by Tom Wheeler
24. Richard R. John, “The Selling of Samuel Morse,” Invention & Technology, Spring 2010. Interestingly, Morse held off his response to the February request for information until September 27: Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 196.
25. Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 183.
26. Silverman, Lightning Man, p. 160.
27. Ibid., p. 161.
28. Ibid., pp. 159–60; Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 192.
29. Silverman, Lightning Man, p. 153.
30. Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 311.
31. Silverman, Lightning Man, p. 168.
32. Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 207.
33. Ibid.
34. Silverman, Lightning Man, p. 169.
35. Ibid., pp. 196–98.
36. Ibid., p. 212. The British Wheatstone-Cooke team had been granted a U.S. patent for their needle telegraph eight days earlier.
37. Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 251. Fortunately for Morse, Cohen had agreed to a success-based fee.
38. Seymour Dunbar, A History of Travel in America, vol. 3 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1915), p. 1048.
39. Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 259.
40. Journal of the House of Representatives, December 30, 1840, p. 118.
41. Silverman, Lightning Man, pp. 219–21.
42. “Newspaper Accounts Regarding the Telegraph,” Industrial Revolution Reference Library, vol. 3, Primary Sources, ed. James L. Outman, Matthew May, and Elisabeth M. Outman (Detroit: U-X-L Thomson Gale, 2003), p. 83.
43. Congressional Globe, 27th Congress, 3rd Session, p. 323.
44. Silverman, Lightning Man, p. 221. Representative Lew Wallace, Civil War hero of the Battle of Monocacy and author of Ben-Hur, attributed his subsequent electoral loss to his constituents’ disdain for his spending their money on such a ridiculous idea. Lew Wallace, An Autobiography, 1906, p. 6, cited in Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 258.
45. Congressional Globe, 27th Congress, 3rd Session, p. 387.
46. “Inflation Calculator,” DaveManuel.com (http://www.davemanuel.com/inflation-calculator.php).
47. Although the agreement with the railroad provided the B&O could use the telegraph free of charge, that capability went unrealized until after Charles Minot’s experience.
48. Silverman, Lightning Man, p. 225.
49. Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 267.
50. Ultimately, Smith pocketed his half while Morse credited his to the government as a cost saving.
51. Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1866 (Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 22.
52. Silverman, Lightning Man, p. 230.
53. Lewis Coe, The Telegraph: A History of Morse’s Invention and Its Predecessors in the United States (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1993), p. 23.
54. Silverman, Lightning Man, pp. 230–31.
55. “The Selling of Samuel Morse,” Invention & Technology, Spring 2010, pp. 45–46.
56. In a May 24 letter to his brother Sidney, Morse enclosed a news item he wanted placed in the Journal of Commerce in New York. In that description, Morse closed the quotation with a question mark.
57. Morse presented Anne Ellsworth with a copy of the historic tape containing the message she had selected. On this version, he hand-wrote a question mark at the end. Knowing of his affection for Anne, was it some kind of lovers’ secret message inquiring as to their future together? No one will ever know. See John, Network Nation, p. 52.
58. Wright’s preference was to run for governor of New York, which he did successfully in 1844, serving until 1846.
59. Mabee, American Leonardo, p. 279.
60. Report of the Postmaster General, Ex. Doc. No. 2, 29th Congress, 1st Session, p. 860.
61. Ibid., p. 861.
62. Congressional Globe, 28th Congress, 2nd Session, 1344–45, p. 366.
63. Jill Hills, The Struggle for Control of Global Communication: The Formative Century (University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 29.
64. Thompson, Wiring a Continent, 240–41, chart. Although precise figures aren’t available, the 1852 Census Report states that an additional 10,000 miles were under construction.
65. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; New York: Dover Publications, 1995), p. 34.
66. German author Heinrich Heine, cited in Nicholas Faith, World the Railways Made, p. 42.
67. Walter A. McDougall, Throes of Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 106.
68. Thompson, Wiring a Continent, p. 29.
69. Standage, Victorian Internet, p. 52.
70. National Police Gazette, May 30, 1846, cited in Silverman, Lightning Man, p. 240.
71. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke University Press, 2000), p. 12.
72. Irwin Lebow, Information Highways & Byways (New York: IEEE Press, 1995), p. xiii.
73. Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Harvard University Press, 1944), p. 33.
74. Standage, Victorian Internet, p. 149.
75. Richard DuBoff, “The Telegraph in Nineteenth-Century America: Technology and Monopoly,” Journal of the Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 26, no. 4, (October 1984), p. 574.
76. Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 172.
77. JoAnn Yates, “The Telegraph’s Effect on Nineteenth Century Markets and Firms,” Business and Economic History, 2nd series, vol. 15 (1986), pp. 149–50.
78. For a further discussion, see Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977).
79. For a full discussion of Lincoln and the telegraph, see Tom Wheeler, Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
80. Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1849, pp. 489–90 (https://archive.org/stream/reportofcommissiunit#page/n495).
