Telegraph Technology Research Articles

Circles, Clocks, Ships, and Wires: Meridian Circles within Innovative Assemblages in 19th-Century America

Driven by needs to map an expanding nation as well as by pure astronomical inquiry, nearly 50 meridian circles were installed in 19th-century U.S. observatories. In the 1840s, U.S. astronomers used meridian circles in conjunction with chronometers on fast steamships to ascertain transatlantic longitude differences. Simultaneously, they devised methods of using meridian circles with newly invented telegraph technologies, which revolutionized longitude determination, productivity of data collection within observatories, and distribution of time signals. 19th-century U.S. astronomers and artisans also designed improvements to meridian circles themselves; by century end, U.S.-based instrument makers dominated the domestic meridian circle market over English and German artisans.

Blockchain Technology Transformation in Advancing Future Change

With the development of technology in the 4th century, it can be seen from before the christian period (SM) such as the compass, calendar, pozzolana and wheel. And now the world is about to undergo a tremendous transformation. In this extraordinary change there are inventions such as printing machines, machines, digital computers, vaccines, telegraph technology, ironing tools, airplanes, and even the internet. With this discovery, the world underwent a tremendous transformation from the previous century, due to technological advances over time. Inventions made before Christ must take a long time, even centuries, but making changes today only takes a few years. But in this study, we will describe blockchain technology even centuries, but by making changes now it only takes a few years. But this research will describe blockchain technology. On Facebook, which has a new change to the concept of decentralization, but this concept is still somewhat contradictory to the current world system, so why do users need intermediaries, namely third parties to keep the transaction secure? This research will provide answers to arguments starting with a conceptual understanding which will then go through the stage of case study stages in various industries such as administration, banking, chain management, intellectual management, transportation, even asset management, logistics and energy materials. With blockchain technology, it is used to describe blockchain technology and technology that humans do everyday. There is a concept of a ledger that undergoes a gradual transformation carried out by Satoshi Nakamoto, who has a triple entry ledger that is used to master blockchain technology. In blockchain technology, it has cryptography that is useful for avoiding money laundering, knowing customer activity, knowing all banking transactions and even administration in storing people's identities. In this case study, we will discuss big companies such as IBM, Amazon, Maersk, and even a kind of startup like Ezremit and Signazy. And in this administration section it is important to identify global educational techniques and develop technology in a better direction so that it can advance society in Indonesia and blockchain technology is included in technology that advances future change.

History of the development of telecommunications infrastructure in Japan

Japan has one of the most well-equipped telecommunications infrastructures in the world. The rich Japanese information environment is the result of a long telecommunications infrastructure construction process. This paper describes the historical process of the development of Japan’s telecommunications infrastructure from the introduction of telegraph technology in the late 19th century to the recent expansion of mobile broadband. From the early stage of the construction of telegraph networks, an efficient geographical configuration for Japan’s international telecommunications has been sought. First, a westward route to European countries was built at the beginning of telegraph services and then the eastward route connected directly to the United States was opened. During the construction of the international coaxial submarine cables after World War II, the combined use of the westward and eastward telecommunications routes similar to the early international telegraph networks was retained. In the early 2000s, ultra-high-speed trans-Pacific telecommunications networks were constructed corresponding to rapid expansion of Internet use. The main route of Japan’s international communications shifted to the eastward one. In contrast, the geographical configuration of the domestic telecommunications in Japan has been essentially unchanged. The domestic telegraph networks had been steadily expanded from the large metropolises to local cities from the end of the 19th century to the early 20th century. Even the recent optical fiber networks maintain a similar configuration. Although new broadband services, e.g., DSL, optical fiber and mobile telecommunications, were installed corresponding to the expansion of Internet use, the geographical configuration of domestic telecommunications networks has been kept.

