This Day in Philosophy — 16 August: the first transatlantic telegraph message

On 16 August 1858 Britain sent its first official message to the United States along a cable laid on the floor of the Atlantic. Queen Victoria was congratulating President James Buchanan on the completion of the line.

Transmitting the message took seventeen hours. The cable failed a few weeks later, and a permanent line was not established until 1866. A threshold had nonetheless been crossed that day.

Communication comes loose from transport#

Until then, for a piece of news to travel from one place to another was the same thing as for a person or a ship to travel there. News moved at the speed of whatever carried it. Between the post roads of Rome and the sailing ship of the nineteenth century there was no difference in order of magnitude.

The telegraph broke that bond. A message could now go without being carried.

Philosophically this marks a rupture in the understanding of space and time. The phrase "at the same moment" became meaningful, for the first time, across the two shores of an ocean. A generation later the simultaneity of two events in different places would turn into a direct question in physics, in Einstein's special theory of relativity — and the practical ground of that argument was made of clocks synchronised over telegraph lines.

The birth of standard time#

The telegraph's second consequence is more everyday. Where each town had kept its clock by its own noon, the connected lines made a common measure of time compulsory. Time zones were born of the practical needs of railway and telegraph networks.

That the question "what time is it?" has a single answer is thus a result of infrastructure, not of nature.

Did the world really come closer?#

The enthusiastic commentary of the day held that the telegraph would put an end to misunderstanding between nations and make wars impossible. Sixty years later the First World War broke out — and was coordinated by telegraph.

The experience delivered a lesson that the philosophy of technology has had to learn repeatedly: speeding up a medium of communication does not by itself improve the quality of the communication. The same argument was made for the telephone, for radio, for television and for the internet — each time with the same hope, and each time with the same disappointment.

It is not hard to see today's argument about social media as a continuation of the line laid in 1858.