81. T. A. Watson, Exploring Life (Appleton Books, 1926), p. 68, cited in Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 45.
82. Watson, Exploring Life, p. 71, cited in Winston, Media Technology and Society, p. 46.
83. Lebow, Information Highways & Byways, p. 35.
84. Seth Shulman, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 12.
85. Ibid., pp. 12–13.
86. The Bell patent was actually filed on February 14, 1876, several weeks before the “Mr. Watson” breakthrough Bell recorded in his notebook. An intriguing and thoughtful discussion of whether Bell actually patented an invention he had not made in order to nose out others he knew were pursuing the same challenge is in Shulman, The Telephone Gambit.
Part III
1. Jonathan Hughes and Louis P. Cain, American Economic History, 7th ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Pearson, 2007), pp. 287, 356.
2. Wikipedia, s.v. “Western Union.”
3. Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 202.
Chapter 5
1. Clark R. Mollenhoff, Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer (Iowa State University Press, 1988), p. 157.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 158.
4. Jane Smiley, The Man Who Invented the Computer (New York: Doubleday, 2010), p. 64.
5. For a comprehensive study of the Atanasoff story, see Alice Rowe Burks, Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press, 2003).
6. Doron Swade, The Difference Engine (New York: Viking, 2000), p. 10.
7. About twenty years prior to Pascal (circa 1623), the German Wilhelm Schickard had apparently constructed a “calculating clock” using rods and cylinders to render a conclusion to input data. Unfortunately, Schickard became a victim of the plague; his ideas w
ere discovered only recently through his correspondence with another contemporary mathematician.
8. Since the gears rotated in only one direction, subtraction was accomplished by a mathematical trick called the “nines complements,” the difference between any number and a similar collection of nines. For instance, to subtract 500 from 800, the Pascaline had a lever that switched the dialed number to its nines complement. Dial in 500 and the complement of 499 (999 – 500) would be displayed, then returning the lever to its regular position, the user dialed in 800 to add it to 499, producing 1299; then the user took the furthest left number (in this case 1) and added it to the others. Voila! The answer to 800 – 500 is 300!
9. The “carry” function was the Pascaline’s bête noire because it would frequently jam. Thirty years later the German Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz substituted a cylinder with nine rows of teeth to pass the carry to the next column. It was this model Babbage followed. Leibniz named his device the “step reckoner.” Because it dispensed with Pascal’s carry lever, the step reckoner’s gears could also move in both directions, making subtraction possible without the awkward use of the nines complement. See Stan Augarten, Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984).
10. As so often in the development of technology, Babbage was not the only person with such an insight, In the late 1700s a German army captain, J. H. Müller, had a similar idea and petitioned his government for funds to build it. When the funding was not forthcoming, the project died.
11. Funding problems and a dispute with the man he hired to build the engine resulted in only a 24-inch-high, 19-inch-wide, and 14-inch-deep portion of the engine being built. As we have seen in chapter 3, Babbage’s difference engine was ultimately built in 1991 by the London Science Museum. It performed as Babbage forecast.
12. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), p. 101.
13. Ibid., p. 114.
14. His son, Henry, assembled a part of it (a portion of the mill) in 1889.
15. One person who did not find Babbage’s ideas quirky was Ada Lovelace, daughter of the English poet Lord Byron. An emancipated woman in a male-dominated era, Ada had a love for mathematics that brought her into contact with Babbage. Their correspondence ultimately produced its own history-making result. In her footnotes to a paper about Babbage’s work that she translated from Italian, she added commentary on the manner in which information could be entered into the analytical engine. While there is dispute as to whether Babbage contributed to these observations, it remains the first written description of what today we call “software.” Lovelace also recognized that the machine had practical implications beyond mathematical calculations. “The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols,” she wrote. Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014), p. 248.
16. Augarten, Bit by Bit, p. 82. By 1913 Burroughs employed 2,500 people.
17. Eric G. Swedin and David L. Ferro, Computers: The Life Story of a Technology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 20–21.
18. James Burke, Connections (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1995), p, 111.
19. Augarten, Bit by Bit, p. 145.
20. George B. Dyson, Darwin among the Machines: The Invention of Global Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 53–58. When World War II broke out, Turing’s mathematical skills brought him to the British code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park. While electromechanical devices were used early in the war to help break the German codes, they weren’t really Turing machines. By 1943, technology had advanced to the much-heralded Colossus, “totally electronic binary analytical calculators that were structurally designed to solve logical problems, to give plain-English read outs of encrypted texts, and to reconstruct the processes and key or keys of the German cipher system.” Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Computing (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001), p. 218.
21. Augarten, Bit by Bit, p. 89.
22. Because it used telephone relays it was an electromechanical device, but Zuse and his colleague Helmut Schreyer had envisioned an all-electronic vacuum-tube-based machine.
23. Ifrah, Universal History of Computing, p. 206.
24. Interestingly, this did not include Atanasoff’s use of binary math and Boolean logic, which would have simplified the task.