Victorian telegrams: the early development of the telegraphic despatch and its interplay with the letter post

The paper examines the early development of the Victorian inland telegraph, and more precisely the telegraphic despatches, or telegrams, as they became widely known. The first telegram service in Britain was launched by the Electric Telegraph Company two decades before nationalization of the telegraphs in 1870. It is argued that this service was not as innovative as the electric telegraph technology that underpinned it. Attention is drawn to the parallels between the telegram and mail services. To this end, the evolution of postal communication is first explored, with a focus on the nineteenth century, when innovations such as mail-trains and prepayment by stamp considerably accelerated the mail and increased the volume of letters from 67 million in 1839 to a staggering 741 million in 1865. It was in this context that the telegram service was introduced to the public. The operating model adopted by the Electric Telegraph Company to deliver this service is deconstructed to show the similarities with the mail service and to demonstrate that a telegram was not always faster than letter post.

Video Communication for Using of Telemedicine in Traffic Accidents

Since the emergence of telegraph and telephone technologies in the 19th Century, doctors have been communicating and consulting with each other over long distances. Telemedicine, as distance healing was first highlighted in 1970, when Thomas Bird wrote about patient care in which physicians were able to examine their patients by using telecommunication technologies. In short, telemedicine can simply involve two health professionals discussing a case over the telephone, or be as sophisticated as using the satellite technology to broadcast a consultation between providers at facilities in two countries, using video conferencing equip men. Telemedicine has the potential to reduce differences in the lives of people, especially those living in remote areas, away from hospitals and thus deprived of quality and timely medical care. The main role of telemedicine is to provide rapid access to experienced health care professionals at a distance using telecommunications and information technologies, no matter where the patient is located. The spectrum of technology used in telemedicine is broad, ranging from simple phone, faxes and emails, to satellite-based relay transfers and state-of-the-art computer and videoconferencing facilities. We divide video communication in telemedicine into video­conferencing and telepresence. Video-conferencing (VC) is defined as a real-time, live, interactive program in which one set of participants are at one or more locations and the other set of participants are at another location. VC permits interaction, including audio and/or video, and possibly other modalities, between at least two sites. Using VC, technical requirements regarding quality are not usually very demanding. Telepresence, on the other hand, widens the purpose of practice beyond pure communication and has clear requirements, mainly concerning the quality and control of the picture as well as time latency. Surgery has entered the computer age with the advent of video laparoscopy. Magnified and computer-enhanced video image provided surgeons with better exposure and visualization of the abdomen. However, a decade after the launch of the new technology it is still poorly accepted. Most laparoscopic procedures are difficult to teach and learn, in addition, the learning curve is very flat. Obvious weaknesses of new technology are: unstable camera platforms, limited motion of straight laparoscopic instruments, two-dimensional imaging and poor ergonomics for the surgeon. Since the introduction of video laparoscopic cholecystectomy, surgeons have speculated that computers, 3-D imaging, and robotics could overcome these pitfalls of laparoscopy.

Telegraphs and Territoriality in Ottoman Africa and Arabia during the Age of High Imperialism

This paper investigates the transformation of the Ottoman Empire’s position on the international stage during the age of High Imperialism. It uses two major technological projects, namely, the two Hijaz telegraph lines of 1882 and 1901, as case studies in which to analyse the shift in the Ottoman Empire’s relationship with its European counterparts and draw important conclusions about the relationship between imperialism and technology. The paper makes the argument that only by understanding the Great Powers’ gradual stifling of the Ottoman participation in the ‘Scramble for Africa’, and the connection between the private telegraph industry and imperialism over the 1880s can we appreciate the significance of the shift from Istanbul’s dependence on European telegraph technology in 1882 to its insistence on an independently planned, constructed and run telegraph line 20 years later.

