From Gutenberg to Google

by Tom Wheeler

  As he worked on continually improving the operation of the difference engine, Babbage was confronted by what he described as a “shadowy vision” of how “the whole of arithmetic now appeared within the grasp of mechanism.”90 He began to consider a much more complex apparatus, an “analytical engine” capable of feeding the result of a previous calculation back into the beginning of another calculation. He called it “the engine eating its own tail.”91 It would become the essential concept behind the modern computer.

  Between the summers of 1834 and 1836, Babbage had conceptualized the components of what we today recognize as a computer. In incredibly detailed blueprints, Babbage laid out a central processing unit (which he called a “mill”) that would rely on its own internal procedures, expandable memory (which he called the “store”), an input device driven by punch cards, and an output printer. The unit used base 10 arithmetic and was capable of if-then conditional branching, the preparation of a result in advance of its need (equivalent to microprogramming), and the use of multiple processors to speed the calculation by splitting the task (parallel processing).92

  Charles Babbage built none of his engines. While he did turn out a small-scale difference engine, its full capabilities were never built because of disputes with his chief engineer and the cessation of funding from the British government. Nor was the analytical engine ever constructed. Components were built, but the entire apparatus was never tied together. Had it been, it would have been a monster the size of a small steam locomotive.

  In 1991, however, the London Science Museum did what Babbage had not. Using the original blueprints and the technology of the mid-nineteenth century, the museum constructed an 8,000-part difference engine. It performed exactly as Babbage had forecasted more than 160 years earlier, producing error-free calculations.93 The museum is currently constructing an analytical engine to Babbage’s specifications.94

  In the 1930s, multiple teams on both sides of the Atlantic labored to create the first digital computer. Amazingly, they were ignorant of Babbage’s work and how their efforts had been preceded a century and a half earlier by the genius of one man and the excitement of the Age of Steam.

  Four

  The First Electronic Network and the End of Time

  Charles Minot was impatient. Stuck on a siding at the Turner, New York, station, the railroad executive was anxious to continue his westward journey. The eastbound train, running on the single line of track, was behind schedule, however. The executive was stuck waiting … and waiting.

  In the early days of railroading the challenge of managing trains headed in opposite directions over a single line of track was supposed to be solved by keeping to a schedule (called running “by the book”). The schedule had built into it a prioritization of trains (for instance, express over locals) and a safety buffer that gave each train a block of track time throughout its course. This meant that a train heading in the opposite direction could not encroach on that buffer and had to wait at a siding for the other train to pass. Should the other train not arrive within the appointed time, the rules allowed for the waiting train to proceed slowly behind a flagman on the lookout for the oncoming locomotive. When the two trains’ conductors spotted each other, one would back up to the nearest siding and allow the other to pass.

  When running by the book met Murphy’s law, however, the system fell apart, and Mr. Minot was the wrong person to be inconvenienced by such a breakdown. The general superintendent of the New York & Erie Railroad, Minot had a reputation for being results-oriented, quick-tempered, and curt.1 On this fall day in 1851 these quirks led him to do something that had never been done on an American railroad: he used the telegraph that ran alongside the tracks to communicate with stations down the line and direct the activity on the line ahead.

  Minot telegraphed the next station, fourteen miles away in Goshen, New York, and asked if the eastbound train had passed. The answer quickly returned that the eastbound had yet to be seen. Rapidly, Minot sent another message, “To Agent and Operator at Goshen: Hold the train for further orders, signed, Charles Minot, Superintendent.” He then gave the engineer on his train the order to proceed. Following protocol, it was a written order: “Run to Goshen regardless of opposing train.”2

  The engineer was far less enthusiastic than Minot about trusting the fate of his train to a few sparks on a telegraph line. He didn’t care what the dots and dashes of the new technology said. He would not move his train until he saw the other train pass with his own two eyes.

  Overruling the engineer, Minot took the controls himself. The anxious engineer retreated to the very last row on the very last car of the train, convinced it would soon cannonball head-on into the eastbound express.

  When Minot successfully reached Goshen, the eastbound train still had not arrived. The same process was repeated. Minot telegraphed the next station to determine the eastbound’s status. Minot received a quick response. Minot’s train rolled forward. The same pattern followed at the stations after that. Not until the fourth station did the eastbound train finally appear.

  Charles Minot had harnessed the only thing faster than a speeding locomotive to govern the movement of the iron horse.

  Soon railroads and telegraph companies were sharing each other’s assets. Commercial telegraph wires were strung along the track, and at each station railroad employees doubled as telegraphers. In return, railroad traffic took precedence on the wire and traveled for free. The local railroad station, which had been the town’s physical link to the people and products of the outside world, now became the town’s information center.

  It was the breakthrough moment for the new telegraph network. “Of all the innovations which entrepreneurs, great and small, brought to the development of the telegraph industry,” one historian observed, “none is more important nor dramatic than the discovery of the symbiotic relationship between the telegraph and the railroad.”3 As that symbiosis spread, the web of wires created what today we refer to as “telecommunications.” It was the beginning of the infrastructure of the information age.

