senior American diplomat in France and with a lawyer from Philadelphia, together with the captain, as well as an otherwise forgotten man named Palmer and a Harvard geologist named Charles Jackson. It was his discussions with Jackson sometime during that stormy three-week passage that let Morse see the potential usefulness of electricity.

Both men were far from ignorant about the topic. Jackson’s scientific work in France had brought him into contact with matters electrical; and despite his ambitions in art, Morse had been taught such fundamentals of electricity as were known while he was at Yale thirty years before, and he had been interested enough in the topic to take additional classes at Columbia College in New York in the 1820s. He was also no mean inventor: twenty years before, he had made a new kind of pump and in 1822 had designed a machine to cut marble.

Perhaps it was an innocent discussion of the properties of limestone that first brought Jackson and Morse together over an evening drink. Whatever forged the first connection, it kept them together for the rest of the journey. In the sway of the ship’s saloon, the two men are remembered for endlessly debating and discussing electricity’s mysteries, suggesting various tasks for which it might be best suited.

Lawyers would in due course bitterly debate which one of them first suggested using electricity as a messenger, but most probably it was Morse, as Jackson’s later claims were declared the work of an embittered fantasist. (Jackson would later die in an asylum.) Suffice it to say that one of them remarked, “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted by electricity.”

In other words, if an electrical current can be made to spark, to do something that can be seen, and to do it instantly over any distance, and if that spark or a number or pattern of sparks can be made to stand for a letter or a number or a word or a name or a piece of data, then the information that these sparks denoted could likewise be transmitted instantly over any distance.

This was a vatic revelation. Morse, who like his geographer father was an avowed imperialist, believing profoundly that America must create “the largest Empire that ever existed,” realized in an electric instant the role his imagined invention could play in such a vision. He jumped from the boat the moment it drew alongside, sped to his widower’s apartment in New York, and promptly began to draw up designs. It was far from easy. Over the next four years, primarily in his offices in the newly opened university building on Washington Square, he patiently experimented with a number of wood-and-brass-and-wire-and-mercury devices built to do one basic thing: to use something—in his case a movable notched ruler fitted with metal blanks—to open and close an electrical circuit in patterns and sequences representing words and numbers in a code of Morse’s invention.

Information was fed into one end and sent down the wires. The circuit was then opened and closed at the other end, signaling that the information had been received. Every opening and closing of the circuit could be signified with a bell or a light or a click.

The complexity and sophistication of the message was up to the user, and the speed at which it needed to be written was up to the user, too. All he had to do was to write, carve, or insert the metal blanks into the ruler according to the prearranged code. In Morse’s primitive devices, the code was usually no more complicated than repetitions of clicks, five of them representing the number 5, and three followed by a space and then four more signifying 34. These numbers were then used to signify letters, or whole words in a numbered dictionary. The code, scribed onto a ruler and fed into the machine, would open and close the electrical circuit in the proper sequence. Far away, at the other end of the wire, the circuit would immediately display this same pattern of clicks, to be read as 5 or 34. Let’s say a pattern of click, click-click, click-click-click was received; a secondary codebook might translate this 123 as ABC.

From there it was a matter of refining the code and the equipment. The words NEW YORK, say, could be punched in at one end, and out of the far end would come a pattern of dots and dashes that could be recorded on a strip of paper and that, to a person able to read the code, would also spell out the same two words, NEW YORK. And crucially, in theory, no matter the distance between the writer and the reader, no matter if the seven letters and their single space were tapped out in half a second or half an hour—all were received an instant after being sent. It was an invention of great simplicity and elegance. It was to be called telegraphy, “distance-writing.” It was foolproof, exact, and precise. And it was made by Samuel Finley Breese Morse, a painter no more.

In time and with sedulous attention to detail (which included writing to all who had been aboard the Sully, and asking if they would swear an oath to what they remembered of his telegraph-obsessed conversations at sea), Morse eventually won all arguments* as to who was first and who invented the instrument, and on June 20, 1840, he won the American patent to it. The file still exists, one of the most significant documents in world history: US Patent No. 1,647, Improvement in the Mode of Communicating Information by Signals by the Application of Electro-Magnetism.

There were problems, inevitably. The electrical current available was too weak to allow messages to be sent as far as theory suggested. Most electricity at the disposal of experimenters was not much more powerful than the sparks that had famously made frogs’ legs twitch in experiments performed half a century earlier. To send messages farther than from one side of a room to another—and Morse’s original telegraph worked over only some forty feet before its signal petered out—required bigger and better batteries, coils, magnets, and most crucial, the invention of repeaters to amplify the signal and push it down the line with rejuvenated energy.

Few patents in world history can be said to have had quite the same impact on society as US Patent No. 1,647, won by Samuel Morse in 1840, signaling what was, essentially, the invention of the electric telegraph. Morse began his career as an artist and turned to electrical experimentation only after being disappointed by being refused a slew of commissions.

Soon other, more skilled inventors came to Morse’s aid. Bit by bit, measured foot by transmitted foot, the range of the device increased. The power from one galvanic cup—a primitive battery, zinc and copper plates immersed in a bath of acid—could be easily multiplied; when forty such cups were used, the signal traveled a hundred feet. When copper wires were wound more tightly around the magnet, a message could be moved a thousand feet. (Appropriately, the telegram A PATIENT WAITER IS NO LOSER was used for this test.) By the time a chemistry professor from Oxford came across the Atlantic to see a demonstration, Morse was sending messages half a mile and more, and then, triumphantly, across no less than ten miles. He knew he was onto something big. He started to petition friends in Washington to urge Congress to take an interest.

“We have no doubt,” he wrote in 1838, “that we can achieve a similar result at any distance.” He felt it vital to the national good that the government be involved in development of the telegraph. “It would seem most natural to connect a telegraphic system with the Post Office Department,” he wrote, because he saw the telegraph as another way of transmitting letters.

However, the Democratic Party controlled Congress at the time, and feeling that the telegraph was no matter for government (a reminder of the evolution of party-political sentiment over the years), rejected his overtures outright. Internal improvements to the country were not, the party chiefs intoned, “susceptible to federal aid.” It was instead up to the states or to private individuals to throw money into projects like this. The doctrine sharply divided politicians of the time; there was much suspicion about corruption, and no certainty that the majority of taxpayers would win the benefits for which they were being asked to pay. So Congress decided it would offer Morse no money for any public demonstration, nor would it offer any kind of official support for the establishment of a trial telegraph line between two cities.

On the technical side, Morse’s scientist allies were almost daily helping him with improvements. One man in particular, Alfred Vail, a priest turned machinist whose family owned a foundry, came up with the crucial invention that solved the problem of the telegraph signal’s progressive weakening over distance.

Vail broke the intended circuit into smallish pieces, and at each junction he introduced a device that he called a relay. This was another magnetic transmitter that “read” the incoming impulse, no matter how weak; boosted it; and then sent it on its reenergized way down the wire of the next circuit. The magic of the relay was that its work could be performed as many times as relays could be built and installed into the line. The line could be continued endlessly until a chain of circuits circled the entire planet, if that was wished.

In electrical terms, the key was the sensitivity of the relay. Alfred Vail put his wish for it this way: “It matters not how delicate the movement [of the receiver] may be. If I can obtain it at all, it is all I want.” So he built the device—a tiny magnet that could be triggered by even the tiniest movement at the circuit’s receiving end and would then open and close the next circuit. Messages could always be sent as fast as anyone wanted to send them; now, with what was called Vail’s “creative engineering achievement of the first order,” they could be sent as far as anyone wanted to send them, too.

Morse traveled the world for four years in search of support, all the while continuing to experiment, improve, and hone his invention and to inveigh against its naysayers. Then, suddenly and to universal surprise, the political climate changed, and congressional intransigence melted away like an April frost. Morse was summoned to Washington, where he arranged to string wires between congressional committee rooms to demonstrate his system’s abilities. The show seemed to soften the mood of the hitherto ill-tempered politicians sufficiently to prompt Morse to make yet another attempt to wheedle money from them.

This time he succeeded. It was hardly a rout: his plea only squeaked through by 89 votes to 83, but he cheerfully remarked that six votes were as good to him as a thousand. He had been offered a $30,000 subvention earmarked for a trench and a line between Washington and Baltimore, a distance of forty-four miles, to conduct the demonstration of his life.

This was the first electrical engineering project ever undertaken in America, and the technical problems turned out to be legion. The trench was tricky to excavate, especially when winter froze the ground. Not enough wire was available; the lead tubes used to insulate the conductor often broke; not enough batteries could be found. The paperwork required to free the government moneys was wretchedly complicated, and feuds broke out among contractors, would-be inventors, and new claimants to the existing inventions. Finally an exasperated Morse decided that the line need not be underground at all but could be suspended in the air from thirty-foot-high chestnut poles, spaced two hundred feet apart.

This turned out to be relatively easy, and he started to employ such of the line as had already been built to send news of the Whig Party’s national convention, which by chance was being staged in Baltimore, back to Washington. He had a colleague at the convention ride out on the train to the closest telegraph pole and report what he had found out to an operator, who would then telegraph it to politicians in Washington. On May 1, he was able to report that the convention had nominated Henry Clay for president. The whole city was suddenly agog with news that was spread about long before the newspapers had it; the atmosphere of febrile excitement that suddenly gripped political Washington generated enormous publicity for the device that transmitted the first official news message ever sent at the speed of light, city to city.

Of that later moment in telegraph history, the famous Friday, May 24, 1844, when the first formal telegraph message was sent, we know rather less than we might wish. Alfred Vail set up his instrument in the offices of a railway station about a mile outside Baltimore. Samuel Morse, well aware of his place in posterity, set his up in no less august a setting than the chamber of the United States Supreme Court, which was then on the ground floor of the north wing of the US Capitol, close to the rotunda whose giant ceiling Morse had once hoped to adorn. But there would be no disappointment now, on this, his second great encounter with the enormous government building.

The first public message to be sent by telegraph—WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT, from the Book of Numbers—was transmitted by Morse on May 24, 1844, from what was then the US Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol, to the railroad depot forty miles away in Baltimore.

Morse had taken advice on what the first message should be. Patent Commissioner Henry Leavitt Ellsworth had championed the invention, and Annie Ellsworth, his daughter, had brought Morse the news of the congressional funding vote, so as a gesture of gratitude, he asked her to choose a suitable phrase. We know little as to how many congressmen were present in Washington and how many others were watching and listening in the depot forty miles away in Baltimore. All we do know is that sometime on that warm afternoon, in the presence of a select group of the nation’s elite, Morse sat down before his confection of wires and magnets and cogwheels and mercury vials and levers, and tapped out eighteen letters, the final four words of the twenty-third verse of the twenty-third chapter of the Book of Numbers: WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.

The words alone formed a simple declarative exclamation, a statement of Samuel Morse’s faith, a plangent line of gratitude, and above all, a suitably portentous epigraph for an era of change that now commenced with unimagined speed and unimaginable consequences. It marked the moment when, as Henry Adams would later write in his Education of Henry Adams, “the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created.”

New telegraph lines went up almost overnight. They went up so fast, according to the music-hall wits of the moment, that it seemed new wires were being spliced onto the tops of cornstalks and beanpoles. Lines were sent out strategically, tactically, or randomly, and were planned to run hither and yon, some for highly profitable reasons and others for purposes less commercially wise. Major cities would be connected in a matter of months; distant states within just a few years.

By the mid-1850s, there were dozens of telegraph companies, offering services of wildly variable quality. Many of these companies had been established so quickly and with so little thought of geography that one message often had to pass through several competing companies’ hands before it reached its target destination. Between Chicago and New York, for example, a message might pass through the operators of six different companies, with each retransmission occasioning delay and risking inaccuracy. Then a team of investors led by Hiram Sibley, a wool carder, agricultural equipment dealer, banker, and county sheriff based in the wheat-processing center of Rochester, New York, decided to buy up all the competing companies and create a giant near-monopoly. Sibley and his crop-buying business friends needed accurate and up-to-the-moment news on wheat prices, and for that there had to be one telegraph company, and one only.

There might have been missteps. Sibley first backed a rival telegraph system, which was based on keyboards and the Roman alphabet rather than Morse code, and which had been invented by a man with the magnificent name of Royal House. And the giant new company was nearly given the name the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. But in the end, Morse’s system proved entirely more reliable than the House brand, and the new name chosen for the company was memorable and elegantly spare: Western Union.*

It was under the banner of this Western Union, appropriately, that the push then began to unite the nation telegraphically, coast-to-coast. Sibley pressed Congress as early as 1857 to support building a transcontinental line. Three years later, the politicians passed the Pacific Telegraph Act of 1860, which underwrote the $40,000 Sibley decided the line would cost.

The act was signed into law on June 16 by President James Buchanan—one of the few notable deeds of a president whose repute remains mired by his having to watch as the slave states of the Deep South seceded and the sides drew apart to begin the first fighting of the Civil War. His decision in signing the telegraph legislation was fully intended to unite the nation, and yet it was a decision taken even as the country was beginning the most savage period of division and disunity in all of its history.

Within weeks Sibley had set up companies to undertake the various sections of the line from Omaha to Sacramento—the same route, more or less, that would soon be taken by the transcontinental railway. By the time construction began in the early summer of 1861, the Civil War was well under way. The attack on Fort Sumter, the generally accepted starting point, had been in April. It thus took more time and trouble than had been expected to acquire supplies of wire and wet-cell batteries and insulators for the fifty-volt line and other essential material—especially supplies for the western half of the line, which still had to be shipped from Northern ports, around Cape Horn, and up to San Francisco.

Once supplies were at hand, the business of cutting poles and making holes, tipping the one into the other, nailing up the cross ties and setting into them the iron-and-glass insulators that would carry the wire, then lifting the wire from an adjacent pole or splicing a new one onto the free end all turned out to be none too difficult, and progress was swift. The prospect of the linemen having to spend a harsh winter in the Rockies was a powerful disincentive to delay. The line had reached Laramie in August, Salt Lake City in early October, and then with Sho-kup’s generous sanction, the tiny town of Fort Carson later in the month. By October 24, 1861, the line was complete.

The first message was sent out from San Francisco by a high panjandrum of one of the telegraph companies. It went to an American president who was by then already reeling under the first months of the Civil War. “I announce to you,” went the message to Abraham Lincoln, “that the telegraph to California has this day been completed. May it be a bond of perpetuity between the states of the Atlantic and the Pacific.” No mention was made of the North or the South.

The message was a harbinger: in all the future development of the nation, east and west time and again would trump north and south, leading to marginalization of the southeastern corner of the country—a marginalization that to a degree remains today.

It was all so quick. It had been no more than a decade and a half after the first signal messages had gone from near Baltimore to the Capitol building that engineers had come inquiring at tepee doors in Idaho, explaining that they were planning the line to California, and could they please pass by? And then it was just moments later, in the greater scheme of things, when all America was connected. Once the final connections had been soldered together and the last of the knurled brass screws tightened, when switches were thrown and voltmeters flicked upward and to the right, quivered and stayed there, then began the roar of a long-withheld national conversation.