“A Living, Fleshy Bond”: The Electric Telegraph, Musical Thought, and Embodiment

The development and rapid spread of the electric telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century were profoundly entangled with music in ways that are seldom if ever acknowledged. Particular emphasis is often placed on sound recording as enacting what Attali describes as “the moment when everything suddenly changed.” In fact, the telegraph anticipated several key premises of recording by decades. Its language is heard, on the one hand, in the direct imitation of Strauss Jr.'s Telegraphische Depeschen, and on the other, in François Sudre's development of a “universal musical language” to communicate across distance. Works by Berlioz and Georges Kastner reveal how the telegraph fed into conceptions of musical transcendence via Spiritualists and the Aeolian harp. The attendant emphasis on mind over body was extended through the employment by conductors of telegraph technology to control musicians across ever-greater distances. This apparent disembodiment of the telegraph carried threatening implications for those social or ethnic groups aligned with the body, including performers. However, as Marshall McLuhan suggests, electricity was also primarily a “tactile” medium, and sensitivity to the telegraphic signals in art music therefore also entailed a new appreciation of the powerful role of embodied performers. Listening for the sounds of the telegraph in music of the mid-nineteenth century thus both enriches our appreciation of the historicity of these works and offers new perspectives on the negotiations between embodiment and transcendence that continue to underpin this repertoire.

Mapping and modernizing the Indian Ocean Rim: Communication technologies under colonial Britain

This article traces some political and economic questions and challenges faced by colonial Britain in networking the Indian Ocean Rim (IOR) through the telegraph and wireless technologies. In the process, the article demonstrates that communication media contributed to the definition of the IOR as a geographical entity, much of which constitutes the global South today. The study concludes with a note on the legacies of media modernization inherited by these societies following independence as, ironically, an apparatus constructed to network and connect the region became fragmented as properties of postcolonial nations, used in the service of independent nation-building and national development. Now that these countries have come together in the recent Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation, implications for a networked region remain to be seen.

Analysis on the Factors of the Telegraph Technology Transfer in Late Qing Dynasty

Analysis on the Factors of the Telegraph Technology Transfer in Late Qing Dynasty

The devil's milk: a social history of rubber

Capital, as Marx once wrote, comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. He might well have been describing the long, grim history of From the early stages of primitive accumulation to the heights of the industrial revolution and beyond, rubber is one of a handful of commodities that has played a crucial role in shaping the modern world, and yet, as John Tully shows in this remarkable book, laboring people around the globe have every reason to regard it as the devil s milk. All the advancements made possible by rubber industrial machinery, telegraph technology, medical equipment, countless consumer goods have occurred against a backdrop of seemingly endless exploitation, conquest, slavery, and war. But Tully is quick to remind us that the vast terrain of rubber production has always been a site of struggle, and that the oppressed who toil closest to the devil s milk in all its forms have never accepted their immiseration without a fight.This book, the product of exhaustive scholarship carried out in many countries and several continents, is destined to become a classic.Tully tells the story of humanity s long encounter with rubber in a kaleidoscopic narrative that regards little as outside its rangewithout losing sight of the commodity in question. With the skill of a master historian and the elegance of a novelist, he presents what amounts to a history of the modern world told through the multiple lives of rubber.

James H Mills, Cannabis Britannica: empire, trade, and prohibition 1800–1928, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. xii, 239, £25.00 (hardback 0-19-924938-5).

