The Tyranny of E-mail

by John Freeman

  If we simply swapped his watch for a BlackBerry, would Beard’s nervous American man be recognizable today? Yes and no. In spite of the ubiquity of cellular phones, all of which keep time, watch sales have not plummeted recently; their appeal as accessories of style and status has, in fact, only increased. A watch suggests a serious, sober man even more than before. On the other hand, that nervous man on the run would have a very different sense of now from the now we live under today—or did one moment ago. It’s quite possible this gentleman had a phone in his home, but after shutting his front door and stepping onto the elevated subway, he would effectively have been in a communication blackout until he reached work.

  Things change even more when he arrives at the office, where telegrams would be sent and received, and there would be phone calls to take and memos to sign off on. If the man was a lawyer, he would do no typing whatsoever. Men of stature did not type—they dictated. He would also receive very few, if any, letters or notes from friends. Most of the telegrams he received would be short. None of them arrived with an attachment, unless you considered the voice component of a singing telegram, which arrived in 1933, the first one sung by Rudy Vallee, or the Candygram, which Western Union established in the 1960s.

  In contrast to e-mail, all of these missives arrived by hand from a messenger boy who could have been a young man looking to get his leg up in business. As late as the 1970s, office buildings in New York City had tubular slots where a telegram messenger could come and pick up messages that had been signaled for pickup by a bell linked to a central processing station. Before their numbers were thinned out by a pneumatic tube system that carried messages to and from main hubs, Wall Street crawled with these busy runners, who snaked through the city streets and bolted up staircases. The inventor Thomas Edison, who adapted the telegraph to create the ticker tape and later invented the lightbulb, and the financier Andrew Carnegie, both got their start in life this way, meeting men of power by taking them urgent messages. A century later, the novelist Henry Miller also worked as a messenger boy, and subsequently the crisscross connections of the metropolis exploded on his pages:

  It’s a human flour mill…. Names and dates. Fingerprints, too, if we had the time for it. So that what? So the American people may enjoy the fastest form of communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly, so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be apprised immediately, that is to say, within an hour, unless the messenger to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can. Twenty million Christmas blanks, all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the directors and president and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company.

  For Those Who Can: Keep It Short

  It’s worth belaboring the importance of brevity in these messages. Telegrams conveyed urgency, but very rarely did they contain large amounts of text—except those sent through diplomatic and news channels. As a result, telegrams were not used to shuttle complex thoughts from one distant location to the next, even when sent by writers. When his wife gave birth, James Joyce, who was responsible for writing some of the longest sentences since Henry James, cabled his brother SON BORN JIM. The editor Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with Ernest Hemingway, was even briefer: GIRL, he telegrammed his mother.

  Humor, which depends in part upon brevity’s torque, also flourished over the telegram. Upon arriving in Venice, Robert Benchley wrote to his editor at The New Yorker, STREETS FULL OF WATER PLEASE ADVISE. Mark Twain once used the device to play a dirty trick upon a dozen well-known men. FLEE AT ONCE, he advised them, by telegram. ALL IS DISCOVERED. All of them left town immediately. Perhaps the shortest telegram ever sent traveled between Oscar Wilde and his publisher, from whom he wanted to know how sales of his new novel were going. The message: “?” The reply: “!”

  Hostility could be conveyed, loud and clear. In 1919, the humorist James Thurber heard from his ex-girlfriend, Minette Fritts, that she had married. He cabled back directly: WHAT THE HELL! When William Faulkner submitted the manuscript of Absalom, Absalom!, his editor was away and the book fell into the lap of a younger editor, who wrote back criticizing the Mississippi novelist’s syntax and sentence structure. Faulkner promptly responded with a telegram: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU? In 1944, Ernest Hemingway got tired of spending so much time apart from his third wife, the war reporter Martha Gellhorn: ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED? Secret lovers, no longer reduced to communicating by code in newspaper classified ads, used it to send missives—also delivered in code. Graham Greene once cabled his mistress, Catherine Walton, from Morocco in 1948: DO YOU LIKE ONION SANDWICHES GREENE, onion sandwiches being code for a sexual act.

  Only the very wealthy—or institutionally underwritten— could afford the luxury of such private correspondence over the wires. Very, very few individuals had telegraph lines installed in their homes. Sending a telegram was reserved for important news: announcements of births or deaths, the latter of which were noted with a black-bordered envelope. In some cases, families received yet another telegram when the body of their loved one began its train trip home: BODY OF MAJ R ROBBINS GOES NORTH TODAY, one of them read in 1864. In other instances, an early telegram of a wound proved too hastily sent. The family of Yankee soldier Stanley Abbott received a telegram that Abbott had suffered a chest wound. DOCTOR SAYS NOT MORTAL, it said. Abbott died the next day.