Borrowers could now talk to lenders; buyers could negotiate with sellers; stock market trends could be sent to all corners of the nation; commodity prices could be relayed to potential market makers; credit references could be checked no matter how far from home the applicant was. In short, the whole complicated apparatus of a fully functioning capitalist economy, lubricated with what economists would come to call “perfect information”—data that were up-to-the-minute, accurate, and offered disinterestedly to all—was now in place, ready to be pressed into service. America could now be instantly in touch with itself, and from that moment on, the din has never ceased.

But . . . neither of the progenitors of the system remained much interested in their creation in later life, though both benefited mightily, accruing great fortunes. Samuel Morse tried to go back to painting but found his talent had deserted him, and he died, less content than he deserved to be, in 1872. Hiram Sibley lasted sixteen years longer, and after retiring from Western Union, became a successful dealer in seeds, leaving the technological developments of the age firmly behind him and his company’s legacy to others.

Western Union once carried more than 90 percent of all telegraphed messages sent in America, but it eventually dwindled in standing as its technology was superseded. Horticulturists, however, belong to a community that today remembers Western Union’s leader for an entirely different legacy. A century ago, Hiram Sibley and Company, seed merchants of Rochester, New York, found and then promoted lavishly a banana-shaped summer gourd that is known still to keen gardeners as the Sibley squash. Though the company’s last telegram was sent in 2006, the Sibley squash endures and will presumably continue until the end of botanical time.

THE SIGNAL POWER OF HUMAN SPEECH

In scientific terms, the telegraph truly transformed the age and broke new ground. It created a profoundly new epoch in human history. Yet it was quite lacking in intimacy and privacy. Ordinary people did not warm to the idea of having telegraph instruments in their drawing rooms any more than they had wanted railway stations in their backyards. Most people could not read Morse code any more than they could shunt steam engines.

But then came the telephone, a device of immense social value, an instrument of personal empowerment. For it was private, intimate, and immediate. The telegraph allowed the transmission of information, but the telephone let individuals have their own long-distance conversations without any need for an intermediary—making it an immediate object of desire.

The telephone became something that was to be owned, to be placed proudly as the centerpiece of a sitting room, next to the aspidistra and across from the soda siphon. And that simple fact—that an electrical device was now made to be installed inside a private house—led to the creation of an entirely new skein of networks, for telephony first but also for an entirely new electrically powered world besides.

 

Alexander Graham Bell was the genius first seized with the idea of the telephone, in 1874. He was at the time employed in Boston as a teacher of the deaf—both his father and later his wife were afflicted—so he knew a good deal about vibrations in the air. One day he had wondered out loud whether, as he later wrote, “it would be possible to transmit sounds of any sort if we could only occasion a variation in the intensity of the current exactly like that occurring in the density of air while a given sound is made.” It was a technological epiphany that impressed many, not least the imperious Joseph Henry, one of the country’s greatest electrical engineers, then the head of the Smithsonian Institution.

“You have the germ of a great invention,” he said to Bell, who replied pathetically that he did not have the skill to do the necessary work. Henry’s stark bark of a reply remains the stuff of legend. “Get it!”

And Aleck, as his family knew him, promptly and famously got it. Less two years later, in March 1876, this twenty-nine-year-old Scotland-born Canadian American teacher and inventor was awarded the famous US Patent No. 174,465, “for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds.” Some weeks before the patent was awarded, he had conducted the equally famous experiment that concluded with perhaps the most important fragment of peremptory speech ever known.

Bell had been experimenting for months with different ways of transmitting “the vibrations of the air” by means of the electric telegraph. Much of his work had been done in a damp basement in Salem, a dire place where the witches’ trials had been held back in colonial times. But in early 1875 he rented a much more agreeable and airy space on Court Street in Boston, in the shop attic of the man who supplied him with electrical equipment—a man who also customarily supplied his inventor tenants with assistants. He happened to assign to Bell an equally young man named Thomas Watson, who became a faithful companion and assistant for the next several decades and played a significant supporting role in the history of America and the world.

One day in the summer of 1875, the two men happened to be working in adjoining rooms, testing three vibrating reeds they were using for an experiment on sending multiple signals along a single telegraph line. One of Watson’s reeds had become too firmly stuck to a magnet, and the young man pulled it clear, with a twang. At the very same instant, Bell, in the next room, heard the same twang through his own receiver—and realized the vibration had induced a tiny electric current that had traveled from one room to the next by wire and had made the reeds on Bell’s magnets twang at the same frequency as Watson’s, at the very same time. He bent his languid frame over the instrument and cupped his ear: there was no doubt about it. Sound was being sent and received where only symbols had gone before.

It was an unanticipated moment of the purest serendipity, and it stopped the two men in their tracks. This, Bell realized, was how to send those “vibrations in the air” down the line—by making a magnet induce a small electric current that would travel along the wire carrying with it the encoded vibrations, as it were. Bell and Watson refined and refined what they were doing, working on ways that the full spectrum of sound frequencies and timbres could be sent, recognized, and received. And then on March 10, 1876, came the peremptory command that remains frozen in history.

Bell had rigged his instrument with a speaking tube, and the circuits between his own room and Watson’s were live. The magnets were working, varying the resistance and producing an undulatory current to mimic the sound that was causing the variation; all other components in the chain were working, too. Now Bell needed his assistant to come to his laboratory to check his instruments.

Whether by accident or design, Alexander Graham Bell spoke formally and sharply into his speaking tube: “Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” And Thomas Watson came as summoned, running. He burst through the door. “I could hear you. I heard what you said!” he exclaimed.

He had become the recipient of the first intelligible telephone message ever sent. Bell’s order may have lacked the sonorous majesty of the carefully thought-out WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT of Samuel Morse’s first telegraphic message thirty-two years before, but it came to serve as an epigraph of which he was inordinately proud.

 

Bell had occasion to recall it nearly forty years later, on January 25, 1915. By this time, the telephone was wildly popular, with millions connected around the country. But now and for the first time, a telephone line had been strung clear across the continent, and it was about to be tested. Alexander Graham Bell was in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company headquarters, on the fifteenth floor of the Telephone Building on Dey Street in Manhattan. Thomas Watson was in the Bell Building in San Francisco, almost three thousand miles away.

The test started. Engineers said all was ready. Watson picked up the telephone on his desk. At first, dead silence. Then came a click, a faint electrical buzz, and after a tantalizing pause, out of the earpiece came a voice.

“Hello, Mr. Watson,” it said, in the familiar, scrupulously modulated, tones of an educated Scotsman. “Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you perfectly,” Watson replied to his former chief.

“Mr. Watson,” Bell went on, a smile playing in his voice, “come here, I want you.”

Thomas Watson, still on the far side of a partition, but one now three thousand miles wide, was quick on the uptake. Maybe the moment was rehearsed, for there were many cameras and reporters present. He smiled, and spoke into the receiver: “I could—but this time it would take me a week to get to you.”

The gist of America’s first transcontinental telephone conversation, in other words, was that most impeccable of social lubricants—a joke. It was an exchange that would set the tone for how the most recognizable and universal technological instrument on the planet would most commonly be employed. It would be used for business, of course, and to transmit the perfect information required for efficient capitalism. But most of all, it would transmit the quotidian ebbs and flows of common chatter, which could now be conducted as easily across the country as across the room.

“Making a Neighborhood of a Nation,” said Southwestern Bell’s advertisements that announced the new service. But the angelic country-spanning operator who is pictured beside the slogan, holding in each hand a telephone, one on the East Coast, the other on the West, has a single word on her headband, suggesting the real hero of the moment: Science.

Alexander Graham Bell, scientist, though a kindly and considerate man and a philanthropist of the first water, was also an adroit businessmen, and he and his heirs became extraordinarily rich. When offered a share in Bell’s company, the chiefs at Western Union at first scoffed at his invention, dismissing it as no more than a toy. A year later, they realized their mistake and offered $25 million for the patent rights. The offer was too late and, by then, far too small. The telephone was fast becoming a success of epic proportions. Everyone wanted one. By the time Bell died and was laid to rest in Nova Scotia, there were thirteen million in America alone. Today there are more telephones in the United States than there are people. And while it would be idle to suggest that telephony is universal—billions of people, in Asia and Africa most commonly, still have little access to clean water or basic sanitation, let alone to even the plainest of telephone instruments—the statistic is undeniable: there are currently six billion cell phones in the world, a number that is increasing rapidly as long-distance conversation becomes almost a basic human right.

As soon as the telephone had been invented in 1876, offering people the opportunity to have conversations from home with people far away, the instrument became fantastically popular. Small forests of poles soon sprang up in cities, to hold up the wires running between subscribers and exchanges, as here on New York’s Broadway.

Small wonder that US Patent No. 174,465 is said to be the most valuable patent ever awarded, though it might not have changed the universe quite as thoroughly as did Morse’s Patent 1,647. No one would say of the telephone, as people had said of the telegraph, that it caused the old world to be tossed into the ashcan and a new one to be born. For many years, the telephone’s newfangledness was feared by those who came to it late—especially, for some reason, Midwestern farmers, who saw it as an instrument that brought only bad news, usually in the middle of the night.* More commonly, though, the instrument came swiftly to be seen as seen a device with lasting commercial class and mercantile clout. Alexander Graham Bell has long been regarded fondly as an archbishop of the capitalist cathedral, especially by the millions around the country who were prudent or prescient enough to own telephone shares. As the glum Western Union chiefs must have said to themselves a year after they turned down his offer, Some toy!

WITH POWER FOR ONE AND ALL

It was a crisp blue morning in mid-September, and I was standing on Battle Pass, in southern Wyoming, mugging for the camera with one foot on each side of the Continental Divide. There was a dusting of early frost on the peaks of the Snowy Range, fifty miles to the east, but here, even at 9,900 feet, it was still comfortable, and the air was scented with warming pine needles. For a few moments, it was serenely peaceful, with just the occasional eagle swooping in the thermals. But then from behind a rock, with the tinny sound of a lawn mower engine, there appeared a stripped-down tractorlike vehicle, with two men aboard. “Hunters!” I cursed. So nice a day! Let’s go out and kill something!

But they turned out to be a perfectly pleasant father and son from Laramie, the lad a poster boy for the joys of hunting and paternal bonding. The pair had skipped their respective work and education for the day and had come up into the high hills for the formal start of the antelope season. When they heard what I was doing—researching the old American Western trails—they both pointed down to the west, where a small gleam of silver shone in the morning sun. “Battle Lake,” they said in near-unison. “Where Edison invented the lightbulb.”

Well, perhaps. Not quite. There is a plaque on the roadway above the lake, which is on the western side of the Divide, and it suggests rather modestly that Thomas Alva Edison had indeed come to Battle Lake in July 1878 and that being there had something to do with inspiring him to think of using burned bamboo to help make light for the nation’s households.

He had traveled to this corner of what was then Wyoming Territory, along with a team of astronomers, to observe an eclipse of the sun while standing on the very same high pass where I had encountered the father-and-son hunters who told me the story. Once the phenomenon was duly observed and done with, he went downhill to fish in the lake, and, so the story goes, he slipped and let one of his bamboo fly rods fall into his campfire. The bamboo was reduced to fronds and filigrees of filaments, which glowed brilliant white with heat. Edison wondered if such a filament could perhaps be made hot artificially, with an electric current running through it, and by becoming hot emit a fine white and useful light. The filament would be fragile, of course; but its lifetime could perhaps be extended and preserved by enclosing it in a vacuum in a specially blown glass bulb.

Thus was born—allegedly, supposedly—the idea of the incandescent lightbulb, in the up-country wilds of Carbon County, Wyoming Territory, in the summer of 1878. But skeptics abound. Most suggest that the nation’s inventor-in-chief experimented in his laboratory in Menlo Park with scores of potential illuminating candidates—strands of burned baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo among them—before finally settling on the carbonized cotton thread from which he made his famous first-ever patented lightbulb in 1879. Bamboo was but one of some six thousand vegetable products that he tried. To find the longest-lasting filament, “I ransacked the world,” he said.

But whether or not Wyoming is due any pride-of-place laurels, Edison’s incandescent lightbulb spawned a need that neither the telegraph nor the telephone had created: a need for power. The telegraph and the telephone drew their sustenance from battery cells in the exchanges, but the electric light was different. Its sheer popularity presented the world with a brand-new challenge, for there were soon far too many of them to power in any conventional way.

Once working models of lightbulbs were put on the market, they quickly began to replace the oil lanterns and gaslights of Victorian households—but the number of bulbs required to light even a modest house or the smallest town demanded a change in the way power was distributed. It made no economic sense to equip each bulb or each household with a battery pack, nor could any battery array at some central plant possibly illuminate as many bulbs as were now hungering for power.

It was necessary that electricity be made, or generated.* Once made, it would then be necessary to distribute it along wires to the waiting communities, and from there send it on to businesses and individual houses, lighting the bulbs in the streets and inside the buildings.

Thomas Edison worked out just how to do this. He was a man of many achievements, with no fewer than 1,093 patents to his name, from the phonograph to the stock-market ticker to the movie camera to the electric chair, and of course the incandescent lightbulb; but his creation of the new science of electric power generation and distribution is the signal unifying achievement that arguably outshines them all.

It all began on Christie Street, in what was once the town of Raritan, New Jersey. (Since the early 1950s, it has been the township of Edison.) The street Edison chose as the first in America—or anywhere in the world, for that matter—to be lit by incandescent electric lamps ran for half a mile outside his laboratories. The lamps were switched on, connected to batteries inside the laboratory, on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1879.

Today most of the houses on Christie Street are just as one might expect of a prosperous bedroom community—neat, mostly ranch style, with clipped lawns, basketball hoops outside the two-car garages, garbage containers ranked outside according to the latest recycling rules. There are a good number of sodium vapor lamps to illuminate the street, all of them now powered not by batteries but by solar panels. Then, at the street’s southern end stands something quite phenomenal: an enormous model of a domestic lightbulb, 13 feet high and made of segments of Pyrex, sitting on top of a tower nearly 120 feet tall that is decorated with eight columns of concrete mosaic, with each topped by a floodlight aimed at the great bulb in the sky.

Every evening the light, a gigantic model of Edison’s first domestic lightbulb, beams out over the suburb, illuminated from within by a giant incandescent filament (soon to be replaced by light-emitting diodes, which the great man did not invent) and lit from below by the floods. Huge loudspeakers set into the concrete then crackle during the daytime with recordings of Edison’s words or else with barely discernible music, mostly sounding like wasps trapped in a milk bottle, spun from his early gramophone recordings. On his birthday each February, the speakers sound with encomiums to the man who, as they say in these parts, “invented today.”