Myths and conspiracies have littered cannabis's past and a good history of the plant has long been needed. Focusing on the British empire's relationship with cannabis, this account stretches from 1800 to 1928, tantalizingly leaving us to await the second volume for the years up to the present. Writings on the cannabis plant generally consider its medicinal and euphoriant properties, but Mills examines all aspects, including its use as a source of fibre for rope dating back to at least the sixteenth century. We learn that, unlike opium, cannabis was not widely consumed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons. From the 1700s British medical publications showed an awareness of the plant's properties as a medicine and intoxicant but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that William Brooke O' Shaughnessy, a pioneer of telegraph technology in India, wrote the definitive account of cannabis based in part on his human and animal experiments. Meanwhile in India cannabis preparations were popular as tonics, medicines and for recreation. This book contains a great deal of interesting information, such as the description of how cannabis cultivation fitted into a nineteenth-century Indian village's ecological, social and economic systems. A range of crops were grown but it was the hemp harvest that paid the land's rent and even influenced the timing of weddings and festivals. Before the hemp was trampled to make hashish, an 1889 commentator recorded that “the persons to be so employed salute the ganja before placing their feet on it”. Much original material is quoted, which is entertaining to read, but at times the path of argument can be difficult to discern amid the dense forest of fact and anecdote. Mills is rather dismissive of other works on cannabis and their authors, on the grounds that they have failed to consider the history of its regulation, whether or not that was part of their brief or might be of interest to their readership. This cannabis history is intended not only for its own value but because “It may be directly relevant to contemporary debates about laws and policies relating to cannabis in Britain today.” Today's politicians, Mills contends, defend the UK cannabis laws on the assumption that the judgements of their predecessors “were based on solid ground” and have since been reinforced by reference back to an unknown past. If the reality of this past were known, he suggests, the case for the current laws would be weakened. While such research can be valuable in informing current debates, the claims that this book makes for its powers are exaggerated and some opportunities for comparisons with the present are missed. The author seems to imply that had cannabis not been controlled in the 1920s, it could still be legal today, but the intervening years have seen many psychoactive substances, including some with therapeutic pedigrees, come under even stricter controls. Are today's politicians defending cannabis prohibition because they think their predecessors knew best and should not be questioned, or because they have their own reasons and precedent is a useful tool for supporting them? It is interesting to read about Indian methods of tax evasion and smuggling which developed to outwit colonial administrators, but more might have been extracted to inform current policy: what level and what methods of taxation prompted cultivators to start breaking the law? Tobacco smuggling in contemporary Britain has grown as duty has risen on cigarettes; what factors determine the point at which such subterfuge becomes worthwhile? While this book leaves room for further histories of cannabis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is certainly an enjoyable and informative read, and I look forward to starting volume two.

The Donders Machine: Matter, Signs, and Time in a Physiological Experiment, ca. 1865

The Donders Machine:Matter, Signs, and Time in a Physiological Experiment, ca. 1865 Henning Schmidgen (bio) The history of experimentation in physiological and psychological laboratories is a history of machines—of spatially circumscribed and temporally limited installations that connect a vast number of heterogeneous components: partial objects derived from the experimenter and the experimental subject (eyes, hands, voices, etc.), more or less isolated organs (hearts, lungs, muscles, nerves, etc.), energy sources, styli, sooted paper, tables, notes, and publications. Starting in the 1850s, the territories of physiological and (later on) psychological laboratories were increasingly populated by such installations that transitorily "machinized" mechanical and organic components and combined material with semiotic aspects. In Berlin and Paris, physiologists hooked animals up to kymographs and quicksilver manometers in order to turn bodily functions into indexical curves. In Königsberg, nerve and muscle preparations were integrated into electromagnetic circuits, not just to produce demonstrative contractions, but also to measure the propagation speed of excitations in the still-living nerve. In the 1870s, Leipzig physiologists presented artificial circulation models to academic audiences and the general public: installations made of rubber hoses, glass tubes, and funnels, in which beating frog hearts functioned as "natural motors" pumping salt water in circles—until the organic components would irrevocably refuse to do service (for a further example, see Fig. 1). All these machines developed continually and as within a "phylum" (while single parts, such as the brass cylinder and [End Page 211] the stylus of the kymograph, moved closer to one another); at the same time, they were ready to undergo mutations, breaking with each other and replacing one another (e.g., water motors being replaced by electric motors). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Experimental set-up by Jolyet and Regnard for the quantitative investigation of the gas exchange in respiration. The model organism is forced to breath through a respiration mask (G) which is connected, by means of a three-way cock, to bottle C. Operating the cock allows the animal's respiratory tract to connect to the air kept in the bottle. The consumption of oxygen through respiration is balanced by vessel O which stands under constant pressure. (From Catalogue des instruments de précision servant en physiologie et en médecine construits par Charles Verdin [Chateauroux: Verdin, 1882], p. 44.) The role of machines in experimental physiology has often been studied by historians of the biological and biomedical sciences.1 As is well known, the advent of the kymograph, one of the central instruments of laboratory physiology, was connected to the emergence and development of the steam engine. More recent studies have argued that electrophysiological procedures for precision time measurements [End Page 212] relied on and further developed features of telegraph technology. In addition, it has been shown that the actual functioning of physiological instruments in the laboratory required advanced technological infrastructures, involving central motive forces placed in the basement (steam engines, gas motors, etc.) as well as urban networks providing electricity and water. While these studies have contributed in important ways to our understanding of experimental physiology as embedded in a specific material culture, more general aspects of the relation between experiments and machines have been addressed in studies concerning the history of the physical sciences. Authors such as M. Norton Wise, Andrew Pickering, and Peter Galison have investigated machines as "mediators" connecting scientific projects to societal concerns and vice versa. They have directed our attention to the "field of machines" that constitute the "material performativity" of science. And they have taught us to look at the "experimental apparatuses" of specific disciplines as machines. (In his "technological reading" of Einstein's famous 1905 article, Galison even suggests conceiving of scientific theories as machines— "Theory-Machines," as he puts it.)2 Yet these studies seldom spell out to what extent their respective notions of machines differ from commonsense ideas of technological objects. Explicit definitions of what a machine is or can do are rare.3 References concerning the history of the machine concept and/or philosophical notions of the technological objects are often lacking. As a result, we sometimes seem to be thrown back on the modern, twofold vision of the machine: on...