  The cost being what it was, even businessmen and bankers, who by 1860 relied quite heavily on the telegraph, sent just seven to ten telegrams a day. Gradually, however, prices declined and the volume of telegrams increased. In the telegram’s heyday, you could send a ten-word telegram for around twenty cents and a weekend cable from New York to London for just seventy-five cents, or the equivalent of $6 and $18 today, respectively. By the end of the nineteenth century, Western Union was transmitting 58 million telegrams a year and needed to outfit 14,000 uniformed messengers. The company began offering specially designed decorative telegrams, some of which, much later, were designed by Norman Rockwell and other artists.

  By 1903, the number of telegrams in all countries around the world reached 1 million per day, with Britain leading the world at 91 million a year. The United States was a close second, followed by France, Germany, Russia, Austria, Belgium, and Italy, in that order. The invention, refinement, and adoption of the telephone gradually chiseled this number down, and the ever-swinging pendulum between written and spoken language swung back toward oral communication. In the United States, there was only one long-distance line in 1885, stretching from New York to Philadelphia. By 1895, the phone system had more than 265,000 miles of wire and was growing exponentially. That year, 750 million telephone calls were made, ten for every man, woman, and child in the United States. And at the turn of the century, telegrams were outnumbered by phone calls fifty to one.

  The decline was precipitous after 1945, the year 236 million messages were sent over the telegraph network. In 1950, Western Union tried to relaunch its service by calling attention to the fact that sending words instantly meant something more than hearing a voice on a phone. “A telegram commands attention—gets results” was its slogan. By 1960, though, telegram volume had dropped to half of what it was in 1945, and by 1970 it was halved again, to 69 million.

  Despite their efforts, by the late 1980s telegrams made up just 5 percent of Western Union’s business. The bulk of these were Opiniongrams, messages used to lobby politicians that could be sent for $5.95 for twenty words. During the Iran-contra hearings, 150,000 telegrams piled in with words of disgust and support for Oliver North, the disgraced colonel involved in shipping arms to Iran so that military aid could be funneled to contra rebels via Saudi Arabia. It was a record blip in a failing service, so the company extended its Opiniongram rates to cover messages sent to anyone testifying before a congressional investigating committee.

  What Time Cannot Contain

  B
y the middle of the twentieth century, the world had an incredible array of channels by which to keep up with one another and the news. But all this communication—all this present-tense urgency—couldn’t conceal one overarching problem, one that philosophers have wrestled with incessantly. Time can be standardized, but it is not uniformly felt. As John Berger has written, “Despite clocks and the regular turning of the earth, time is experienced as passing at different rates. This impression is generally dismissed as subjective, because time, according to the nineteenth century view, is objective, incontestable, and indifferent; to its indifference there are no limits.”

  The friction between our private sense of time and the objectively observable notion of Time—be it in the news or in the updates of a friend talking to you by telephone—creates the texture we know as consciousness. It is the source of our subjectivity and our greatest pain and dislocation. Consciousness is what sets us apart from so many other animals and from one another. As our world moved faster, or appeared to, we became left behind and alone. A telephone call, a face-to-face meeting into which we become absorbed, a deeply rewarding mental or physical task, a moment’s prayer might briefly make us forget this fact; but when the silence returns—as it must—we cannot escape the hard truth that we are alone in the world.

  None of the technological inventions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave us a total reprieve from our singularity; they merely swathed it in padded wrapping. People in many countries could get into cars and drive to see one another. The telegraph meant that urgent news could be sent swiftly and business transacted. In the end, though, long-distance rates meant that it was more practical for people who had a lot to say to simply pick up the phone. One could cook or put children to bed and meanwhile carry on a separate conversation. Up until the invention of the fax machine, important memos and business documents were still sent by letter, airmail if necessary.

  When it came to telling the story of one another’s lives, though, or sharing the details of an afternoon’s idyll, the rest of the world bridged this gap—this gap between our time and Time itself, from our minds and someone else’s—as it had since literacy became widespread. People withdrew and dialed into the inner quietude, that absence of sound we think of as our most intimate selves, and transformed it so that they could pass it along, share it. In other words, they wrote a letter and put it into the mail. Dramatically, radically, that would change at the end of the twentieth century.

  3

  ALL TOGETHER NOW

  The infrastructure we will need in the 21st century goes beyond traditional public works projects…. I envision a national computer network linking academic researchers and industry, using the nation’s vast data banks as the raw material for increasing industrial productivity and creating new products.

  — AL GORE, 1988

  We want to eliminate distance as a factor…. You can compare this to the kinds of things that happened in the 50’s in the United States. We need a project of the scale of a National Highway Project for computer information.