The motto of Edison Township is “Let there be light,” and not without reason. During the summer of 1879 he saw to it that lamps were erected along the byways of the township’s thirty-six acres of Menlo Park, where he had sited his laboratory. They were an exhibition of his abilities and his vision, an exhibition he would employ to persuade those who mattered in New York to allow him to use the city as his first test market for lightbulbs and for the generation and distribution of the electricity to illuminate them.

Not that Manhattan was exactly wanting for electric light. For the previous decade, many of the city’s streets, parks, docks, and factories had been lit by thousands of arc lights, devices which poured cascades of brilliant, unforgiving, harsh white light from between a pair of pointed carbon electrodes. They emitted gas that caused headaches, smelled bad, and left a grimy, oily residue on ceilings. The electrodes also burned out rapidly, the drain on batteries was immense, and the quality of light was intolerably extreme. Their makers, knowing they were unpopular, offered the argument that by erecting tall arc-light towers from which illumination could be directed across entire neighborhoods, light would be offered to all equally and democratically, in a very American way. But it was an argument that cut little ice with New Yorkers. Although everyone agreed that the security the lights offered to businesses and people late at night promoted the twenty-four-hour economy that still defines Manhattan today, no one liked arc lighting, not one bit.

Edison hoped New Yorkers would turn instead to his smaller, softer, more human-scale incandescent vacuum-tube illuminations—bulbs his company promised would offer “milder” light. He consequently invited all manner of grandees over to Menlo Park to demonstrate what he had in mind.

It was quite a show. On his thirty-six-acre spread, he had laid out whole streets, each lined with wooden poles topped with glass lanterns, inside each of which was an incandescent bulb. Imaginary houses, designed to look like those in lower Manhattan, were also staked out, and they were lighted, too, and this whole unreal New York City was connected to an array of batteries with feeder cables (which took the power to the streets), mains wires (which took it into the houses), and service wires (which went to the individual house lamps). Edison’s basic plan for electric distribution—generator, feeder, mains, service—remains today the standard model for all distribution everywhere.

Once he threw the switches, his display burst into a frenzy of glitter. It immediately and mightily impressed the city’s Blue Book visitors. The Vanderbilts, prominent from their railroading fortune, were the first to back Edison’s efforts. Then a portfolio of barons—J. P. Morgan, Baron Rothschild, and Henry Villard among them—followed suit, commingling between them sufficient funds to allow Edison to forge ahead.

Early in 1881, Edison gave a formidable dinner party, catered by Delmonico’s—with Sarah Bernhardt performing—where he showed New York’s aldermen and commissioners what he had in mind: a power station in lower Manhattan and conduits with cables running beneath the streets from it to connect buildings to his new electric service. It must have been a wild party, because less than three weeks later, the city’s new mayor, the Irish chemical magnate William Russell Grace, granted permission for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company to build its first power station in a dilapidated industrial building at 257 Pearl Street.

Thomas Edison’s eagerness to have electricity generated in power stations and distributed by wire to private consumers led to the sudden popularity of outdoor “electric shows,” where lights were erected in fields and parks and switched on and off to the amazement of visitors. Soon, Edison promised, power would be so cheap only the rich would burn candles.

Edison somewhat grumpily paid $155,000 for the property, which he complained was a slum and smelled richly from the fish market nearby on Fulton Street. City bureaucrats initially opposed his plans for digging up the streets, threatening to tax every foot of digging. But he argued fiercely for the system’s efficiency and before long began a positive orgy of trenching, his teams working through the hot August nights to place fifteen miles of thick copper mains lines deep in the macadamized roads, insulating them with beeswax and linseed oil and thick asphalt that had been especially ordered from the tar pits in Trinidad.

Six giant steam-powered generators then arrived from Philadelphia, weighing thirty tons each and known as Jumbos. They were coupled to the devices that actually created the electricity, strange-shaped dynamos known as Long-Waisted Mary Anns; following this, giant water tanks and boilers were bolted to the floors, chimneys were raised, and fuel supplies were gathered in. Finally, on the evening of September 4, 1882, the stokers lit the fires, steam began to push pistons, the engines started to turn, the dynamos began to run. The armature of coils turned within its blanket of magnetism, and in accordance with a basic principle of physics, direct current began to flow into the wires, snaked out of the Pearl Street building, poured along the underground copper cables in their conduits, surfaced out of manhole covers and into the mains cables of some forty households, and from there was sent to the server circuits and terminals of the first eight hundred bulbs that had been installed.

In one golden instant, lower Manhattan came ablaze with a soft, uninterrupted light, all coming from vacuum bulbs that neither polluted nor glared nor gave headaches to those who read, dined, walked, or dozed beneath them. The promises of illumination made across the Hudson River in Menlo Park, New Jersey, had now been made good in New York City, and the success of the trial took hold with a speed that astonished even the city itself.

Scores of plutocrats became early adopters; mansions lit up from Central Park to Chambers Street. The Stock Exchange installed electroliers, as they were known, massive chandeliers with sixty-six bulbs each, to throw light across the trading floor. Industry of all kinds suddenly sprouted in the city, with machines that sewed clothing, spun sugar, carved pianos, and printed books and newspapers, all of them suddenly illuminated in a way that no longer carried, as previously, the terrible risk of fire. Theaters put up advertising marquees studded with bulbs—enough of a blaze for Broadway to be christened the Great White Way. The electric elevator was invented: with heights no longer limited by the number of stairs their occupants could reasonably be expected to climb, buildings began to rise high into the sky.

Electric billboards were hauled up into that same sky—one of them a four-hundred-square-foot monster with fifteen thousand bulbs that flashed on and off under the direction of a man sitting in a hut on a roof nearby. H. J. Heinz put up an electric sign with bulbs all painted green in the shape of a forty-five-foot pickle. Nightclubs flourished, in which pretty girls waved customers to low-lit tables with electric-powered wands and winking lights created seductive effects on the dance floor. A prostitute would advertise her wares, her availability, and her address with a small red electric lamp. The elevated trains now had stations gleaming with incandescence, and the docks and boulevards beside the water also gleamed. People who came to New York loved what they saw: the today that Edison promised electricity would bring was now taking Manhattan by storm and would soon spread like an uncheckable fire from New York City throughout the entire country beyond.

There were small problems. The generators broke down or speeded up for no apparent reason and exploded. J. P. Morgan had his walls and carpets scorched by a sudden outrush of power. One of the Vanderbilts got so cross with short circuits that he went back to gas, although the rest of the family kept the faith in their investment. Once in a while, electricity leaked into the street. A man peddling tinware directed his horse across an intersection near Wall Street, whereupon it seemed to go suddenly mad, its ears stood bolt upright, its tail rose skyward, and it ran crazily off toward the East River; a few moments later another team of animals crossing the same spot all fell to their knees and refused to budge. Workmen, it turned out, had punctured one of the copper feeder lines, and the manhole cover was live with current.

In 1888 a terrific blizzard coated the thousands of miles of overhead wires with ice, bringing down innumerable live wires, which fizzed and snaked and blazed on the icy streets, and had to be captured, cut, and turned off by men with axes, who dealt with them as they might deal with hordes of poisonous snakes.

But there were bigger problems, too, and one bigger than all the rest. It soon became apparent that the current Edison favored for New York—direct current, in which the electrons all move in unison in one direction along a wire—could not be easily transmitted along supply lines that were longer than a mile or two. This meant that more generating stations had to be built, creating noise, pollution, and expense. Yet at the same time that Edison and his immediate rivals and copycat inventors were installing their wires and lights, it was discovered that quite another kind of electric current—alternating current, in which the electrically charged particles move back and forth many times each second and essentially go nowhere at all—was, miraculously it must have seemed, not at all limited in terms of distance.

Thus began the so-called War of the Currents, the decisive outcome of which would eventually lift electricity from purely local use and make it a truly national utility. It would also become, in common with such seemingly unrelated things as knowledge, fresh air, and lighthouses, a public good to which all should have access.

One of the features of Edison’s direct current was that it needed to be generated at more or less the same voltage as that required by the devices it was powering. In the early days, almost all of these devices were electric lightbulbs. And because tests had shown that a carbonized cotton filament in an incandescent lightbulb survives longest and shines brightest when a current of about 100 volts passes through it, the generators at Edison’s power stations were designed to generate electricity only at 100 volts.

Two problems resulted. The first, already mentioned, concerns the three-wire copper transmission lines taking this power from the generating station to the lightbulbs. When the wires warmed up as a direct result of carrying the 100-volt transmission, the current’s power dribbled slowly away. The longer the lines were, the more power they lost. Lightbulbs that were nicely close to a power station burned with a pleasing bright white light (“soft, mellow and grateful to the eye” wrote the New York Times). Bulbs that were in offices or houses half a mile away, on the other hand, burned with a yellowish, sickly look. A mile farther on and they were dimmed with a kind of invisible soot. More than that and the feeble glow of the filament wavered and faded until it was quite dark. DC power was indeed useless over any useful kind of distance.

The second problem involved direct current’s limited ability to carry electricity to devices other than lightbulbs. As electricity became publicly available,* scores of inventors came up with uses for it that went far beyond the bulb, world-changing though it might be to have illumination at the touch of a switch. The electric motor, for example, found a myriad of uses—Edison himself came up with a motorized electric fan, which suddenly made the sultry American summertimes of the 1890s bearable; and before long there were electric clocks, vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, and water pumps. The success of the motor never wavered: today half of all the electricity produced in the world is used by electric motors of one kind or another.

But what is true of motors today was true in the 1880s: different motors required different voltages of electricity to perform the different tasks, and in those early days it proved tiresomely difficult and costly for engineers to transform Edison’s direct current into the different voltages that were needed. It was not impossible: a rotating device had to be attached to the generator to do this; but like all rotating devices of the day, it was expensive, it wore out, and it needed to be replaced. The whole process was formidably uneconomical.

So arguments started to be put forward, most notably by George Westinghouse and his business colleagues, in favor of the significantly different alternating current, whose voltage could be easily altered up or down—transformed by a transformer—to power a tiny lightbulb or a massive heavy-duty electric motor, no matter how far away each might be. It was not long before the AC lobby, in spite of Edison’s charismatic, near-heroic standing in the America of the time, steadily began to gain ground. It was late in 1887 that the lines were drawn for a brief and vicious little electrical war, which would decide the future of the electrification of the United States.

Although the name of George Westinghouse is the one most commonly associated with the currents war—Edison versus Westinghouse is how the bout is cast in present-day shorthand—he actually had little or nothing to do with the creation of alternating current. His expertise was in mechanical engineering, and he had made a fortune designing brakes for railway trains and making signaling systems and gas pipelines. He was quick to spot an opportunity, however, and late in 1887 he bought for $60,000 the patents for seven crucially important inventions in the field of AC power generation and distribution, all of which had been granted to the true pioneer in the field, Nikola Tesla, a young Serbian inventor and polymath who had come to New York in 1884 to work for Edison.

The adoration of Nikola Tesla—some call him the father of the electric age—has recently made him almost a cult figure. It is easy to see why. He was tall, handsome, supremely clever, impeccably dressed. He was a fastidious gourmand who liked weighing his food and dining alone. He was shy, celibate, polite, soft-spoken, courteous, and kindly; a melancholic man blessed with a photographic memory; a man affected by phobias of such things as pearl earrings, spherical objects, accidental contact with women’s hair, and the imagined dirt on knives and forks. He liked to play billiards, chess, and poker and to feed the city pigeons—for one of which, its feathers pure white, he built a $2,000 splint when nursing it back to health after it broke one of its gray-tipped wings. He was also afflicted with an obsessive-compulsive disorder; he refused to shake hands, he would feel a need to read all the books written by any author he encountered, and he had a peculiar devotion to the number three and to any other number divisible by it.

Though the Serbian-born inventor Nikola Tesla, clever, fragile, and an eccentric showman, was until recently widely overlooked, it is now generally accepted that he made vast contributions to the development of alternating electrical current and the invention of radio, long before Marconi. He has lately won legions of new admirers, mostly young, who see him as a forgotten hero of American science.

Nikola Tesla was, in short, the classic exemplar of the mad scientist, and the fact that he made dangerously interesting inventions by the score resonates still with today’s imaginative fans of the far-fetched. He made devices like the Tesla coil, a step-up transformer that could raise current into the tens of thousands of volts and then generate Niagaras of gigantic electrical sparks. Smaller versions of the coil were used as scalp massagers and violet-ray-emitting devices for amusing the clients of beauty salons. He drew up blueprints for a gun that could shoot out thousands of tiny particles of tungsten. He promised the US Army a lethal particle-beam weapon, which was immediately seized upon by headline writers and comic-book editors as a death ray. He persuaded his backers to erect a huge iron pylon at a place called Wardenclyffe on Long Island, from which he promised he could beam waves of electrical power directly through the air, just like radio, and by doing so end the need for transmission lines and in theory connect the whole world electrically.

Tesla is also said by some to have held Thomas Edison in spectacularly low esteem. The supposed antipathy went back to his first job at Menlo Park, which he had won after a brief interview soon after his arrival (with just four cents and a book of poems in his pocket) from the Balkans. He had reportedly told Edison he could remake a DC motor that Edison had designed and make it more efficient; Edison promised him $50,000 if he succeeded. But when he showed the successful result to Edison and asked for his money, the notoriously stingy inventor is said to have remarked with withering superciliousness that Tesla clearly had no understanding of American humor, and offered him instead a $10 pay raise. Tesla resigned immediately and remained at daggers drawn with Edison for the rest of his life, making the war of the currents a highly personal crusade as well as a battle based on science and economics.

The first demonstration of public distribution of Tesla’s generated alternating current was made in the hill town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A transformer manufacturer named William Stanley, backed by Westinghouse and basing his techniques on Tesla’s designs and patents, had established his small factory on the banks of the Housatonic River, which flows through the town on its way to Long Island Sound and the ocean. It was beside the river, in an old rubber mill on a short road named Cottage Street, that Stanley made his experiment.

He had erected a generator, driven by the fast-flowing Housatonic water, that would produce 500 volts of single-phase AC electricity. There was nothing very difficult about this, but Stanley knew that if he simply supplied this voltage to the customers in town, their lights would grow dimmer the more distant they were from his generator. So he did what it was not possible to do with Edison’s DC current: he connected a big, heavy, wire-wound Tesla-style transformer into the circuit and stepped the output up to 3,000 volts, a hitherto unheard-of current.

This he then sent out by wire to Main Street, hanging the cable from the giant elm trees (now replaced by flowering cherries) that lined the roadway. He connected this big, high-voltage wire to a series of six much smaller step-down transformers designed by Tesla and brought the voltage down to a manageable 100 volts. He connected these small lines to a chain of domestic lightbulbs. On March 20, 1886, he threw the switch and the lights began to glow.

Every light came on and stayed on. Every house, every business that lined Main Street, from the small banks in the north to the piano factory in the south, suddenly had power. They were recipients of the first distributed AC electricity ever offered to any community in the world. And it all worked flawlessly.