Uncle Sam's War of 1898 and Globalization

36Historically Speaking · September/October 2004 Thomas Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 145-173; John T. McGreevy, "Faith Histories," in Andrea Sterk, ed., Religion, Scholarship, andHigherEducation: Perspectives , Models, and Future Prospects (University ofNotre Dame Press, 2002), 63-75. 5 Cynthia Gorney,ArticlesofFaith:A FrontlineHistory ofthe Abortion Wars (Simon and Schuster, 1994); David Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making ofRoe v. Wade (Scribner's, 1994). 6 Christopher Shannon,A WorldMade SafeforDifference : Cold WarIntellectualsandthe PoliticsofIdentity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001 ), xi-xxii. 7 For some of the same concerns from a different angle, Walter Johnson, "On Agency," Journal of SocialHistory 37 (2003): 113-124. Uncle Sam's War of 1 898 and Globalization Thomas Schoonover Most Americans have considered the Spanish-American War (a better term is the War of 1898) as a conflict that took place in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines and as a dispute between the United States and Spain. The conventional emphasis upon Cuba and Puerto Rico has made iteasyto thinkofthiswarprimarily in domestic terms. This viewpoint seemed patently misleading to me while in graduate school. The War of 1898 incorporated permanent global engagements into U.S. foreign relations. The War of 1898 and its aftermath formalized the transfer ofleadership—unwillingly on the part ofSpain, most of Europe, and Japan—in the ongoing quest for access to wealth in Asia and the Pacific. This passage of power to the United States occurred within the context of its competitive relationship with other states in the North Atlantic region and in the Caribbean and Pacific basins. Since the 17th century, Protestant North Americans considered the Catholic colonies to the south and west and all the non-Christian areas of the Pacific basin as a challenge to their religion , security, commercial activity, and culture . U.S. growth and transformation across the continent pointed to the resilient tradition of British colonial expansion. In the 1780s U.S. vessels hunted whales and seals, and other ships traded in Pacific and East Asian waters. Soon, missionaries undertook to "civilize" the Pacific islanders and East Asians (and U.S. sailors), while U.S. warships departed to explore the Pacific, protect U.S. interests, and tutor those Pacific basin dwellers who failed to adopt U.S. civilizing and material instructions. At times, these ships were used to protect U.S. objectives from the Chinese,Japanese, and Europeans who proposed alternative visions for the Pacific basin. These expansive impulses generated tensions and conflict in both the Caribbean and Pacific basins in the course ofthe century-and-a-halfafter 1776. The U.S. stake in the Pacific basin increased with exploration and westward migration. The U.S. government nudged The War of1898 was not an aberration. . . . the countryrelentlesslytoward the Pacific— the John Ledyard (a seaman, adventurer, intellectual, and friend ofThomasJefferson) mission of 1794-95, the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the War of 1812, theJohn QuincyAdams-Luis de Onís treaty (1819), the settlement of the Willamette valley (Oregon), the Great U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842), the Mexican War, the Oregon settlement, the 1849 gold rush, the free soil land policy, and the Indian wars. Itwas neither accidental nor odd thatU.S. entrepreneurs and officials leapt to the west coast of the continent and established ties with the Pacific islands, China, and Japan before the West was settled. The sea was a cheaper and faster means oftransportation from coast to coast than the overland routes. New England, the Mid-Atlantic States, the West, and the Northwest all supplied goods and services to the Pacific and East Asia. 19th-century liberal development— industrialization, technology, and mass production and distribution—accelerated material accumulation. It dislocated human and material values, however, and added urgency to the national and international competition for scarce factors related to production. Improved communications had an impact on every nation's expansion in the 19th century. Between 1840 and 1900, telegraph technology reduced, for example, the time-lapse for a response to a London-to-india message from two years to about ninety minutes. And these cables became ever more reliable. This represented a more meaningful reduction in communications' time than the...

