The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood - James Gleick

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suspended from posts, and from towers, or from church steeples,” and he built a working model in his London house. He grew obsessed with other variations on the theme of sending messages over the greatest possible distances. The post bag dispatched nightly from Bristol, he noted, weighed less than one hundred pounds. To send these messages 120 miles, “a coach and apparatus, weighing above thirty hundred weight, are put in motion, and also conveyed over the same space.” What a waste! Suppose, instead, he suggested, post towns were linked by a series of high pillars erected every hundred feet or so. Steel wires would stretch from pillar to pillar. Within cities, church steeples might serve as the pillars. Tin cases with wheels would roll along the wires and carry batches of letters. The expense would be “comparatively trifling,” he said, “nor is it impossible that the stretched wire might itself be available for a species of telegraphic communication yet more rapid.”

      During the Great Exhibition of 1851, when England showcased its industrial achievement in a Crystal Palace, Babbage placed an oil lamp with a moveable shutter in an upstairs window at Dorset Street to create an “occulting light” apparatus that blinked coded signals to passersby. He drew up a standardized system for lighthouses to use in sending numerical signals and posted twelve copies to, as he said, “the proper authorities of the great maritime countries.” In the United States, the Congress approved $5,000 for a trial program of Babbage’s system. He studied sun signals and “zenith-light signals” flashed by mirrors, and Greenwich time signals for transmission to mariners. For communicating between stranded ships and rescuers on shore, he proposed that all nations adopt a standard list of a hundred questions and answers, assigned numbers, “to be printed on cards, and nailed up on several parts of every vessel.” Similar signals, he suggested, could help the military, the police, the railways, or even, “for various social purposes,” neighbors in the country.

      These purposes were far from obvious. “For what purposes will the electric telegraph become useful?” the king of Sardinia, Charles Albert, asked Babbage in 1840. Babbage searched his mind for an illustration, “and at last I pointed out the probability that, by means of the electric telegraphs, his Majesty’s fleet might receive warning of coming storms. . . .”

      This led to a new theory of storms, about which the king was very curious. By degrees I endeavoured to make it clear. I cited, as an illustration, a storm which had occurred but a short time before I left England. The damage done by it at Liverpool was very great, and at Glasgow immense. . . . I added that if there had been electric communication between Genoa and a few other places the people of Glasgow might have had information of one of those storms twenty-four hours previously to its arrival.

      As for the engine, it had to be forgotten before it was remembered. It had no obvious progeny. It rematerialized like buried treasure and inspired a sense of puzzled wonder. With the computer era in full swing, the historian Jenny Uglow felt in Babbage’s engines “a different sense of anachronism.” Such failed inventions, she wrote, contain “ideas that lie like yellowing blueprints in dark cupboards, to be stumbled on afresh by later generations.”

      Meant first to generate number tables, the engine in its modern form instead rendered number tables obsolete. Did Babbage anticipate that? He did wonder how the future would make use of his vision. He guessed that a half century would pass before anyone would try again to create a general-purpose computing machine. In fact, it took most of a century for the necessary substrate of technology to be laid down. “If, unwarned by my example,” he wrote in 1864, “any man shall undertake and shall succeed in really constructing an engine embodying in itself the whole of the executive department of mathematical analysis upon different principles or by simpler mechanical means, I have no fear of leaving my reputation in his charge, for he alone will be fully able to appreciate the nature of my efforts and the value of their results.”

      As he looked to the future, he saw a special role for one truth above all: “the maxim, that knowledge is power.” He understood that literally. Knowledge “is itself the generator of physical force,” he declared. Science gave the world steam, and soon, he suspected, would turn to the less tangible power of electricity: “Already it has nearly chained the ethereal fluid.” And he looked further:

      It is the science of calculation—which becomes continually more necessary at each step of our progress, and which must ultimately govern the whole of the applications of science to the arts of life.

      Some years before his death, he told a friend that he would gladly give up whatever time he had left, if only he could be allowed to live for three days, five centuries in the future.

      As for his young friend Ada, countess of Lovelace, she died many years before him—a protracted, torturous death from cancer of the womb, her agony barely lessened by laudanum and cannabis. For a long time her family kept from her the truth of her illness. In the end she knew she was dying. “They say that ‘coming events cast their shadows before,’ ” she wrote to her mother. “May they not sometimes cast their lights before?” They buried her next to her father.

      She, too, had a last dream of the future: “my being in time an Autocrat, in my own way.” She would have regiments, marshaled before her. The iron rulers of the earth would have to give way. And of what would her regiments consist? “I do not at present divulge. I have however the hope that they will be most harmoniously disciplined troops;—consisting of vast numbers, & marching in irresistible power to the sound of Music. Is not this very mysterious? Certainly my troops must consist of numbers, or they can have no existence at all. . . . But then, what are these Numbers? There is a riddle—”

      Chapter Five

      A Nervous System for the Earth (What Can One Expect of a Few Wretched Wires?)

       Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!

      —Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)

      THREE CLERKS IN A SMALL ROOM UPSTAIRS in the Ferry House of Jersey City handled the entire telegraph traffic of the city of New York in 1846 and did not have to work very hard. They administered one end of a single pair of wires leading to Baltimore and Washington. Incoming messages were written down by hand, relayed by ferry across the Hudson River to the Liberty Street pier, and delivered to the first office of the Magnetic Telegraph Company at 16 Wall Street.

      In London, where the river caused less difficulty, capitalists formed the Electric Telegraph Company and began to lay their first copper wires, twisted into cables, covered with gutta-percha, and drawn through iron pipes, mainly alongside new railroad tracks. To house the central office the company rented Founders’ Hall, Lothbury, opposite the Bank of England, and advertised its presence by installing an electric clock— modern and apt, for already railroad time was telegraphic time. By 1849

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