As a result of Stanley’s success, Edison was almost ready to acknowledge defeat. He railed against what he wanted the public to see as the dangers of Tesla’s AC. The back-and-forth current was peculiarly suited, he suggested ominously, for killing people, and even much larger creatures with what some might think were electrically impermeable skins. To the dismay of many and with lasting damage to his historical standing, Edison in 1903 demonstrated the use of a prototype AC-powered electric chair by fitting copper shoes onto a rogue circus elephant named Topsy and electrocuting her in public on a steel plate at a Coney Island zoo.

Topsy was a disagreeable elephant, no doubt; she had killed three of her keepers, though perhaps understandably in the case of one of them, a man who had tried to persuade her to eat a lit cigarette. Few today believe she deserved electrocution, however, even though some at the time believed that “riding the lightning” was, as zoo visitors were told, quick and humane as these things go.

Topsy is seen in a film, standing on the sheet of metal. She had already been given a quick pre-execution snack of cyanide-laced carrots, just in case. The current is switched on. Her legs immediately start to emit white smoke, as if they were stumps caught in a fast-moving forest fire. After no more than a second or two, she falls over on her side, her trunk flailing, her legs in wild seizure. She is dead within a minute. It is a dreadful few seconds of film—evidence of a cavalier attitude to cruelty, which when added to Edison’s reputation for plundering others’ ideas and for general irascibility, left an indelible stain on his reputation. That he was the first man to connect America by electric wire tends to get forgotten, despite the best efforts of the museum that stands today in Menlo Park, in the shadow of his monster lightbulb on a stick.

One last contest, an event far less macabre than the public assassination of Topsy, proved to be the hinge of fate that decided the nature of the electrical system America would formally adopt before the transmission lines started uncoiling across the land. Companies offering the two competing systems were invited to bid to light the Columbian Exposition, the yearlong Chicago World’s Fair dedicated in 1892 to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. It would be the first electrically lit exposition in history, and whoever illuminated Chicago would illuminate the nation.

Money, rather than the relative utility or safety of the two competing systems, turned out to be the deciding factor.

Edison had made an early pilgrimage to Chicago to sell his ideas for DC electrical supply to the exposition’s chief planner, Daniel Burnham. He certainly convinced Burnham to install incandescent rather than arc lighting, and up to that point, the meeting was cordial. But once the matter of how best to supply electricity to the lamps came up and the corporations became involved, all pretense of courtesy fled. Edison was no longer fully able to speak for himself in these matters since J. P. Morgan had become financially involved and Edison Electric had become a different and much grander organization, the General Electric Company. Such was its swagger, even in those early days, that it had no problems suggesting to Burnham that his exposition could be properly illuminated by DC-powered lightbulbs for $1.8 million.

The backers of the Chicago show were indignant, suspecting they were being made fools of by tricky New York bankers. “Extortionate!” they chorused. They then welcomed the arrival of George Westinghouse, who asked to be considered and claimed he could install a more reliable and less costly system using AC. The organizers asked for new, sealed bids from the two companies. General Electric revised its opening bid downward to the more sensible figure of $554,000. But when the board members opened the envelope from Westinghouse, they read a quoted figure of $399,000. There was now no further question: the alternating-current system would be used to light the greatest world’s fair in American history.

DC would continue to have its uses. Subway systems, New York’s most prominently, still employ direct current, and very new technologies these days allow for ultra-high-voltage transmission lines to carry DC across long distances also. However, AC promptly became the dominant electrical system in the United States, as it has been ever since the end of the nineteenth century.

LIGHTING THE CORN, POWERING THE PRAIRIE

The first transmission line in the country was opened in 1889, giving Portland, Oregon, a constant 4,000 volts of AC from a generating station built beneath the Willamette Falls, fourteen miles away. With 4,000 volts, people found they could do more or less as they wished—they could light streets and houses, run tramways, take X-rays, pump water, cool milk, cut hair, show movies, weld pipes, cut stone. Power companies sprang up like weeds; in 1892, Chicago alone had twenty of them. The output of their generators and the capacities of the wires that carried their electricity kept increasing. By 1907 certain transmission lines carried a hitherto unheard-of 110,000 volts—the first of these lines opening between a hydroelectric generating station under a waterfall in Michigan and the modest city of Grand Rapids.

By the outbreak of World War I, more than fifty major electrical firms were making and distributing power, as were any number of smaller companies and municipally owned utilities. Come the 1920s and the number was more than six thousand, though most were controlled by much larger holding companies, of which there were about a hundred. Electricity, which everyone now wanted, was a means of making an almost limitless amount of money, and if the business was profitable, then big companies wanted as much of it as they could possibly acquire.

That, however, was the problem. Not every aspect of the electric business was profitable. It was a good moneymaker in the cities: it cost next to nothing, relatively speaking, to throw up a shed full of boilers and turbines, string wires out a few miles to customers’ houses, and then send them a bill each month for the power they consumed. It was not much more difficult in the suburbs or in the smaller towns beyond: the generators might have to be a bit larger, the transformers a little more powerful; the transmission towers and the lines they supported might have to be measured in tens or even hundreds of miles rather than in yards or city blocks. It was not as profitable to supply such places with power, but it still made money.

However, there was no money at all to be made out in the farm country of the American Midwest. The pitiless arithmetic of capitalism did no favors for those who grew corn or alfalfa or soybeans out on the prairies or whose cattle grazed in the foothills of the Ozarks or up in the high country of Idaho. These people could be left safely disconnected from the electrical world. They could remain, though not of their own choosing, steadfastly outside the American dream. They could be reliant only on the wind and the sun and their own muscle and grit to give them the energy that they and their farmyards needed. The electric power was there, ready and waiting and straining at the leash, to give them relief and hope, but in the 1930s, the chiefs of the utility giants judged it as being too costly to bring to their doorsteps. So their hardscrabble lives were to remain that way for much longer than seemed the right of every other American.

In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in running for the presidency, campaigned against what he saw as an inequity, attacking in particular “the Ishmaels and the Insulls” of the electrical industry, “whose hand is against every man’s.” His particular target was Samuel Insull, a Briton who had worked for Edison and had subsequently created a vast electrical monopoly from the Dakotas to Maine, a highly leveraged, precariously balanced corporate monster of a kind more familiar in modern times. Insull lived lavishly, spent freely, conducted his business recklessly, and was eventually charged with federal mail fraud (but later acquitted) and fled to Europe, dying penniless in a Paris Metro station and being buried ignominiously in Putney. Orson Welles said that his Citizen Kane, popularly supposed to have been based on the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, was in large part modeled on the equally megalomaniacal Samuel Insull.

Insull’s electrical companies had an established policy of not doing business with the faraway farms. Almost none sent their wires out onto the windswept prairies of America’s heartland, a fact that sorely tried Roosevelt and led him, once he was securely in the White House, to act swiftly to apply government right, as he saw it, to a monstrous capitalist wrong.

Everyone in the Thirties—and especially, from mid-decade onward, the readers of Life magazine, which took a keen interest in America’s dispossessed—seemed to know that with the combination of Dust Bowl and Depression, the lot of the people of the prairies was grim indeed. Everyone also knew their lot could be mightily improved by the arrival of electricity. Only one farm in ten had access to mains power in 1934—a statistic that made a mockery of the claims that the telegraph, the telephone, and electricity were unifying the country. Electricity might be doing great things for Manhattan and Malibu, but for tiny settlements in Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas, the lack of electric power meant that America was divided still, into those on the grid with electricity and those who survived beyond it.

For those without, life could be a trial. The government published a catalog of the woes of the powerless, a lengthy book that began

Because there was no electricity, a farmer could not use an electric pump. He was forced not only to milk but to water his cows by hand, a chore that, in dry weather, meant hauling up endless buckets from a deep well. Because he could not use an electric auger, he had to feed his livestock by hand, pitch-forking heavy loads of hay up into the loft of his barn and then stomping on it to soften it enough so the cows could eat it.

He had to prepare the feed by hand: because he could not use an electric grinder, he would get the corn kernels for his mules and horse by sticking ears of corn—hundreds of ears of corn—one by one into a corn sheller and cranking it for hours. Because he could not use electric motors, he had to unload cotton seed by hand, and then shovel it into the barn by hand; to saw wood by hand, by swinging an axe or riding one end of a ripsaw.

Because there was never enough daylight for all the jobs that had to be done, the farmer usually finished after sunset, ending the day as he had begun it, stumbling around the barn milking the cows in the dark, as farmers had done centuries before.

Washing, ironing, cooking, canning, shearing, helping with the plowing and the picking and the sowing, and, every day, carrying the water and wood, and because there was no electricity, having do so everything by hand by the same methods that had been employed by her mother and grandmother and great-great-great-grandmother before her. . . .

Because there was no electricity.

And then came FDR and his memorable promise of July 1932: “I pledge you—I pledge myself—to a New Deal for the American people.” And one by one there then came from Washington the ingredients for the great alphabet soup of federal agencies, the mass of government bodies, known still by their initial letters, that were created in a fierce whirlwind of anti-Depression activity mounted by Roosevelt during his first hundred days in office. There were as many as a hundred such bodies, some of them so small and hidden from view as to escape government audit; some massive, with gigantic budgets that were rammed through Congress by presidential fiat (and later found to have been unconstitutional—except that by then they had done their job of helping lift America out of the Depression).

The bigger of the alphabet agencies ranged from the AAA, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a vital part of FDR’s farm-relief program, down to the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. For eight years, the WPA provided gainful employment for millions of jobless Americans, undertaking all manner of public works. Writers wrote government-supported books, poets performed in government-backed slams, and artists and musicians were commissioned to beautify hitherto unadorned corners of federally administered property.

Buried deep within this thick catalog of big government is the one agency that amply settled the hash of such profiteers as Samuel Insull. Founded in 1935 as the REA, the Rural Electrification Administration, it became a godsend to the families of the prairies. It was the government body that lit up those parts of America that capitalism forgot.

The key player, long forgotten, was an engineer named Morris Llewellyn Cooke, who’d had a bee in his bonnet about electrifying America’s farmland since the 1920s. Just like his new president, he thought it wildly unfair that the very people who made the nation’s food were so ill served, without access to the one utility that could make their lives easier and their work more efficient. Not only did the power companies refuse to connect faraway farms; they charged extortionate rates to anyone who dared to live in the countryside where lines did exist. Such imprudent inequity, Cooke declared, would have to stop. Roosevelt himself had long been particularly vexed; when he got his own first electric bill for his small cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, he was irritated beyond measure to discover that the local power company was charging him four times the rate he paid in New York.

Cooke did his best to alert the president and his Cabinet as to what he had in mind to solve the Insull problem. He prepared a formal proposal, now renowned in bureaucratic history for being boldly bound in black-and-white zebra stripes and illustrated with attractive watercolors of bright red barns, with a note on the cover stating, “This report can be read in 12 minutes.”

Cooke’s flamboyance did the trick, as did his compelling argument. There were currently six million farms in America, Cooke wrote, and of them only 650,000—one in ten—was connected to electric power from the national grid. However, it should be possible to electrify almost all of these farms quickly and at almost no cost to the American taxpayer, providing that a network of cooperatives were set up, which farmers would pay to join. Each one would buy power from existing makers, and it, with government help, would build the lines to supply its farmer members.

The secretary of agriculture promptly read the document in the allotted twelve minutes and hired Cooke—“the big boy from Philadelphia,” as he came to be known—to direct the program, then arranged for Congress to pass the necessary legislation to get the show on the road.

On May 11, 1935, under the authority of Roosevelt’s historic Executive Order 7037, the REA was in business. It took offices in a Victorian mansion in central Washington that resembled nothing so much as the Bates Motel in Psycho. Six hundred administrators were hired. Orders went out to hire many hundreds of unemployed electricians, as well as thousands of junior technicians in overalls, and to buy scores of thousands of white-pine utility poles, millions of yards of wire, and tens of thousands of porcelain insulators. Agents then fanned out across the country, checkbooks to hand, ready to lend REA moneys to rural co-ops that were willing to build the lines, connect the farms, negotiate to buy the power from the generating companies, and then arrange to distribute it and sell it to the farmers.

The first such plan was put into place in November 1935 with the establishment of the Piqua Municipal Light plant in Miami County, in the flat countryside (and Eighth Congressional District) of western Ohio. The REA loaned this co-op a quarter of a million dollars to start building. Advertisements went up—with images of linemen, the countryside heroes of the New Deal, suspended and safety-belted high up on poles, working to connect the glittering wires. Serried ranks of these poles soon went up, marching away from the Piqua plant in all directions toward the distant Ohio horizons of farmhouses, barns, cattle, and stands of corn, where everything was still worked by calloused hand, where everything was dark, but for a few oil lamps, each time dusk had settled on the plains. “It’s Coming!” the advertisements blared. “Electricity for You!”

And farm by farm, quarter section by quarter section, dirt road by dirt road, the co-op won over the customers. They paid $5 apiece. “Sign up and get the REA” was the slogan. The REA salesmen liked to have the farmer’s wife around when trying to sell the co-op idea. They were instructed to look meaningfully at her as they explained the advantages, especially if her husband was busily examining the dirt under his nails and protesting that he didn’t want to “owe nuthin’ to the guvmint.” Back in 1935, after all, $5 was no mean sum.

Once agreement came—and it usually did—the REA workers moved in, digging holes for tall poles, uncoiling spools of wire, raising it high, then tightening it and linking it together. And then the men of the connection teams came right into the farmhouse, to the bewilderment of all within, and put in the fuse box; climbed up on ladders to fix the ceiling sockets; put in the big rubberized cables for the 60-amp circuit for the kitchen range, then the smaller wires for the 20-amp circuit for the rest of the still-to-be-bought kitchen equipment, and the 15-amp circuits for the lights; then put in the switches, and the sockets on the walls for an occasional table lamp or maybe for that most important piece of equipment that soon would be an even more powerful national unifying force, the radio.

The Public Works Administration, part of FDR’s New Deal, promoted its myriad projects with this 1935 map showing the variety of tasks to which it was officially bent. All told, the PWA undertook some thirty-four thousand projects, including dams, bridges, and reservoirs, which still dominate the American landscape today.

Finally, it was all done. The moment usually came at dusk. “I wanted to be at my parents’ house when the electricity came,” wrote one REA customer. “It was in 1940. We’d all go around flipping the switch, to make sure it hadn’t come on yet. When they finally came on the lights just barely glowed. I remember my mother smiling. When they came on full, tears started to run down her cheeks.”

The moment is still recalled by old-timers in some of the more distant parts of the country. “The night the lights came on” was as significant a moment as a birthday, often more so. The REA’s celebratory volume, published half a century later, is filled with affecting reminiscences, such as this one from Kentucky:

We’d heard the government was going to lend us money to get lights, but we didn’t believe it until we saw the men putting up the poles. Every day they came closer, and we realized it was really going to happen. So Dad went ahead, and had the house wired.