News and its communicative quality: the inverted pyramid—when and why did it appear?

There is a general assumption that the inverted pyramid (lead-and-body principle, answers to four or five w-questions at the beginning of the article) became a professional standard during the American Civil War (1861–65), either because of the unreliability of the new telegraph technology (technological explanation); or because of the information policy of the Union (political explanation); or because of the increasing commercial interests of publishers and competition between them (economical explanation). But a content analysis of the New York Herald and the New York Times shows that the inverted pyramid became commonplace only two decades later. Between 1880 and 1890, moreover, publishers and editors attempted systematically to enhance the comprehensibility of their products by using, for example, headlines and illustrations. The author therefore favours the thesis that the journalistic routine and genre of the inverted pyramid resulted from the professional effort to strengthen the communicative quality of news.

Communications, innovation, and territory: the production network of Swift Meat Packing and the creation of a national US market

This study is an historical and theoretical account of how market territory, configured from flows of production and trade, gets reshaped by the innovative behavior of business firms. The research for this study focuses on the production network developed in the late nineteenth century by the American firm of G.F. Swift & Company. The central theme of this case is how businesses reorganize their strategies, routines and structure as transport and communications technology changes, and how the innovations in production networks engineered by firms as part of this reorganization, become territorially embedded and reconfigure the space for economic activity. The production network pioneered by Swift from railroad and telegraph technology, created long-distance production and trade linkages in the economy that widened the boundaries of formerly-localized markets, and established the foundations of a more geographically-extended, nationally-oriented market space. As it widened market boundaries, however, the network of Swift concentrated economic activity in new places. The essay builds a theoretical framework of the route from the ‘communications revolution,’ to the process of innovation in the firm, to the production network, to territorial transformation. This framework reveals how the railroad and telegraph revolution enabled firms in the US to develop innovations in production networks on the basis of vertically-integrated, geographically-dispersed enterprises organized over a national market space. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Constructing an Industrial Divide: Western Union, AT&T, and the Federal Government, 1876–1971

An 1879 contract between Western Union and Bell partitioned the electrical communications industry between the telegraph and telephone markets. Historians typically view this contract as the start of both Western Union's decline and Bell's rise, and they have treated these as largely separate processes. This article argues instead that these processes were linked by a porous and shifting boundary between the two industries. Legal, technical, and regulatory factors interacted to shape this boundary over the next century. The 1879 contract failed to keep Bell out of long-distance communications, as Bell used its market power, geographic reach, and technological superiority to penetrate this boundary. Throughout much of the twentieth century, federal regulators and Western Union executives attempted to strengthen this divide through regulatory means. The attempt failed because AT&T controlled key telegraph technologies and had considerable market power. While regulators propped up Western Union as the only competitor to AT&T, by the 1960s it was offering only token competition.

Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China's Technological Modernization, 1860-1890 (review)

Reviews 353 Erik Baark. Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China's Technological Modernization, 1860-1890. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. xii, 216 pp. Hardcover $69.50, isbn 0-313-30011-9. The telegraph transformed nineteenth-century commerce and statecraft, invigorating capitalism and giving advantages in diplomacy and war to the countries that possessed it over those that did not. China's early encounters with the new technology occurred in the context of struggles with the military and commercial incursions by the foreign powers into Chinese territory. The history ofthe adoption ofthe telegraph in China cannot be separated from China's encounters with capitalism and imperialism. Encounters with Western technology also sent shocks rippling through Chinese culture, the effects ofwhich emerged in realms as diverse as the philosophical ruminations ofthe literati and the fengshui worries of peasants. The telegraph was eventually accepted in China, but not before a series of rejections and conflicts that extended over several decades. Baark provides a well-researched account ofthe initial resistance to and eventual adoption of the telegraph in China between the 1860s and the 1880s. The book is able to offer a more in-depth account ofsome ofthis process than previous accounts by using material from the Copenhagen archives of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company, which had participated aggressively in the development oftelegraph lines in East Asia. These Danish materials provide a valuable supplement to more traditional historical sources such as the archives of the Qing government's Office for Foreign Affairs (the Zongli Yamen). Chapter 1 deals with general theoretical approaches to the study oftechnology transfer and the social impact oftechnology. The main theoretical rivals in the literature are said to be technological determinism and contextualism (the social shaping oftechnology). Baark's own approach is less theoretical and abstract than some previous work, and more densely historical. He prefers a detailed examination ofevents and associated discourses to show the complexity of the process by which a radical new technology was finally absorbed into a conservative society. Chapter 2 describes the evolving conflict between what have been called the yangwu modernizers and various qingyi traditionalists, who "saw in modern technology the instruments offoreign aggression and a subversion ofthe Chinese political order and cultural values" (p. 21). We meet familiar figures such as Li© 1998 by University Hongzhang, Prince Gong, Zeng Guofan, and Shen Baozhen, along with a number ofHawai'i Pressoflesser officials, all struggling to promote or preserve various national or sectional interests. Admirers ofLi Hongzhang will be interested to see how quickly he perceived the importance ofthe telegraph, and how accuratelyhe foresaw the 354 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 pressures that would eventually force China to adopt it, despite initial resistance from some conservative officials. Chapter 3 provides a useful overview of the invention and spread of telegraph technology, its growing use in global commerce and diplomacy, and its spread into East Asia. Chapter 4 deals with the arrival oftelegraph companies in East Asia and their early attempts to introduce telegraph lines into China, the development of the submarine cable between Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the construction of selected lines in the foreign treaty ports, often with the acquiescence of local officials. Chapter 5, "The Telegraph Lines in Fujian, 1874-1877," describes the attempts to build the first land lines outside the treaty ports. In the 1870s, the attitudes of some early resisters changed as a result of the military incursion by Japan into Taiwan, when Qing officials found that the telegraph allowed foreigners in Beijing to know more about daily developments on the edges of the empire than the empire's own ministers. The defense of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan was a prime consideration in changing the minds of some officials about the new technology . A short line was quickly constructed, with little overt opposition from the local population or local officials, and a second line was planned between Fuzhou and Xiamen, in what appeared to be a mutually beneficial agreement between the Great Northern Telegraph Company and the provincial government. However, disagreements among Chinese officials over the nature and desirability of the contract with Great Northern led to the...

