714 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE This is the book’s major strength—analyzing how people reacted to attempts to regulate their life by time. Stephen Salsbury Dr. Salsbury is professor of economic history at the University of Sydney. News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844—1897. By Menahem Blondheim. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Pp. ix + 305; tables, notes, bibliog raphy, index. $39.95. On finishing the first chapter of News over the Wires I must admit a part of me regretted having agreed to review this book, for I could already see that Menahem Blondheim would forever shatter my com fortable and contained assumptions regarding the history of the tele graph in the United States. Not that I had ever dismissed the tele graph; I saw it as an important but nevertheless simple 19th-century technology for the conveyance of messages that on rare occasions foreshadowed the complexities of 20th-century mass culture but gen erally remained a most humble instrument of communications. Now caught in my complacency, I am coming forward and confessing that I have sinned. But I don’t mind, because News over the Wires is a superb vehicle for both the revelation and redemption of the history of the American telegraph. This is media history at its very best. Blondheim has the gift of showing time and time again how what now seem to be the most obvious and banal circumstances and condi tions of telegraphy were complex, contradictory, and exhilarating to those who first experienced them. Take the case of Samuel Morse’s need to persuade early observers of the authenticity of the telegraphic message. While the telegraph message was quickly acculturated as representative of truth, its veracity was not inherent to the first casual observers of telegraphic technology. Using the Democratic and Whig political conventions of 1844 as case studies, Blondheim discusses the transport of information from Baltimore to Washington via telegraph lines—information at first met with doubts by the public—and the surprising confirmation of that telegraphic information by passengers traveling via rail from Baltimore and arriving later that day in Wash ington. These early examples of comparative information flows show how a skeptical public quickly came to embrace the telegraph as a conveyor of truth and authenticity. Business historians and media historians will both applaud the de tailed account of the commodification of news. This commodification resulted from two major factors. First, the growing telegraph industry quickly convinced newspaper editors and their reading publics of the increased value of “timely” or “rapid” news, thus reducing the value of newspaper exchanges through the U.S. Postal Service as the central mechanism of regional and national news distribution. Editors could TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 715 no longer afford the leisure of perusing exchanged newspapers as a primary method of news gathering; the technology of the telegraph instilled a new culture of immediacy among editors and their readers. A second major factor in news commodification stemmed from the “race” among news brokers to deliver news from Europe. Here Blondheim paints a vivid picture of innovative news brokers such as Daniel Craig, the competition among telegraphers to build systems along the northeast coast of North America, the interception of ships at sea to procure news from Europe, and finally in 1858, the success ful bridging of the old and new worlds by Cyrus Field and his first, albeit short-lived, transatlantic cable. But wait—did that cable ever in fact operate? Blondheim presents persuasive evidence that the fa mous “three-week life” of this pre—Civil War transatlantic connection was, most likely, an elaborate deception designed to strengthen the Associated Press, please clients, sell stock, and satisfy clauses in a number of long-term exclusive telegraph contracts and concessions. Not surprisingly, the latter half of the 19th century saw the tele graph industry become fully enmeshed in capitalism and politics. Businessmen and financiers learned that a superior knowledge of the uses of the telegraph could mean superior results in stock markets and corporate growth. Politicians and editors learned how the tele graph could shape and mold political opinion. In two sensational examples, Blondheim...