It was almost two months later before they finished the job and turned on the power. I’ll never forget the day—it was late on a November afternoon, just before dark. All we had was wires hanging down from the ceiling in every room, with bare bulbs on the end. Dad turned on the one in the kitchen first, and he just stood there, holding the pull-chain. He said to me “Carl, come here and hang on to this so I can turn on the light in the sitting room.”

I knew he didn’t have to do that, and I told him to stop holding it, that it would stay on. He finally let go, and then looked kind of foolish.

It was like that all across the land.

By 1942, half of all American farms were connected to the grid; by 1952, they almost all were, less than a century after Thomas Edison threw that first switch on Christie Street in Raritan, New Jersey, in 1879. And though it still took some time to bring electric power from central generating stations deep into all the American Indian reservations, it can fairly be said now that all who want electric power in America today either have it by right or by right can get it.

It was swiftly accepted that electricity was a public good—a marketable public good, to be sure, a good with a price tag, but something that should be accessible to all as a hallmark of a civilized society. When Thomas Edison threw that first switch, neither he nor anyone else thought electricity would ever enjoy such a status, but now the country was fully connected, united in 110-volt, 60-cycle-per-second concert, city and countryside humming together as one.

THE TALK OF THE NATION

It was a host of Europeans, not Americans, who invented the means of transmitting information invisibly through the air, not with smoke signals or semaphore flags or heliograph flashes but with electromagnetic signals sent wirelessly. Most of the pioneers’ names—Maxwell, Hertz, Popov, even the majestically named Italian Temistocle Calzecchi Onesti—are now familiar only to specialists in the field. But Guglielmo Marconi, who cracked the final technical problems and can be called the true inventor of wireless telegraphy, is more properly memorialized. The precipitous cliffs overlooking the entrance to the harbor at Saint John’s, Newfoundland, where Marconi first discerned the faint Morse signal for the letter S being tapped out by his assistants thousands of miles away across the ocean in Poldhu, Cornwall, have become a pilgrimage destination. To gaze out over the boiling Atlantic waves below and imagine the sound of a radio signal borne across them from the tip of the Old World . . . Signal Hill is a wildly romantic place, in a wildly romantic story.

But what these wireless signals carried were then only clicks, the dots and dashes of Morse code. It was not then possible to employ Marconi’s wireless transmitters and receivers to carry the sound of the human voice. Not, that is, until Christmas Eve 1906, when from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, there came over the ether a cacophony of never-before-heard noises, all sounding (over the clutter of atmospheric static) quite unlike Morse code. They announced the arrival of a new star on the radio scene, a Canadian-born former chemistry professor and electrical engineer named Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, the man who, some claim, made radio come alive. And while it was in Europe that the idea of radio germinated, it was in America that the technology was first employed to transmit the human voice and allow people to begin to talk to one another not just individually, as on Mr. Bell’s telephone, but en masse, in their millions.

 

The basic principle behind the early wireless transmitters was simple enough. It is based on the discovery that each time an electrical spark is generated, it produces an invisible pulse of electromagnetic radiation. The more sparks generated each second, the higher the vibrational frequency of the pulse of transmitted radiation. Tune a piece of receiving apparatus (first made by a Frenchman named Édouard Branly and initially called a coherer) to the same frequency of the pulse that is being generated by the transmitter, and the pulse can be reproduced exactly as it was sent.

Moreover, this reproduction can be achieved—it can be seen on a meter or heard through an electrically driven signal-to-sound transducer in a speaker or in headphones—without the use of any wires and across a distance that varies according to the power of the transmission and the frequency of the pulse. A low-powered, high-frequency pulse will go far, and the signal can even be made to bounce off the ionosphere and cross continents. Modifying the signal by briefly opening and closing the circuit with a keyed instrument allows a coded signal to be sent and received by someone far away. This was what Marconi (or Tesla: there remains some controversy) discovered and perfected; the keyed instrument was essentially the same Morse tapper that was used to pass signals over the now old-fashioned telegraph wires. The wireless equipment, now having been tried and tested over the previous decade, was the kind of equipment that was being used by Reginald Aubrey Fessenden when he joined the staff of the United States Weather Bureau in 1900.

The bureau had set up a chain of wireless stations along the American East Coast, and from them it sent weather information to ships at sea. Fessenden’s contract called for him to test and improve the system—he had been trained by Edison, so he knew his stuff—and to allow the bureau use of anything he might invent along the way. This he did, in spades. His years working for this American government agency produced a flurry of inventive energy that mightily accelerated the already fast-moving progress of radio technology.

Most notably, he experimented first by sending out a continuous, very-high-frequency radio wave from a rotating transmitter that produced thousands of sparks each second. He then connected an ordinary microphone, just as you might find in the mouthpiece of a telephone, to the apparatus to modulate this signal, to increase or decrease what might be called, if it were audible, its volume.

The critical aspect of Fessenden’s idea was that the modulation, not the basic signal, contained the information that was to be sent. The high-frequency radio wave simply carried the information that was encoded in this modulation. (Because he was modulating the volume, or amplitude of the carrier wave, his system was known as amplitude modulation, or AM radio. The later development of frequency modulation led to the creation of FM radio.) All one did at the receiving end, using one of Branly’s coherers, was to strip away or ignore the high-frequency radio signal, the carrier wave, and what remained was the information that was being sent out from the transmitter.

The truly magical aspect of this system was that a modulated signal need not be restricted to the dots and dashes of a code. It could be made to carry anything. It could carry music. It could transmit the sound of the wind or the rain or the crashing of waves—or the human voice. Anything that was sound, and had a measurable frequency, could be turned by a microphone into patterns that could modulate the amplitude of the carrier wave and ride on its back wirelessly out to anywhere.

The first time Reginald Fessenden—a big, bearded, bluff man, quite full of himself and relentlessly self-promoting—is said to have tried doing this was on December 23, 1900. He was at a weather station on Cobb Island, one of the outer banks of the lower Potomac estuary, in Virginia. He started the carrier wave going, attached a carbon microphone, and spoke into it, hoping to attract the attention of a colleague listening in a building about a mile away. “One—two—three—four. Is it snowing where you are, Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?”

And Mr. Thiessen heard this clearly enough to understand it, and he did indeed telegraph back, though history remains silent about the snow. If this account is true, it was the first time that a human voice was ever transmitted wirelessly—by an employee of the United States government in a Weather Service experiment funded by the American taxpayer.

Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian-born engineer with the US Weather Bureau, is generally given credit for making the first broadcast of voice and music over the radio. Until Christmas Eve 1906, ships’ radio operators heard only Morse code. Then, from his transmitter on Brant Rock, Massachusetts, Fessenden broadcast music by Handel and read from the Bible—changing the nature of broadcasting forever.

A much more famous experiment took place six years later, by which time Fessenden had left the government’s employ (there had been a quarrel over the rights to his ceaseless blizzard of patents). This test was backed not by the taxpayer, but by a pair of wealthy Pittsburgh businessmen, men who were convinced that with his revolutionary technique of modulating a continuous radio wave, Fessenden was going to eventually outdo Marconi in making serious money out of wireless.

The pair of them financed the setting up of the National Electric Signalling Company, NESCO. They first built a huge antenna for Fessenden on a remote eastern Massachusetts headland known as Brant Rock, a former island now connected to dry land and so named because it lies beneath a flyway for migrating brant geese and because the wearier birds once liked briefly to settle there.

The headland—a place of great historic importance now, though seldom visited—is basically a low, wide mound covered with short springy turf and projecting into the Atlantic surf for some yards. Today it sports a few flyblown shacks; a century ago it was quite isolated from nearby houses and passersby. Its remoteness, as well as its proximity to the clever technical men of Boston, prompted the NESCO engineers to build their very tall experimental radio antenna there. It was slender, alarmingly fragile-looking, a confection of steel mounted on a layer-cake base of cement and insulating ceramics and rising 420 feet straight up. Sixteen guy wires held it steady against the Atlantic gales, and nearby were an engineer’s shed and the buildings that housed the transmitting and receiving apparatus.

To make the experiments comprehensive, they also paid to build a second tower on the far side of the Atlantic, at the Scottish village of Machrihanish, in southern Argyll. Early in 1906, technicians reported success in using the Fessenden transmitter to send messages and receive replies, but with Morse code only. Two-way code transmissions had never been achieved before; for that alone, Fessenden would have made history. But he had rather more ambitious plans, for transmitting the kind of voice messages that he knew from his Cobb Island days could feasibly be sent. There were delays; technical problems to be sorted out; and repairs were needed after the Argyll antenna blew down in a gale. Moreover his two investors were getting cold feet and were starting to think seriously about the wisdom of their commitment.

Their skepticism was necessarily short-lived. In mid-December their man announced that he was ready at last to begin a voice transmission. Word went out, by Morse messages sent over the conventional telegraph, to a number of ships then sailing on the Atlantic—most notably to a flotilla of banana boats owned by the United Fruit Company, which had been equipped with NESCO receivers—that they should be ready to listen to the broadcast. Late on Christmas Eve, it was blowing a full gale, the classic dark and stormy night, which only adds to the skeptics’ somewhat jaundiced view of the story—when Reginald Fessenden powered up his transmitters, stood before the microphone, and depressed the switch. As he recounted some years later:

The program on Christmas Eve was as follows: first a short speech by me saying what we were going to do, then some phonograph music. The music on the phonograph being Handel’s “Largo.” Then came a violin solo by me, being a composition of Gounod called “O, Holy Night,” and ending up with the words “Adore and be still” of which I sang one verse, in addition to playing on the violin, though the singing of course was not very good.

Then came the Bible text, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will,” and finally we wound up by wishing them a Merry Christmas. . . .

We got word of reception of the Christmas Eve program as far down as Norfolk, Va., and on the New Year’s Eve program we got word from some places down in the West Indies.

The thought of the aria “Ombra mai fu,” or “Shade There Never Was,” being heard for the first time far out at sea, the idea of so resolutely landlocked a conceit as a Persian king’s contemplation of the cool shade under a plane tree being heard by seamen riding out a storm on the Atlantic Ocean . . . Whatever the timescale, whether this was the first or the second time (as some skeptics still claim) that voice broadcast had been demonstrated, whether or not this experiment was in the running at all, the very idea behind the Fessenden story has a magic about it that now positively urges us to believe it.

Yes, the story may well not be entirely true. It is most decidedly odd, for instance, that no ship’s log that survives mentions a broadcast that would surely have set most navigation bridges a-hopping with excitement, for not once in the past would anyone aboard have ever heard a sound coming through the wireless receiver, other than that of a Morse tapper. And yet here suddenly there was a human voice and sweet music coming to them out of the thin air! To most it was quite incredible and surely worth mentioning in at least one shipmaster’s logbook.

So maybe Fessenden is out by a year or so; surely no matter, really. What does matter is that sometime around 1906, inventions made by this great bear of a man made such things possible.

It was an achievement that did little for Reginald Fessenden. His wealthy partners fought with him and sacked him from his own company. He spent fifteen miserable and costly years dragging them through the courts, without satisfactory results. Though eventually he got a cluster of gold medals for his work and was said by many great men and biographers to have been radio’s greatest pioneer, he became embittered, turned his back on his invention, wrote an obscure and little-noticed book on antediluvian civilizations, and died in Bermuda in 1932, largely unsung.

His invention, however, went from strength to strength, and at an appropriate lightning speed. Initially the listeners—or perhaps hearers would be the better term, for what was received was in the early days the result of random and unplanned transmissions—were rank amateurs, “hams,” who saw the airwaves as a magical democratic free-for-all and began exchanging all kinds of information, usually in code, very occasionally by voice, from all kinds of sources to all manner of places, about all kinds of topics, commonplace and arcane.

A small number had the patience, skill, and wherewithal to broadcast voice and music. Charles Herrold, a professor (in the Herrold College of Wireless and Engineering, which he founded in 1909) built a transmitter on the third floor of a bank building in San Jose and began a regular Wednesday-night program of songs and chatter, which he called the Little Hams Program. He had a wind-up Victor phonograph (complete with the little dog Nipper listening to “His Master’s Voice”), and he borrowed 78-rpm records from Sherman Clay, the local music store. Positioning himself carefully in front of the microphone, which, because it was wired into the same electrical circuit that caused the transmitting sparks, would get searingly hot, “Doc” Herrold would introduce the music—Sousa marches a specialty—and then read out columns from the local papers. And when he played music, he would tell his audience where he had bought it. The lines of customers outside the Sherman Clay store the following morning testified to yet another new and hitherto unimagined phenomenon: broadcast advertising.

At first maybe fifty local ham operators listened in to his 9:00 p.m. hour-long show. But then in 1913, Herrold invited his young wife, Sybil, to be an announcer. That ploy, together with his adroit plan to stage contests and offer as prizes small galena crystals—which were known to be tunable to specific radio frequencies and so could be used to make the new “crystal set” receivers—led his listenership to mount steadily, until soon several hundred were tuning in. Most of his listeners were on the Peninsula; but on some atmospherically favored listeners as far away as Oregon and New Mexico were able to hear the music, interspersed with Sybil’s sweet made-for-radio voice, swooping and soaring above the crackle of static.

Fan letters started arriving at the bank. Listeners would telephone to ask Sybil for their favorite tunes. Doc Herrold’s show, which ran for five years, unregistered, informal, but regular and reliable, was the first properly broadcast radio show in America and possibly the first anywhere.

For a long while, however, code remained king. Young men in attics and garages from Maine to California, with their trinkets of galena and other tunable crystals, built crude radio receiving sets—and the bolder and cleverer ones made transmitters, too—and spent countless nights scanning the ether for streams of code, much as radio telescopes do today, hunting for signs of deep-space life. The tradition of ham radio was born, with scores, then hundreds of people experimenting, a brotherhood of radioheads chattering across the nighttime miles, their encrypted letters and numbers rattling through space by the millions, the invisible pixels of a huge unseen national portrait.

The US Navy, which by now was also enthusiastically using Morse and radio telegraphy to communicate with its warships at sea, frowned on this sudden burst of landlubberly interference. Admirals protested, saying that safety at sea was threatened when urgent maritime traffic was made unintelligible by the constant racket of amateur gossip. Civilian enthusiasts countered the sailors by arguing that the newly discovered airwaves were a realm quite beyond the control or jurisdiction of the state. It was a realm that should be democratized, allowed to be employed at will by the people.

The result of the inevitable standoff was inevitable too—regulation. Urged on by powerful naval lobbying, Congress passed the 1912 Radio Act, which suddenly required anyone operating a transmitter to have a license. And while the government could not refuse anyone who wanted one, it could from now on set time limits on transmissions, and it could order amateurs to cluster in certain corners of the frequency spectrum, while reserving the better ones—frequencies less troubled by whether it was night or day, for instance—for the armed forces.