The Maxwellians by Bruce J. Hunt

186 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The Maxwellians. By Bruce J. Hunt. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii+ 266; illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliogra­ phy, index. $34.95. The Maxwellians is a consummately readable book in a difficult field, the history of 19th-century physics. Bruce J. Hunt has given his text the immediacy of a novel while preserving its “hard-science” content by melding together intimately and gracefully the personal, the social, the sociological, and the intellectual. Hunt’s “Maxwellians” comprise George Fitzgerald, Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside, and, peripherally, John Henry Poynting, Heinrich Hertz, and Joseph Larmor. They are the men who both proselytized for, and remade, James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory in the twenty years from 1880 to 1900. Each came to Maxwell’s theory for reasons that lay deep in his personal history. Their achievements in electromagnetism were forged within the matrix of their mutual interaction. At the same time their science affected, and was affected by, their struggles to get their research program accepted by the wider community of electrical scientists. George Fitzgerald’s interest in Maxwell’s theory was rooted in the Trinity College, Dublin, tradition in which he was educated, more particularly in his researches into the optical theory of his compatriot James MacCullagh. This interest in turn brought him, in 1878, into close and lasting friendship with Oliver Lodge, who had just finished his doctorate at University College, London. Fitzgerald’s prowess in math­ ematics and his inventiveness complemented Lodge’s strengths, which were skill in experimentation and conceptual clarity. They both seized on Poynting’s 1884 expression for energy flow in the electromagnetic field as a key tool in reshaping Maxwell’s theory. They also both worked on the problem of electromagnetic generation of ether waves. All the while they shared ideas through visits and a copious correspondence. Heinrich Hertz drew close to Fitzgerald and Lodge in 1888 after his experimental proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves was published. This verification of Maxwell’s theory gave the FitzgeraldLodge research program a new authority within British science. Lodge and Fitzgerald repaid in kind. They were uniquely situated to recognize the magnitude of Hertz’s accomplishment, and the enthusiastic reception they gave it helped gain Hertz an audience on the continent. It was also in 1888 and 1889 that Oliver Heaviside was drawn into the Maxwellian group. An eccentric and largely self-educated tele­ graph engineer, Heaviside was one of the most productive and brilliant of Maxwell’s successors. As one who worked on the margins of the scientific community, he needed Fitzgerald, Lodge, and Hertz, not only as collaborators but as supporters in his fight for recognition and outlets for his publications. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 187 One of Hunt’s central theses will be of particular interest to Technology and Culture readers—his contention that British electrical theory was strongly influenced by telegraph technology. Elsewhere he has argued that British preeminence in submarine cable technol­ ogy promoted the field theory of electromagnetism by focusing attention on the behavior of dielectrics and the propagation of signals (“Michael Faraday, Cable Telegraphy and the Rise of Field Theory,” History of Technology, vol. 13 [1991]). In The Maxwellians, Hunt makes other connections between technology and science. He shows how Heaviside’s telegraphic experience guided his researches and recounts the controversy, involving at once questions of theory, field practice, and scientific authority, between chief telegraph engineer William Henry Preece and the Maxwellians. Hunt situates his work in relation to Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise’s recent study of Kelvin (Energy and Empire [Cambridge, 1989]) and J. Z. Buchwald’s From Maxwell to Microphysics ([Chicago, 1985]). The Maxwellians can be said to complement Energy and Empire in that Kelvin was a constant presence for the men Hunt studies. They admired and respected him as Britain’s leading electrical scientist. They sought his backing to lend added legitimacy to their program. They deplored his rejection of Maxwell’s concept of electric displace­ ment and his electromagnetic theory of light. In contrast, Hunt’s book stands in a more dialectical relation to Buchwald’s book, as Hunt alternately builds on it, quarrels with it...

The heritage of telegraphy

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