  “Flash of Genius”

  The same year as the first run of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (1825), a hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, was on his fourth and final triumphal visit to the United States. As befitted a man who had been a colleague in arms of Washington and crucial in winning French support for the colonists, the city fathers of New York determined Lafayette’s image should hang at City Hall alongside other giants such as Washington, Clinton, Jay, and Hamilton.

  They commissioned the noted American artist Samuel F. B. Morse for the task. In early February, Morse departed to join Lafayette in the nation’s capital. The trip from his home in New Haven to Washington was a four-day trek by road.

  Settling into the orbit of the great man, Morse spent the evening of February 9, 1825, with Lafayette at the White House. In addition to visiting with President Monroe, the artist also chatted with President-elect John Quincy Adams, whose election had just been decided by the narrowest of margins in the House of Representatives. It was a heady evening. Eager to share his experience, Morse wrote his wife a lengthy account of the events. He closed the letter with a wistful “I long to hear from you.”4

  The addressee, Lucretia Morse, had died three days earlier.5

  The following day Morse received a letter. “My Affectionately-Beloved Son,” his father wrote, “My heart is in pain and deeply sorrowful, while I announce to you the sudden and unexpected death of your dear and deservedly-loved wife.”6

  The new widower raced home. He arrived several days after his wife’s burial.

  Still mourning his wife’s death, four years later Morse departed for an extended, hopefully healing tour abroad during which he would study the painting techniques of the European masters. Returning home in October 1832 aboard the packet ship Sully he was struck with what he immodestly called a “flash of genius.”

  One night the Sully’s dinner conversation turned to t
he relatively new concept of electromagnetism. “I then remarked,” Morse later recorded, “if the presence of electricity can be made visible in any desired part of the circuit I see no reason why intelligence might not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.”7

  It was an unexpected insight from a man whose activities had hitherto been focused on art rather than science. Nevertheless, the six-week sea journey gave Morse plenty of time to fill his artist’s sketchbook with notes and diagrams about the issues that needed to be solved.

  Despite his not-so-humble “flash of genius” assertion—and an effort in his later years to gather endorsements from his fellow passengers establishing his parentage of telegraphy—Morse understood little about the physics surrounding the transmission of electric energy. He was also unaware that the idea for an electric telegraph was almost eighty years old and had already seen multiple demonstrations.

  In many ways Morse’s ignorance acted to his advantage. Assuming away the problems of practical physics, he focused instead on the input and output mechanisms. From the outset, Morse believed there needed to be a permanent record of the message. His other conclusion aboard the Sully was that the message should be expressed in digits rather than letters as there were only ten digits but twenty-six letters (a number increased by accompanying capitals, punctuation, and other marks). Morse conceived of combining bursts of electric energy, expressed as dots and dashes, to represent the numbers he would transmit. He even began to play with the best permutations of such dots and dashes.8

  To turn the transmitted numbers into words, Morse envisioned a codebook that assigned a numerical representation to every word. To compose a message, one simply looked up the words and transmitted their numbers. At the receiving end the process was just the reverse.

  To compose these signals, Morse inserted metal teeth into a slot cut into a yard-long piece of wood. He called it a “port-rule.” A crank then drew the sawtooth-embedded stick under a lever that would ride up and down on the sawteeth. At the other end of this armature was a connection to a battery so that when an “up” motion along the teeth was produced, reciprocal movement at the other end of the lever completed the circuit. Likewise, every “down” motion broke the circuit. The impulses corresponded to the numbers one through ten. The number 1, for instance, was a single tooth; 2 was a tooth, then a short space, then another tooth. The number 6 began to introduce long spaces and was a single tooth followed by a long space.9

  At the other end, Morse designed a moving roll of paper and a pen or pencil attached to an electromagnet that hung over the paper like a pendulum. He called this a “register.” As the current (or lack thereof) forced the writing instrument to move from one side of the paper to the other, it left marks in the shape of a V that corresponded to the impulses generated at the originating station. The number 23, for instance, would appear as VV VVV.10

  Not a New Idea

  Disembarking from the Sully in New York on November 16, 1832, Morse told the ship’s commander, “Well Captain, should you hear of the telegraph one of these days, as the wonder of the world, remember the discovery was made on board the good ship Sully.”11

  Morse’s grandiose proclamation notwithstanding, like all great network breakthroughs, the telegraph was the result of the gradual convergence of other technologies. It began with the almost-mystical transmission of electricity through a wire.12 In 1729, in London, Stephen Gray hung wire from silk threads and transmitted a friction-generated current from one end to the other.13 As early as 1753 a letter from someone identified only as “C.M.” proposed sending messages over such a wire by means of electrical pulses. Published in Scot’s Magazine, the idea was described in an article titled “An Expeditious Method of Conveying Intelligence.”14

  The concept put forth in the Scot’s piece—a separate line for each letter of the alphabet that would trigger a signal at the receiving end—was demonstrated in Geneva twenty-one years later by the French inventor Georges Le Sage.15 A bizarre application of the same concept was put forward in 1804 by the Catalan scientist Don Francisco Salva i Campillo, who proposed that the end of each wire be attached to a person, who would shout out the assigned letter when he or she received a shock.16