Then came World War I, and once America had joined battle, the entire world of amateur radio was ordered shut down. Doc Herrold and his small number of followers were told to cease and desist. Attics and garages were raided by police, who seized and destroyed the equipment of anyone whose signals were still bleating out into the night after the order had gone out. For more than a year, the American airwaves fell silent. Only the chatter of naval vessels and weather stations could be heard by those still listening in, hoping for nighttime music.

But the moment the war was over, an enormous wave of enthusiasm swiftly gathered, and applications for new broadcast licenses poured by the hundreds into the Commerce Department. It was as though the country suddenly wanted to start talking to itself: magazines throughout the land began to hail the arrival of broadcasting—of the human voice, music, sounds of all kinds—as a new means of giving reality to the concept of nationhood. Radio was all of a sudden seen as a possible way to help further unify the country, to ensure that the stories of the Down Easter were made familiar to a listener in Nevada, that the accents and thoughts of a man from Alabama or a woman from Arkansas could be heard and appreciated by a listener with an entirely different manner of speaking up on the high plains of North Dakota or down among the sierras and the arroyos of New Mexico. Radio, one writer said, could give everyone into the fold; it was a democratizing influence that would give those isolated from the mainstream of American culture—“the farmers, the poor, the housebound, the uneducated”—a sense of communion. Radio was suddenly invested with an ideal—as a free, limitless site for a forum of ideas that could knit the nation together spiritually, intellectually, emotionally.

That is not, however, quite what happened.

MAKING MONEY FROM AIR

Since the very notion of broadcasting has its linguistic roots in agriculture, in seed spreading, it is entirely proper that the oldest radio station in the nation is in Madison, Wisconsin, and that its first aerials were sited in middle of a nearby field of corn. The station, known at its beginnings in 1914 by the call sign 9XM, first transmitted weather forecasts to farmers in Morse code, mercifully switching over to voice broadcasts three years later.

The era of officially sanctioned radio then got itself properly under way in 1920, when George Westinghouse’s company, the Radio Corporation of America, launched the station in Pittsburgh known by its all-letter call sign, KDKA. (9XM up in Madison was awarded an all-letter designation too, being reborn as WHA in 1922—coincidentally the same year that the word broadcasting entered the English language as a term of art for the new phenomenon.)

And with this launch of a service that then began to spread inexorably to every corner of the country, the guiding philosophy of American broadcasting began to make itself clear. It was championed by such decidedly non-messianic figures as Herbert Hoover, who as secretary of commerce in the late 1920s directed a series of radio conferences that laid down policy for the medium’s regulation.

American radio, the conferees agreed, was to be based from its start almost entirely on the perceived need to employ it to make money. Commercial stations, financed by advertising, and so purposely aimed at winning the best audience by providing programming directed at the spending masses, were to be central. Educational radio stations, and indeed any broadcasting that was deemed to be in the dreamily impractical role of promoting the public interest, were consigned initially to unattractive corners of the wireless spectrum, and given little help and generally short shrift by all.

The American idea of broadcasting was born of the country’s firm belief—during the prosperous, economically vibrant 1920s, when all of this was unfolding, along with mass production and a seemingly inextinguishable blaze of consumerism—in the purity and sanctity of capitalism and market forces. Britain, which by the 1920s had already been eclipsed by America as the world’s leading economy, was in its approach to the medium still clinging to an almost mediaeval aristocratic model—a “mother knows best” approach, which has caused the BBC to be referred to, even today, as Auntie.

America would have none of this. The idea of radio as being some kind of rallying point for the preservation of democracy was, in the view of Hoover and his government, dangerous quasi-Bolshevik piffle. To the radio bosses at NBC, CBS, ABC, and all the other networks that soon sprang up, the American audience was not a manipulable, educable herd of like-minded serfs, but was composed of consumers whose individual motivations were different and based on self-interest. They needed radio for entertainment and amusement and for a means to participate in the nation’s commercial and political life.

American commercial radio did not have any high-minded wish to become a way to bring the country together: it was all about making money. Any notion that the medium might offer what had originally seemed most likely—point-to-point communication between people or communities—was swept away by the realization that radio was best in offering point-to-mass communication, one broadcaster talking to millions. For thirty years, beginning in the 1920s, radio networks skippered by men like David Sarnoff, the Russian immigrant who was deeply involved in directing an empire that both manufactured radio sets (RCA) and then broadcast programs to them (NBC), entered a truly golden age.

Sarnoff had already suggested what he wanted: “I have in mind a plan of development,” he wrote in a famous memo in 1920, “that would make radio a household utility in the same sense as a piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the home by wireless.” To show that he was as good as his word, he helped set up the NBC Orchestra and persuaded Arturo Toscanini to come over from Europe to be its principal conductor. Or maybe people would prefer swing, he then remarked. Whatever they wanted, basically “we’re just the delivery boys.”

He promised his customers he would deliver sport as well. Early on he staged a boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier that had three hundred thousand listeners. Mass appeal was generated with extraordinary speed. In the 1930s twenty million people tuned in to listen each Sunday night to Walter Winchell, the opening of his acidic gossip show invariably the same: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast, and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press!” In 1938 the twenty-two-year old Orson Welles broadcast his radio version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. His adroit dramatization of imagined news bulletins announcing an invasion of Martians in suburban New Jersey startled millions, prompted a formal apology, and jump-started his long career as a director and actor. Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Amos ’n’ Andy, the Champion Spark Plug Hour, and the Bell Telephone Hour in the 1930s and ’40s were listened to by a country that was in this one sense entirely united—and united by a form of mass entertainment that could transfix millions, all at the same time. By the end of the Second World War, more than 80 percent of the American public was listening in regularly, to shows that had vast transcontinental audiences.

The image of a family gathered around the radio set remains an enduring testament to the briefly unifying power of early broadcasting. Before long, the vast range of choices available meant that the family scattered, each to listen in private, to march to a different drum.

But then some started to whisper that perhaps the pursuit of commerce was not the only reason for this now vastly significant new national medium of radio. By midcentury, as the dollars continued to flow into the stations and into the pockets of their owners, a number of figures made an eloquently impassioned case for radio, not merely as a machine for printing money but as a nation-unifying force for the public good. Among them was a broadcaster from the upper Midwest named William Siemering, who in the late 1960s would become the principal founding architect of what would become National Public Radio, NPR.

The idea of public-service radio—radio for the public good, not financed by advertising—had been around almost from the beginning of broadcasting. Educational radio stations, as they were first called, had sprung up at many of the country’s colleges and universities, especially at the so-called land-grant colleges, which had been established, mostly in the late nineteenth century, on land given for educational purposes by the federal government. In Madison WHA, or 9XM, had, indeed, been one of these stations.

After the Second World War, many of these stations banded together to try to form a cross-country radio network. Though initially their efforts were unsuccessful, they did win one victory through a moment of clever cunning.

In the late 1940s the commercial broadcast industry was mainly interested in promoting AM radio and the new medium of television. The steady growth of FM radio did not concern the industry greatly—and this lack of interest allowed the small number of educational stations to band together and successfully petition the government to reserve the left-hand side of the FM radio dial, frequencies 88.1 to 91.9 MHz, permanently for their brand of noncommercial radio alone. The rest of the FM spectrum could be as much of a free-for-all as the AM dial already was; but from 1945 onward any potential listener who wanted educational radio, whether in Seattle or Miami, Bangor or Los Angeles, knew just where on the FM dial to find it. The reservation of twenty channels of guaranteed spectrum space for public radio remains to this day.

The four hundred stations involved in the first cooperative effort then got themselves more or less organized into a lobbying group, arguing for rather more than the reservation of parts of the spectrum. They wanted recognition, and they wanted some kind of government-sponsored financial help. In the mid-1960s, reports and books like The Hidden Medium and The Public Radio Study began to be circulated among legislators—prompting the country to sit up and take notice of the revolutionary idea of a national network of radio stations that were designed solely for the common good.

The lobbying proved effective: in 1967, the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law, creating a nonprofit, extragovernmental entity, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which would raise money for the creation of public TV and radio networks. It was then that William Siemering’s thinking started to be taken seriously.

Bill Siemering was from Wisconsin, and he seemed to have been in radio since birth. His family’s house was almost literally in the shadow of the historic aerials from which WHA, at the land-grant University of Wisconsin, had for the previous four decades been broadcasting its deliberately uplifting, useful, locally beloved—and commercial-free—radio programs. He dived into radio as soon as he was able, working in the mid-1950s, part-time during term, full-time in the summers, as a board operator, an announcer, a newscaster. He came to believe profoundly in his station’s mission.

By the early 1960s, he had left the small university town of Madison and had become a public radio station manager in the much larger and more racially diverse city of Buffalo, New York. While he was there—“the formative years for NPR” as he was to say later—he changed the station’s direction, making it quite unashamedly a community resource available to everyone in town, and highly successful thereby. He also listened avidly to the broadcasts coming from across Lake Ontario from the government-supported Canadian Broadcasting Corporation stations in Toronto—since the CBC was known then, as today, for producing a vast slate of highly original programming.

In 1970, and basing his thinking very much on his eight-year experience in the cold of upstate New York, he famously wrote a mission statement that brazenly suggested that what had proved so good for Buffalo and across the border in Ontario would also be good for the nation. “National Public Radio,” as the new system was almost casually named by a radio journalist colleague named Al Hulsen,

will serve the individual; it will promote personal growth; it will regard the individual differences among men with respect and joy rather than with derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely various rather than vacuous and banal; it will encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness.

Congress had already anticipated the network’s creation. It was now decreed that federal moneys would be earmarked for the new system, with broadcasts scheduled to commence in 1971. Intelligent radio would be given an officially blessed leg-up. Under the banner of Siemering’s mission statement, with a radio newsmagazine program designed by him, NPR was formally incorporated in midwinter 1970 and broadcast the first edition of All Things Considered the following May. That first show began with a twenty-minute report on antigovernment protests in Washington over the Vietnam War, played an interview with Allen Ginsberg about the legality of drugs, ran a portrait of a young girl addicted to heroin, and reported on how a barbershop in Iowa was diversifying by offering to shave women’s legs. NPR, it was abundantly clear, was going to be radio of a very different stripe.

Few would dispute that in the forty years since, it has gone on to be become a grand success. NPR is now an established and essential part of the American broadcast continuum, admired by most who hear it, held in high esteem both within America and beyond. It has proved to be formidably successful in broadcasting intelligent, nonpartisan information to an immense and ever-growing daily national audience. There is what one might term an NPR culture in the country: decisions are often made, conversations are often begun, conferences often commenced, with a simple commonly heard phrase: I heard it on Morning Edition, or more simply, I heard it on NPR. Despite reaching fewer than one in ten of the American public, NPR seems sometimes, in terms of its influence, to be just about everywhere.

But can NPR be fairly said to have unified the nation? Did it—indeed, does it today—help connect the people of America in the way that the invention of the telegraph, the laying of the railroad tracks, or the making the Interstate Highway System so unequivocally managed to do? Was that ever the intent of its creators? Was NPR devised to be both a national bulletin board and a social sounding board—or was it to be something with rather more strength, an entity of great size and power that could employ the metaphor of being a network to help link the nation together by an invisible skein of radio waves, and thus forge a bond quite as strong and enduring as any railroad line, telegraph wire, or highway vanishing over the horizon to the mountains?

To be sure, the country is all too often gathered suddenly together, as it was in grief at the moment of John Kennedy’s killing in November 1963, or on learning of the terrible events of September 2001. Similarly, there can be no more unifying exuberance than was displayed with the broadcast news of the 1969 landing on the moon or the bicentennial in 1976. The part that radio played in alerting Americans to these events was key: people heard the news flash, they gathered around the sets, they remained transfixed, and for days after spoke of little else.

But what annealed the society into one was the events—not the medium that transmitted the news of them. On ordinary days American public radio somehow retreats, then subsides. It fades into the background to be ever present, always available, like the staff in a country house or the spigot of a hot-water supply, as a supplier of impeccably turned-out news and analysis, of entertainment of a higher order, of music well chosen and worthy. But it performs no other social function than this, on ordinary days. It does not on ordinary days allow the cranberry picker in Maine to feel any kind of national connection with the computer technician in California. The life of an Iowa prairie farmer is scarcely connected by radio to the quotidian routines of the taxi driver in Manhattan. She is quite foreign to him, and he to her, and the presence of the radio set that each has at home or in the car does little to make their relationship otherwise. A scattering of programs—This American Life, Story Corps—attempts a kind of connectivity, but NPR’s basic institutional structure, with member-station fiefdoms whose managers are necessarily occupied with their own parochial concerns, militates against that.

This is not quite how NPR saw itself back when it was founded. And it should be recalled that the late 1960s were a time of deep divisions in the country—over the Vietnam war, over race, over the power of youth and the voice of authority—and a time when any attempt to forge a sense of unity should have been blessed, and noble. Siemering was eager to give voice to all in those divisive times, “to celebrate differences,” and by doing so to help bring the fractured community together. To construct the unum from the pluribus, by radio.

To help accomplish this he planned to have as much as a third of the material on the big nationally made shows come from the local stations, so that America could genuinely be heard talking to itself. Had his plan worked it might well have helped create some sense of national oneness via the medium, rather than wholly through the big events that the medium occasionally broadcast. But it was not to be. Back in 1971 few of the original hundred-odd member stations had the staff or the time to contribute stories to the network; most of the programs were eventually produced by an ever-growing corps of Washington staff—and in the process, some of the pan-American vision slipped; some of the magic vanished.

Bill Siemering was eventually dislodged from NPR. Internal politics and stated differences about vision did him in. While his fingertips were still grasping the window ledge he took to pleading to stay on at headquarters, if only to cut recording tape. But his colleagues declined the offer.

In the end he left the capital altogether and took a job far away, up in the great northern plains, managing yet another educational station on the border between North Dakota and Minnesota. He spent a happy five years there, with just a three-person staff, returning to radio basics—finding the news, editing it, recording it himself. Necessity and reality tempered his vision, somewhat. From his new windswept aerie he managed to look both inward—producing a series of radio essays on a scattering of small towns in North Dakota, telling Dakotans more about themselves than perhaps they had ever known—and also outward, setting himself the target of contributing at least one piece of High Plains broadcasting each week down to NPR headquarters, and so having a prairie story told regularly to all America. In this modest goal he succeeded—helping thereby to employ radio to knit Dakotans together, and to more firmly cement in place a part of the magical mosaic of America. In a modest way, in other words, he fulfilled the task with which public service radio around the world is entrusted, and in which he so believed.

And meanwhile the commercial airwaves of today are loud with the harsher sounds of hectoring and demagoguery. There are national conversations in process, true: the most popular of all, a conservative rabble-rouser broadcasting from Florida, preaches to as many as twenty million listeners a day and earns $50 million a year for doing so. But his is far from being a unifying conversation: it is broadly seen as divisive and unkindly, sharply separating radio audiences into radically opposed camps.