  — ROBERT HABER, 1988

  All the heckling radio hosts, wisecracking comedians, and savvy computer gurus were right: Al Gore did not “invent the Internet.” It’s also worth pointing out that the vice president never claimed to have done so; he merely brought a bill before the U.S. Senate aimed at creating a much larger, more user-friendly version of a network that already existed— ARPANET—and then made the mistake during his first presidential campaign in 1988 of telling Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he had “taken initiative in creating the Internet.” Republican congressman Dick Armey pounced on Gore’s apparent hubris and put out a press release mocking the Tennessee senator, and in typical say-it-often-enough-and-it’s-true fashion, the word “create” evolved into “invent.” The transformation was so convoluted that Stanford University researchers actually did a media study on it in which they concluded, “Truth does not always win out in the marketplace of ideas, even when the marketplace is highly competitive.”

  One of the reasons the story is believed to be true, though, has to do with the long gap between the development of the technology and networks that became the Internet and the public’s sudden and swift gravitation online in the mid-1990s. For most people, the Internet seemed to appear out of thin air in 1995. But ARPANET, the Internet’s granddaddy, was approaching thirty years of age at that point, long enough to have developed a lore and a following, not to mention a few name changes. Its first node was installed in UCLA in the late 1960s by a group of inspired, sleep-deprived researchers with a practical dream, and three more nodes were quickly added. They wanted to network with other academics around the country their hulking, washroom-sized supercomputers, machines so expensive and complicated to maintain that only a few universities in America had one.

  The institutions and players that turned this dream into reality echoed the overlapping forces that had brought mail to the masses and the telegram to life: scientists needed a network so they could conduct research; the U.S. military badly needed a new kind of communication network to stay one step ahead of, well, everyone else. By the late 1960s, real-time computing— hardware and software systems that work together in highly deadline-oriented situations, as in antilock brakes—had been in use in radar and missile systems for two decades. ARPANET was that technology’s practical offshoot and fail-safe. A decentralized, secondary communication network would be essential in the event of a nuclear attack; given the climate of fear and dread in the United States in the 1950s, this was hardly the stuff of science fiction. Circumventing such an attack was not the explicit goal of ARPANET, but it was a prevailing preoccupation of one inventor who helped to make the whole thing possible: Paul Baran.

  Like Morse’s, Baran’s impact as an inventor stretches across several practical realms. He is credited with inventing the airport metal detector, as well as the technology that is essential to the ATM and the DSL modem, which connects a computer to a high-speed phone line. But his place in history was secured by work he performed at the RAND Corporation between 1959 and 1965. RAND was a good home for a man worried about the future of American security, as Baran was. Founded in 1946 by the U.S. Army Air Corps, the corporation was set up to maintain the research capability built up by the United States during World War II. It was originally part of Douglas Aircraft Company, but in 1948 it was spun off and became its own independent nonprofit group. Between 1950 and 1970, Rand’s growing ranks of theorists and eggheads worked on systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, advanced computers, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. RAND also advised Robert McNamara on the failing Vietnam War, a role that became a political controversy when a RAND employee, Daniel Ellsberg, leaked seven thousand pages of classified documents to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan. They would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

  Baran’s work at RAND would never earn him the fame or notoriety that Ellsberg’s act of patriotism did, but it made a larger impact on the day-to-day life of people the world round. He had two strokes of genius, both of which would refine the structure of communication networks henceforth and assist the birth and incredible growth of what became known as the Internet. He pulled them both off by overshooting expectations. At the time, the military was merely concerned with preserving “minimal essential communications,” which Baran described in an interview as thus: “a euphemism for the President to be able to say ‘You are authorized to fire your weapons.’ Or ‘hold your fire.’ These are very short messages. The initial strategic concept at that time was if you can build a communications system that could survive and transmit such short messages, that is all that is needed.”

  After talking to generals, though, Baran realized there would be an immediate need for such a network to carry more data. When he couldn’t get a clear answer for how much more, he simply decided to design something that would be able to handle an almost unlimited amount of information. His solution was to sketch out wha
t is now called a distributed network. In a centralized network, all roads lead back to the same place; in a decentralized network, all roads lead to a number of different places. A distributed network has no center. Rather, it resembles a map of the human brain, with each “node” connected to several others. This meant that no attack on a central node could knock out all communications.

  Second, and more important, Baran suggested that messages could be broken up into pieces and sent along this network, then reassembled at the point of their destination. Thanks to the advent of digital technology, data could be encoded into a series of 1s and 0s, and, if marked properly, a message could travel the most efficient route possible to its destination. If there were a slowdown in one place, the message would simply take another route. In her fabulous history of the Internet’s early days, Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, Katie Hafner uses the metaphor of shipping a house from Boston to Los Angeles on the American interstate highways to explain why this is effective. “As long as each driver has clear instructions telling him where to deliver his load and he is told to take the fastest way he can find, chances are that all the pieces will arrive at their destination in Los Angeles, but if each piece of the house carries a label indicating the place in the overall structure, the order of arrival doesn’t matter. The rebuilders can find the right parts and put them together in the right places.”