25. Amazingly, Mauchly would visit Atanasoff at his Ordnance Lab post during the development of ENIAC to continue picking his brain.
26. Swedin and Ferro, Computers, p. 39.
27. In this effort Mauchly and Eckert were aided greatly by John von Neumann, a Hungarian émigré, Princeton professor, and part of the Manhattan Project.
28. Even though work on the program started in 1945, the EDVAC wasn’t completed until 1952, after the UNIVAC.
29. The company was offered to IBM but the firm’s lawyers nixed the deal out of fear it wouldn’t pass antitrust scrutiny since IBM controlled a dominant position in mechanical tabulators (the legacy of Hollerith) and calculators.
30. Sperry Rand Corporation et al. v. Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., 317 F. 2d 491 (2d Cir. 1963).
31. Honeywell, Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corp, et al., 180 USPQ 673 (D. Minn 1973).
32. Burks, Who Invented the Computer?, p. 13.
33. Shockley shared the prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, also of Bell Labs.
34. Wade Rowland, Spirit of the Web (Toronto: Somerville House Publishing, 1997), p. 311.
35. “Flashback: The History of Computing,” Computerworld, May 19, 1999.
36. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for the 1959 invention of the integrated circuit.
37. Noyce’s development, for instance, relied on the discovery of another of the “Fairchild Eight,” Jean Hoerni, who conceived of the means of making a completely flat transistor (earlier versions had a tiny mesa protruding)—the planar process.
38. Intel Corporation, “The History of Intel, 30 Years of Innovation,” Intel.com, 2002.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ron Smith, Intel senior vice president, to author, March 2002.
42. Rowland, Spirit of the Web, p. 322.
43. For a user-friendly discussion of microprocessors, see www.intel.com/education/teachtech/learning/chips/index.htm.
44. While the growth of microprocessor sales was slow, Intel’s broadened scope of activity turned out to be a fortunate decision. In the late 1970s the bottom fell out of DRAM profitability because of inexpensive foreign production. Intel was losing its shirt on DRAM and left the business in 1985. By that time, however, the microprocessor was the backbone of the IBM PC, and Intel was off to the races.
45. The Frenchman Andre Thi Truong had created a PC, the Micral, in 1973 and sold 500 units. Its design was never published in the United States. For a discussion of the development of the PC, see Swedin and Ferro, Computers, chap. 5.
46. Swedin and Ferro, Computers, pp. 88–89.
47. Ibid., p. 93.
48. Augarten, Bit by Bit, p. 280.
49. The company was NABU: The Home Computer Network, the first network to connect PCs to cable TV lines.
50. Gordon Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, April 19, 1965.
Chapter 6
1. Bell Labs was then located at 463 West Street in Manhattan. It would not move to New Jersey until after World War II.
2. There are two parts to a telephone call: the transmission of the signal and the setup of the circuit that carries it. The relay automated the setup activity formerly performed by switchboard operators pulling cables to plug two lines together. In the “on” position, the relay acted like the operator plugging the lines together; the “off” position broke the circuit path. Unknown to him, Stibitz was demonstrating what Konrad Zuse was building in Germany at the same time.
3. Paul E. Ce
ruzzi, Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer, from Relays to Stored Program Concept, 1935–1945 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).
4. The phone lines were actually twenty-eight-wire teletype cable.
5. It would be ten years before remote computing would happen again at the National Bureau of Standards (today the National Institute for Standards and Technology), with the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC).
6. Richard R. John, Network Nation (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 159, citing Orton correspondence in E. C. Baker, Sir William Preece, F.R.S., Victorian Engineer Extraordinary (London: Hutchinson, 1976).
7. By threatening to use Edison’s patent, Gould depressed Western Union stock with the threat that multiple simultaneous signals would drive down rates and thus threaten Western Union’s revenues. Thomas Edison used the proceeds from the sale to Gould to build his legendary Menlo Park laboratories.
8. Hubbard had made his mark dealing in horse-drawn trolleys, water and gas works, and other activities that required a municipal franchise. He was also a champion of nationalizing the telegraph monopoly.
9. John, Network Nation, p. 164. Another father of a Bell student, Thomas Sanders, supported his research and the early stages of the telephone business as well.
10. Herbert Newton Casson, The History of the Telephone (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), p. 8.
11. There has been much debate over the patent caveat (a declaration of an idea with the patent application to follow) filed the same day as Bell’s application by Elisha Gray of Chicago. It is an interesting story of competing concepts that is well told in Seth Shulman’s The Telephone Gambit (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). After approximately 600 lawsuits challenging the patent, and a decision of the Supreme Court, the Bell patent prevailed.
12. The first record of the idea of transmitting sound over wire was an 1861 lecture to the Frankfurt Physical Society by the German inventor Philip Reis. Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867–1914 and Their Lasting Impact (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 228.
13. Casson, History of the Telephone, p. 13.
14. Ibid., p. 16.
15. John, Network Nation, p. 162.
16. Casson, History of the Telephone, p. 21.