The radio broadcasting that Reginald Fessenden inaugurated from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, in 1906, has hardly lived up to its promise of creating a kind of continental togetherness. For thirty years, it did: between 1920 and 1950 the cosy image of the walnut-veneered radio in the living room, the family gathered about, all listening in Minneapolis to the same program that was going out to listeners in Manhattan and Montezuma, Iowa, had a solid truth to it. But since, the dream has sputtered, changed, and faded. Television altered much, of course. But in other countries with a strong public broadcasting tradition—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain—the idea of radio as a unifying force still obtains. Public radio in America is undeniably good radio; but aside from those events of great moment that in and of themselves unify the nation, it devotes itself largely to the service of its hundreds of local audiences, each of them typically isolated from the others. And the commercial radio that did once help bind the country now often divides it, and brutally. Reginald Fessenden and his like would probably not wish to be listening.

 

TELEVISION: THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

In the summer of 1963, when I was still a student, I was hitchhiking north of Los Angeles and was given a ride by a helpful middle-aged man who worked as a technician at NBC television studios in Burbank. Like so many of those who gave me rides, this man—his name long forgotten, I’m ashamed to say—was exceptionally well connected. He knew studio chiefs everywhere and happily admitted me to a closed set at the Paramount studios in Hollywood, where people were shooting scenes for a film to be called Seven Days in May.

The director, John Frankenheimer, took kindly to me also and let me sit briefly in his director’s chair, which was just as I imagined a director’s chair to be. He also introduced me to Kirk Douglas, who was exceptionally warm, told me amusing stories about various Britons with whom he had worked, and signed the brim of the straw hat I had bought in Mexico.

All of which was fine and exciting and would become the stuff of a wealth of stories when I got back to Oxford. But the real deal, as they said in those days, was another promise that my technician friend had made to me: that he would get me onto the set in Burbank where NBC technicians were taping episodes of The Tonight Show and that if I was exceptionally lucky and well behaved, I might get to meet the now legendary new young star who was just then briefly hosting the show there, Johnny Carson.

All of which duly came to pass. I met, shook hands with, was bought coffee by, and duly fell under the spell of Mr. Carson. I cannot say I gave any thought to the possibility that he and his late-evening show, screened in bedrooms throughout the land, would tuck millions of Americans into bed for the coming thirty years or that he would become one of the most popular mass entertainers the country would ever know.

None of these things would have even interested me at the time. I was more interested in the technical aspects of the production, in watching in detail the workings of a full-blown American television operation. And what remains in my mind was driving each night with my new friend and two big metal drums in the backseat of the car. We would place these drums securely on an overnight plane bound for Idlewild Airport, New York. They held precious, freshly recorded tapes of The Tonight Show and would be handed off to the technicians at WNBC’s headquarters in Rockefeller Center and played over the air the next day for the stations on the American East Coast.

In its youth, television proved as unifying a feature of postwar society as radio had been in the 1930s. Johnny Carson, a late-night television host, can fairly be said to have sent the nation to sleep each night, though not before presiding over a million conceptions that he never witnessed. By the 1990s, cable TV and other later splinterings of the TV networks’ command of the airwaves had diminished the role of such figures.

The three-hour time difference across the continent had much to do with it. When Carson opted to perform his show in California, and went live on the air in Burbank at 11:30 p.m. Pacific Time, it was 2:30 a.m. the next day in New York, a time when even his most ardent fans were likely to be a-slumber. NBC had at the time the technical capacity to hook up stations for coast-to-coast live broadcasts, but if everyone back east was asleep, there was clearly no reason to. What the network did not have, however, was the ability to send the show down the line and have stations record it for broadcast the following day. Hence the visit to the airport; hence the concern that the tapes were treated royally, being worth millions in potential East Coast revenue.

Our nightly airport excursions were reminders that television’s true transcontinental network was still not quite finished. Its great potential as a cultural unifier was still a work in progress. Yet perhaps no other device had progressed from invention to near-omnipresent acceptance with such speed.

The first public demonstration took place on Thursday, April 7, 1927, in Manhattan, at the Bell Telephone laboratories on Bethune Street in what is now Tribeca. It featured the amiable moon face of the secretary of commerce, soon to be president, Herbert Hoover. He was speaking from his offices in Washington. Reporters from the New York Times watched him, enthralled, though not a little skeptical.

FAR-OFF SPEAKERS SEEN AS WELL AS HEARD HERE IN A TEST OF TELEVISION, read the headline on Friday’s page 1, above six decks of subheads: “Like a Photo Come to Life; Hoover’s Face Plainly Imaged as He Speaks in Washington; The First Time in History, Pictures Are Flashed by Wire and Radio Synchronizing with Speaker’s Voice; Commercial Use in Doubt, but AT&T Head Sees a New Step in Conquest of Nature After Years of Research.”

With a screen measuring three inches by two, the likeness was excellent: “It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life, had begun to talk, smile, nod its head and smile, look this way and that.” On a larger screen, the image was not so good, the secretary’s face difficult to distinguish. But his voice was clear, and he declaimed, appropriately, “Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history. Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.”

As a slightly ominous hint of the likely caliber of entertainment, Hoover’s formal broadcast was then followed by a link from a studio in New Jersey, featuring a vaudeville act by “A. Dolan, a comedian, as a stage Irishman with side whiskers and a broken pipe [who] did a monologue in brogue . . . then made a quick change and came back in blackface with a new line of quips in negro dialect.”

The Times reporter did not indicate any particular hostility to the nature of this performance; he did, however, go on to write that the commercial future of television, “if it has one,” was thought to be “largely in public entertainment—super-news reels flashed before audiences at the moment of occurrence, together with dramatic and musical acts shot on the ether waves in sound and picture at the instant they are taking place at the studio.” It would actually be seven years later, in 1934, that the word live was first used to describe this phenomenon, which would become a high-cost hallmark of much early television.

What the Times had seen was a demonstration of “mechanical television,” which featured rotating scanners and offered low-resolution images and in the hurly-burly of the time was invented first. In tandem, and so in competition, others were developing so-called electronic television, which was the brainchild of a remarkable inventor named Philo Farnsworth. The son of devout Mormon farmers, raised on a remote homestead in rural Utah, Farnsworth experimented for years on the use of cathode-ray tubes for making and receiving electronic images, and a TV system based on this technology eventually won the day. The tussle between the two systems was on occasion difficult and divisive, recalling the struggle between Edison and Westinghouse, between DC and AC, in the field of power generation. To this day, feelings remain strong among supporters of the two camps, one side complaining that the other stole this or that.

But the simple fact is that technicians worked tirelessly over the ensuing years, swiftly erasing any lingering public skepticism over the coming of television and confirming the general accuracy of the Times’ forecast. In 1939 David Sarnoff, who fifteen years before had so adroitly recognized the value of radio as a point-to-mass broadcasting medium, recognized in television exactly the same thing. He had at his fingertips (thanks in part to his own laboratories at RCA, which had developed and improved cathode-ray-based receivers) a technically suitable mechanism for performing the same broadcasting task as radio, only with moving pictures, too.

His company already owned station WEAF as the New York City flagship for NBC Radio. Now he inaugurated the cumbersomely styled W2XBS, with an antenna at the top of the newly built Empire State Building, for the sole purpose of transmitting television. Sarnoff himself, never backward at coming forward, decided that he would go on air first, ostensibly to show off the new RCA pavilion at the World’s Fair across the East River in Queens. “It is with a feeling of humbleness,” he said, “that I come to this moment of announcing the birth of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society.”

The signal carrying his speech from the Avenue of Progress went out to only about two hundred sets and barely more than a thousand viewers. But it was quite evidently the start of something unimaginably big. World War II interrupted developments, though some kind of a network was begun during the conflict, with connecting lines opened to stations in Pennsylvania and Schenectady. Once peace had returned and the country was flush with returned men and released cash, the postwar commercial boom got into full swing, and television began its remarkable takeoff into the stratosphere.

Its staggering potential was first publicly recognized by a former newspaper reporter, Wayne Coy, whom President Truman had appointed to run the Federal Communications Commission. In 1948 he made a famously prescient declaration: “Make no mistake about it: television is here to stay. It is a new force unloosed in the land. I believe it is an irresistible force.” It seemed at the time that Mr. Coy might be sticking his neck out. The television industry was looking far from robust: there were just 172,000 TV receivers in the entire country and only 28 broadcasting stations, compared with the 1,600 that transmitted radio.

But then, right on cue, the price of sets went down dramatically. In 1950 a Philco receiver with a twelve-inch screen had cost $499, but in 1955, an Admiral with a twenty-one-inch screen cost $149. It suddenly became a man’s solemn duty to acquire a television and help his country’s postwar economy. To do so was also an affirmation of family values, for everyone would gather in front of it and laugh and cry together. Suddenly, buoyed by the beginnings of well-researched cleverness of the Madison Avenue advertisers, every American with space in a living room was demanding a set. Sales rocketed.

In 1952, eleven years before my moment with Johnny Carson, there were fifteen million televisions in America. A year later, exactly ten years before my time in Burbank, twenty-four million. By 1955, there were thirty-two million. When Carson began his career as the King of Late Night in 1962, well over 90 percent of the seventy-two million American households owned at least one television.

But while television sets in those years were cheap and became nearly ubiquitous, the making of television shows remained costly, far more costly than producing radio shows. Radio required only a quiet room, a microphone, and a transmitter, but television required studios, sets, cameras, film-processing equipment, and all manner of expensive technology and the personnel to handle and repair it. It was easy and economically feasible for many to make radio shows; but the price of producing TV allowed the industry swiftly to be dominated by a very few organizations with very deep pockets.

The consequence was profound. With so few masters and with the choices they offered their viewers at any one moment of broadcast time so necessarily circumscribed, almost everyone in America with a television was being offered exactly the same stream of warmly comforting entertainment. Television offered a sudden unification of culture such as had never been seen or imagined before in the country’s history—but a kind of unification quite different from what had gone before.

Roads, railroads, telegraph systems, canals—these were creations that had allowed Americans to merge and mingle with one another on an individual basis—to become physically unified with ever-increasing ease and speed. The telegraph and telephone had similarly permitted connection via conversation. In theory the technologies behind radio and television might also allow the same thing. There is no technical reason why both kinds of devices could not be employed to let people talk to one another and see one another while doing so.

But in practice the marketplace allowed almost none of this. Both kinds of electronic media were employed to permit the dissemination of a unified mass culture. Although for about three glorious twentieth-century decades, commercial radio had played a seminally important role in doing so, everything switched across to the more exciting technology once television got properly under way. Television’s role in unifying mass American culture, then in time encouraging that same culture to seep out under the doorway into the rest of the world, is now well-nigh impossible to exaggerate.

Within a decade of that first David Sarnoff broadcast, television watching had become the favorite pastime of almost half of the American people. It was a leisure activity that had ripple effects few can have imagined. Water companies had to prepare for sudden increases in consumption during commercial breaks; electrical companies, for sudden surges in demand when shows ended. Furniture companies created new kinds of chairs and sofas to help make the endless hours of watching more comfortable. The food industry came out in 1954 with premade, preplated, artificially preserved meals designed to be eaten while watching. Lexicographers noted the arrival of new-minted phrases, boob tube in 1963, couch potato in 1976, and a score of others, many migrating swiftly from slang to the mainstream. Political parties now had to groom candidates for appearances, for debates, for sudden twists and turns in policies demanded by a public that was watching all the time. Some benefited—John Kennedy, for one. Others—Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy—did not.

The shows that helped create this almighty mass culture have become part of the American language: Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, The Ed Sullivan Show, Dragnet, Dallas, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. The weekly lunacies of I Love Lucy transfixed the nation throughout the 1950s: forty-four million people, almost 70 percent of the TV-owning public, tuned in on January 19, 1953, to watch while Lucille Ball gave birth, in real life, to her first baby. Half as many people tuned in the following day to watch President Eisenhower’s inauguration ceremony. Seventy million watched the finale of a Korean War medical comedy show, M.A.S.H.

In the years that followed, sporting events, political debates, moon landings, assassinations, attacks—all these were consumed by an ever-fascinated public principally via television, the griefs and triumphs shared, the conversation united. Millions got their news from men who would become trusted, avuncular figures—Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite—whose timbre and manner suggested an almost godlike authority. Governments feared their power; the loss of Cronkite’s support for the Vietnam War was an important factor in President Nixon’s decision to wind the conflict down.

But then, after just thirty years of domination by the major television networks, a domination that helped create a cultural and psychological unification of the states, there came something new: cable television. And with cable there came further changes, which began to erode TV’s brief role as the electronic welder-in-chief of the country.

The technology behind cable TV is simple enough: rather than having the TV signals sent through the air by local stations affiliated with the networks that supplied most of their programs, the signals could be relayed directly to household by wire, without the need for a station in between.

In the early days, the late 1940s, these wires were generally put in for reasons of necessity. Out in the mountainous regions of the country, for example, many could simply not receive line-of-sight broadcast signals. A Pennsylvania appliance store owner and lineman named John Walson, in the Appalachian hill town of Mahanoy City, is generally credited with founding the industry in 1948. He had offered to connect those customers who had bought televisions from him but received only poor signals to an antenna he had built on a local hillside. He would connect them with a cable and through it would bring them three channels of programming for $2 a month.

Walson used a specially made high-volume coaxial cable that could carry half a dozen channels at the same time. In time the capacity of such cables increased tenfold, and by the 1970s, when cable television became a realistic commercial prospect, customers could have many scores of channels beamed directly into their televisions. Today coaxial metal cables have been replaced by fiber-optic cables. Now hundreds and potentially thousands of channels can be carried, and viewers—now usually city and suburb dwellers who buy cable by choice rather than necessity—can choose from a nearly limitless menu of entertainment, education, news, and commentary.

The result has been to dilute and disperse the unifying potential power of television even more dramatically than that of public radio. Radio had become diluted because so many geographically separated public radio stations were established, hundreds of small fiefdoms that for one reason or another proved unwilling or unable to talk to one another. Cable television, on the other hand, created no stations at all; it diluted the overall effect of the medium by virtue of the vast spectrum of choices it offered to the viewer.

The huge TV-watching population, encouraged by advertisers using clever demographically based or interest-based algorithms, swiftly began to split itself into subgroups. Some were based on demographics, with all youngsters watching this kind of television, older white people watching another kind, and young African American women yet another; others were based on interests, with those liking golf, fashion, numismatics, basketball, British comedy, and erotica tuning in to specialty channels. Cable television allowed all of these bodies of humanity to enter their own personal echo chambers, to retreat into cultural laagers and become cut off from the mainstream broadcasts for which television had been originally intended.

The consequence was immediate, dramatic, generational, and continuing, remaining a work in progress. In the 1950s and ’60s, American popular culture had been unwittingly homogenized by an almost monotheistic devotion to network television. It generally ignored such criticism as that most notoriously made by Newton Minow, another chairman of the FCC, who in the 1960s derided television as a “vast wasteland.” He made himself an archenemy of the networks by condemning their output as little more than “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom.”