  Morse was also ignorant of the electromagnetic signaling systems that had been constructed on the American side of the Atlantic. As early as 1827, a rudimentary demonstration project had been built on Long Island.17 Credit for the first electric telegraph, however, goes to Professor Joseph Henry. In January 1831, the year before Morse’s “flash of genius,” Henry described the concept in an article in Benjamin Silliman’s American Journal of Science and Arts (whose title was later shortened to American Journal of Science). He then went on to build a demonstration that used electricity to command an armature to strike a distant bell; it was precisely the functionality of a telegraph with a circuit being opened or closed at one end to produce a desired action at the other.18

  The idea of moving information at speed by disembodying it from the physical was well established. Signaling over distance by smoke or fire had been around for centuries. The English term “telegraph” was derived from the French télégraphe (“far writing), the name Frenchman Claude Chappe gave to a system of optical relays he had developed.

  Early fire or smoke signals were limited in that they could only convey broad contextual information (for instance, “enemy sighted” rather than “100 cavalry passed at 4:00 heading southwest”). On March 2, 1791, Chappe overcame that limitation by successfully transmitting a nine-word message over ten miles in four minutes.19

  Chappe’s first telegraph used panels painted black on one side and white on the other. The signal was sent by the combinations of the panels. Later on, he would adopt a semaphore-like system. The French Revolution inconveniently intervened and revolutionary paranoia made suspect any new means of sending messages. But when Napoleon came to power in 1799 he embraced the concept and ordered the construction of a string of Chappe’s towers. Like Morse, Chappe’s signals were recorded in a codebook.20

  The Chappe idea was soon replicated throughout Europe. In the United States similar systems sprang up, principally around seaports as a means of reporting approaching ships. The Telegraph Hills in Boston and San Francisco are the legacies of such systems—high points from which distant activity could be observed by telescope and which themselves could be observed as the originating point of optical signals conveying the information.21

  By 1837, the British scientist Charles Wheatstone and his partner, William Cooke, had improved on the early ideas for electronic communications and were sending messages over the mile and a half between London’s Euston and Camden Town railway stations. Their cumbersome system required five wires, each connected to a row of five needle-like arrows in the middle of a diamond-shaped grid. By providing current to the appropriate line the originator could send electricity through a coil wrapped around one of the five arrows at the other end, making it pivot to the right or left.22 The appropriate letter of the alphabet was indicated by two arrows pointing toward it.

  Not only was the Wheatstone-Cooke device cumbersome, but it could only signal twenty of the alphabet’s twenty-six letters (missing were c, j, q, u, x, and z). Nevertheless, it was transmitting messages via electronic impulses. The British government gave Wheatstone and Cooke a patent for their invention.23 The Wheatstone-Cooke system went into commercial service in 1838 alongside the tracks of the new Great Western Railway out of Paddington Station.

  In February 1837 (the same year as the Wheatstone-Cooke demonstration in London), U.S. treasury secretary Levi Woodbury, responding to a congressional directive, issued a request for information on the feasibility of a “system of telegraphs.” The inquiry was about a Chappe-like system, and seventeen of the eighteen respondents described just such an optical signaling system. Samuel Morse’s response reimagined the undertaking as an electronic signaling system.24

  In his rooms at New York University, Morse, now a professor of the li
terature of the art of design, had been painting, teaching, and experimenting. He developed his ideas from the Sully using whatever materials he could get his hands on. An early register, for instance, was an artist’s canvas stretcher, nailed to a table, from which was suspended the electromagnet.25 In his response to Secretary Woodbury, Morse reported on his tests and promised to keep the other man informed.26

  One of those subsequent reports was of the successful transmission of signals through ten miles of spooled wire. Bullish on this development, Morse confidently predicted that “we have now no doubt of … effectuating a similar result at any distance.”27 Here was the true breakthrough in telegraphy: overcoming the resistance of the wire, which, as distance increased, attenuated the strength of the signal until it eventually disappeared. The technology that overcame this problem did not belong to Samuel Morse, however. Morse went to great lengths to deny such precursors ever existed and to claim that he and his “flash of genius” were the sole parents of telegraphy. But that was not the case.

  Six years before Morse’s letter to the treasury secretary, Joseph Henry’s article in Silliman’s journal had identified the intensity of electricity (that is, the voltage) as more important than the quantity (that is, the current). Shortly prior to his letter to Woodbury, Morse had only been able to transmit over relatively short distances, not the distance that practical telegraphy would mandate. Another NYU professor, Leonard Gale, told Morse about Henry’s article and how voltage could be increased by using a multi-cell rather than a single-cell battery for power. Gale also shared Henry’s observation that the power of an electromagnet could be increased by increasing the number and tightness of its wire wrappings. With these two modifications, the reach of Morse’s telegraph jumped from forty feet to ten miles.28

  It was these breakthroughs that allowed Morse to brag to Woodbury about “a similar result at any distance.” The following year (1839), when Morse was struggling with even greater distances, he would go see Professor Henry and walk away with another Henry revelation to mitigate power loss over great distances.