Today, with cable television attracting more than half of the American population, the monoculture reared on such entertainment—for it is difficult to suppose that a modern Newton Minow would find much changed—has started to evaporate. The cultural firmament has fractured, each splinter attracting its own cohort of viewers, each wedded by fiber-optic cable or satellite transponder to the unseen broadcaster, viewers separate from one another and each group separated from the others also.

The fracturing of taste has changed the family, too. What was once an indissoluble unit gathered around the flickering blue television screen now is spoiled for choice and spoiled by choice. One parent might be watching one sport on one cable channel while another views a gentler pastime on a second set and the children are each shut away behind closed doors, watching yet other channels or, more likely, a transmission of cultural omniscience that is available by way of electronics’ most recent and indisputably most profoundly important newcomer: the Internet.

THE ALL OF SOME KNOWLEDGE

I was in a sheep station in a remote corner of northern Australia when I first realized the Internet’s extraordinary potential. It was the mid-1990s. I was living in Hong Kong, owned a cell phone the size of my hand, and worked on an Apple computer the size of a small filing cabinet. I had been using e-mail for the previous six years.

The Internet of the time was slow, hesitant. Enthusiasts, of which I was unashamedly one, spent hours trawling through the booths at the somewhat shady Golden Supermarket in a tenement in Wanchai to buy gadgets and listen to suggestions for making their connection marginally faster. But the basic fact was: an Internet existed, and even in those slow days, most who used it were in awe.

But on Stockholm Station, in western Queensland, people didn’t have it, had never heard of it. In the farm office, there was a mechanical adding machine, handle and all, and the farmer looked mystified at the sight of my portable—or in those days, luggable—computer. The farmer’s son, a seven-year-old sheepherding Land Rover–driving boy much older than his years and named Rupert, said he had heard his by-radio School of the Air teacher, one Mrs. Bishop, describe a computer, but he had never seen one. He was in consequence more enthralled than mystified by mine, as was his pet lamb, named Gidgee, who always seemed to be gamboling cheerily along at Rupert’s side. He asked me for a demonstration of what it could do. He sat down beside me, and Gidgee, obligingly charming, jumped up onto his lap and nestled there, watching, too.

First I showed him some e-mails. Though mundane now, they were quite extraordinary then, especially in the remote red heart of outback Australia. This first was a letter from Hong Kong, I explained; the next, from France; two more, from New York. Then I typed a note for a friend in San Francisco, mentioning that I had a lad named Rupert sitting beside me. “Hi, Rupert,” she returned, seconds later. The boy stirred uneasily in his seat.

But now, I said: the Internet. He had no idea what it was, so I explained as best I could. Anything he wanted to know about, anything, I could show him with a click, in pictures, sound, text, film. So employing the Microsoft slogan of the moment, I asked him: “Where do you want to go today?”

He thought for a second. Then . . . could I perhaps show him a picture; he hesitated, presumably not wishing to sound foolish . . . a B-1 bomber? He had always been fascinated, ever since reading about them in a magazine.

I knew there had been some test aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base in California, logged on to the website, and in moments I had film clips of a B-1B soaring into the skies over the Arizona desert. Rupert’s eyes were as big as dinner plates. Then he fell rather quiet, looked away for a second, then said in a nervous whisper: “Could your computer possibly . . . take me to Mars?”

It was an obsession, he confessed. He had always tried to see it in the clear nighttime skies. His dad’s binoculars were helpful. But if it were possible to see a close-up . . . ?

I clicked over to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and by happy chance there was a satellite, the Sojourner, flying over the Martian surface. Every ten minutes or so, it was sending a picture, which JPL was posting on its website. Slowly, line by line, an image of the red desert landscape revealed itself. Craters, canal-like canyons, mountaintops—all were being seen for the first time here in Australia just as they were in California. Then I heard a stirring beside me.

Rupert was astonished, his eyes even wider than before. He didn’t seem to know what to do—until he then placed his hands gently across Gidgee’s wooly face and pointed the creature’s eyes directly at the screen. He lowered his head and, desperate to share the moment with his best friend, said solemnly to the little lamb, “Look Gidgee! It’s Mars!”

I left my computer behind in Australia for Rupert, who soon began sending e-mails to me, and I bought another machine the moment I arrived back home. The new one was faster, smaller, lighter, and cheaper. Access to the Internet was getting easier. Converts were accumulating all the time. The addition of that one small child convinced me that the effect of connection to this parallel universe of knowledge was of seminal importance. There was no stopping it now.

And the Internet revolution has not stopped its acceleration, not for one microsecond in all the years since. Whether for ultimate good or not remains to be seen, but as a phenomenon, it seems as permanent as the pyramids, only a very great deal younger.

The dates of its early stirrings and the names of those who can lay some claim to having created it present a marvelous confusion. Almost all of its origins are American, and a great deal of them involve—as with the expeditions, the surveys, the roads, the railways, the waterways, the telegraph, and a score of other unifying events and entities—the United States government.

In this case, the government agency involved was the Defense Department. Its interest was piqued by its perceived need, following the launch of the Soviet satellites in the late 1950s, to counter a new high-technology threat. It was deemed suddenly important to the generals and admirals in Washington that their family of three huge mainframe computers at the Pentagon, at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska, and at the underground headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado should be linked together, able to relay information about war readiness and threat assessment in real time. An agency known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was set up to investigate the possibilities of doing this. An MIT professor named Joseph Licklider, who specialized in examining how the brain converts air vibrations into the perception of sounds—psychoacoustics—was chosen to lead the team.

It can be convenient to regard the Internet that then developed as an entity that rests on three coequal pillars. There is first the physical Internet, or the hardware Internet, with its spiderwebs of fiber-optic cables and nests of routers and server farms, with its secret nodes and mirror sites and Internet exchanges. Though it is so complex that in current form it can only be a creation of many, “Lick” Licklider’s contribution to its making was seminal.

For it was Licklider who in 1969 came up with core ideas behind what was to be called the ARPANET. This was the original network of defense computers, Virginia to Nebraska to Colorado and back to Virginia, a connection made back when computers were huge glass-windowed, air-cooled rooms filled with ranks of man-size towers, each one topped with whirling drums of magnetic tape that spun this way and that like the infernal clock contraptions in Metropolis. The ARPANET connecting these machines—devised by Larry Roberts, another half-forgotten Internet pioneer—supposedly allowed for the better defending of America and in theory permitted the nation’s atomic weapons to be launched much more quickly than those owned by the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces.

Happily that particular need never arose, and once the threat had subsided, the technology started to seep into the commercial world and inexorably and inevitably led to a civil version of ARPANET. This peaceable version eventually linked not three single room-size machines, but millions upon millions of computers and their hundreds of thousands of networks across the globe. Over the next two decades, it evolved into what was rolled out first throughout the United States in March 1990 as the modern Internet.

But the hardware is only the hardware. The computers also needed to decide, or be taught, how best to talk with one another, electronically. The way in which they do so is byzantine; the conversation that hums silently around the world today owes its existence to legions of linguists and lexicographers, if you will, who helped create it. One system eventually turned out to be particularly appropriate—a list of subatomic courtesies that let two strange machines get to know each other, along with a list of microscopic interpreters to decode the linguistic codes that are peculiar to one machine and can make them intelligible to another. The system came to be known as TCP/IP, Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. For the Internet to function properly, both are employed simultaneously, conjoined as the Internet Protocol Suite. Two Americans are most commonly associated with creating these proprieties of computer conversation, jointly becoming the Miss Manners, if you like, of the cyberworld.

Joseph Licklider, Vint Cerf, and Robert Kahn can fairly be said to have conceived and invented the basic structure of the modern Internet—with a memo from Licklider in 1963 first suggesting the need for a network of connected computers. Cerf and Kahn were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005; Licklider died in 1990, before the implications of the Internet were fully realized.

One was Vint Cerf, the other Robert Kahn. Working as government employees together at DARPA, the pair devised ways of slicing digitized information into tiny packets, sending these packets in cleverly arranged order down the wires connecting the computers, and then reassembling the packets in the distant computer into a precise copy of the information.

Both men eventually left government to preach the essential goodness of computer connectivity, and both have been deluged with honors, mostly from their native United States. Doubtless Licklider would have won a medley of plaudits, too, but this modest and kindly man, predictor of so much and architect of so many of the central ideas, died young, in 1990, just as the Internet was getting started. According to Larry Roberts, it was in the early 1960s that Licklider began to suggest that “everybody could use computers anywhere and get at data anywhere in the world. He didn’t envision the number of computers we have today by any means, but he had the same concept—all of the stuff linked together throughout the world, that you can use a remote computer, get data from a remote computer, or use lots of computers in your job. The vision was really Lick’s originally. He didn’t have a clue how to build it. He didn’t have any idea how to make this happen. But he knew it was important, so he sat down with me and really convinced me that it was important and convinced me into making it happen.”

Both creations, the physical structure and the protocols of communication, are different in two symbolically important respects from the final supporting pylon of the Internet, the medium known as the World Wide Web. The Web is the simplest of the three baseplates of the Internet, the easiest to explain. It is a medium that offers a computer user a means* of transmitting real information—text, pictures, film, sounds—from computer to computer or device to device. It transmits this information through the physical system of the Internet that was devised at the Pentagon by Roberts and Licklider, using the protocols first made at the Pentagon by Cerf and Kahn.

But the Web does not have many creators—just one. And neither he nor its early users were Americans. Tim Berners-Lee is British, and his first customers were scientists working at the nuclear research center CERN, in Switzerland. He told them about his invention in a memo sent electronically in August 1991. The web, as he called it, “aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere. [It] was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!”

The Web came to California, to Stanford, a month later; it spread beyond universities and into the hands of the general public in 1993, and by the end of the year there were six hundred websites. At the end of 1994 there were nearly three thousand, including sources for information on music, cooking, and movies; an early Internet comic named Doctor Fun; a webcam pointed into a fish tank; a means of ordering pizza online; a free-speech website called Bianca’s Smut Shack; and the online site of one of the world’s most venerable newspapers, the Economist.

From the summer of 1994 on, the Internet went into accelerative overdrive, exponential and hyperkinetic. There are said to be more than six hundred million websites today, connecting the world, drilling details into and out of the most remote corners of the planet.

And the most remote corners of America, too. The physical plant of the Internet is everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Orange markers show where buried fiber-optic cables run, spearing across the remoteness but too valuable to have anyone dig anywhere close to them, so identified everywhere, even deep in forests and swamps. Google has just built an immense server farm on the site of the old drive-in movie theater in Council Bluffs, Iowa, close to the great gold-colored spike that marks the spot that Abraham Lincoln declared the starting point for the transcontinental railroad.

Lewis and Clark passed down the Columbia River in 1804, and then half a century later, the settlers and their wagons rumbled along nearby on their way to a future. Today in a flat nearby valley, there is a town called Prineville. Facebook has an enormous anonymous structure there, half dark and chill. All such centers lie behind tall razor-wire fences, are policed on the outside by guards and watchtowers and lights, have usually as the sole entrance an unmarked door with a smokers’ ash receptacle beside it, and are manned on the inside by just a small corps of three or four uniformed men who pad around like keepers in some strange beastless zoo. But each one is a zoo crammed with iron mesh cages that hold hundreds and hundreds of computer servers, all of them passing data from one to another or down into the cables, up and out of them into other cables, all soundless and not a little sinister.

I was escorted around one such center in northern California. The keeper was utterly discreet about his charges, trusting that I would be sufficiently mesmerized by the millions of winking lights and the low blue light bathing the building’s innards not to ask too many questions. But he did start at one point, gesturing to one especially large cage, in which the Cisco servers were all jet black and shiny, like Darth Vader’s skin. “That,” he said with great solemnity, “is where they store all the information on California’s deadbeat dads.”

Every man who has run out on child support or is late with his alimony payments or who in some other way is said to have failed his children or his former spouse—every name, every address, and every last detail of the miscreant is corralled behind the black mesh of chain mail. Every time a gathering of diodes on a server panel begins a fury of colored blinking, as happened several times while I was watching, it signified that someone, somewhere in the world, was seeking to find out something about someone whose details lie buried on slices of conducting metal within.

One of the newly built cathedrals of an entirely new kind of unification church—a Google server farm, housing tens of thousands of highly secure computer nodes that store and exchange at lightning speed information both for the entire American nation and, now, for the entire world.

And while the computers are soundless in their labors, the center hums with a low-frequency rumble of motors and harmonics. Great air-conditioning systems have to be built alongside these vast new information cathedrals to keep the computers and their eternally spinning hard drives from overheating, melting, bursting into flame, and perhaps for just one critical microsecond, going disastrously offline, off the grid.

Somewhere across the world a computer user is expecting that his click of a mouse button will yield instant access to a piece of information. If he has to wait—in a world where waiting is an intolerable new inconvenience—an analysis will show within seconds just which data center is responsible for the delay and why. To ensure that there are as few interruptions as possible, immense quantities of electricity are deployed to keep everything running with precision and perfection and permanence: 2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.

Therein lies an irony, perhaps. The Internet was formed in America, based in America, a godchild of all the earlier technologies born or first used in America that helped to connect its people and landscape as one, and now its business is in connecting the world. Connecting America to the world, true, and connecting the world to America. But while many of the networks that employ the Internet—Twitter, especially—have proved themselves unimaginably adroit in linking together people and causes and helping create the new phenomenon of mass thinking that has come to be known as the hive mind, it is no longer a stated or perceived mission of the network to help anneal the nation that made it all into one.

If California is to feel at one, to be at one, with Maine and the Dakotas and Florida and Alabama, then it has to be hoped that the structures already settled into place by the great men and great visions of the past will continue to endure, as the republic endures. It is surely evident now that the Internet, the great new technological missionary of the age, is obliged to a future lying well beyond America. Its creators have as their unstated vision the uniting of the whole world. The unum that is America’s proudest accomplishment today will in time become part of an even greater pluribus, which one day will be similarly forged by electronics into one great planetary unity.

Whether such a dream will work and will make sense remains to be seen. It may not happen, but it will surely be attempted. It may be a dream, or it may be a nightmare. In the forefront of this effort will be the century’s new corps of forge masters. They will probably no longer be, as in the past, great public figures of strength and courage and determination. The days of Powell and Hayden, Lewis and Clark, Maclure and Edison and Clarence King are long over; there will be no further examples of men bent on surveying mountains or hammering railroad ties or wrenching trees from the living earth or excavating canals or listening for faint radio signals through the fog. Instead the new pioneers of unification will be technical men, hidden quietly out of sight in their blue-lit warehouses, surrounded by silent frenzies of blinking server lights.

As this dream or this nightmare unfolds, deep within these fortresses, such men of cool dispassion and quiet determination will remain fixed to their allotted tasks of a new ideal, that of making the planet one and then placing America in her proper context as a briefly glorious component of the comprehensive history of earth. The men who united the states, in their next incarnation as a part of this new ideal, will have become transmuted into the men who united the world.