Daniel R. Headrick

Submarine Telegraph Cables: Business and Politics, 1838–1939

International telecommunication is not only a business but also a political enterprise, the subject of great-power rivalries. In the late nineteenth century, British firms held a near monopoly, because Britain had more advanced industry, a wealthier capital market, and a merchant marine and colonial empire that provided customers for the new service. After the 1880s, they encountered increasing competition on the North Atlantic from American, German, and French firms. Elsewhere, the British conglomerate Eastern and Associated retained its hegemony until the 1920s. Following World War I, radiotelegraphy threatened the dominance of cables. In the 1930s, cable companies were almost bankrupted by the Depression and by competition from shortwave radio.

Sleeping Sickness Epidemics and Colonial Responses in East and Central Africa, 1900-1940

In the early 20th centu- ry, major epidemics of trypanoso- miasis (sleeping sickness) broke out in East and Central Africa. The European colonial powers that controlled this area reacted by sending scientific missions to study the disease, establishing schools of tropical medicine, testing drugs, and instituting measures to eradi- cate the epidemic. Several very distinct approaches were taken to this end. German efforts focused on developing and testing new drugs, but were hampered by a lack of personnel. The British approach was to remove the inhabitants from infested areas and eliminate tsetse flies, the vectors of the disease. The French and Belgian approach was medical rather than environmental; they isolated the sick and injected them with drugs in order to eliminate the trypano- somes from the population. The Portuguese combined both medi- cal and environmental approaches successfully on one small island.

Gutta-Percha: A Case of Resource Depletion and International Rivalry

Gutta-percha, the latex of the Palaquium tree, is a natural plastic with good dielectric properties, once used to insulate submarine telegraph cables. The rapid expansion of telegraphy after 1850 led to the almost total destruction of the wild trees by natives of Malaya, Sumatra, and Borneo. By the turn of the century, the depletion of this essential but slowly renewable resource caused much concern in European and American business circles. Two sciences were brought to bear on this problem. Botanists first searched for additional wild trees, then opened plantations for future production. Meanwhile, chemists sought to substitute the latex of other trees such as natural rubber and balata. In 1933, Imperial Chemical Industries created the synthetic dielectric polyethylene. The cycle from plunder to botanical then to chemical substitutes is typical of the use of tropical products by the industrialized countries and seldom benefits the populations or the environments of the tropics. Of all the natural substances used by man, gutta-percha is surely among the least well known today, except to three groups of connoisseurs: dentists, who use it to fill cavities; golfers, who hit it with a stick; and historians, to whom it is the stuff with which our ancestors made ashtrays, lamp stands, and submarine cables.* None of them, however, has felt the need to write or give speeches about it in the past 50 years.

Global Warming, the Ruddiman Thesis, and the Little Ice Age

G Parker’s Global Crisis is one of those books that appear once in a generation and define the field—in this case, the crisis of the seventeenth century—for years to come. It is also the culmination of a lifetime’s devotion to the scholarly study of that century in all its ramifications: political, social, cultural, environmental, and economic. Rather than comment on the entire book, I will, as a budding environmental historian, limit my comments to the first chapter, “The Little Ice Age.” In that chapter, Parker describes all the environmental anomalies that afflicted Earth in the seventeenth century—unseasonably cold weather, storms, volcanic eruptions, floods in some places, droughts in others—and their impact on harvests and on other aspects of human life. Rather than simply generalizing, he provides specific data from both human and natural archives, as well as quotations from the writings of people who lived through that terrible century. I had read Parker’s earlier works, especially Europe in Crisis and The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century.1 Yet I found much new information in Global Crisis, especially about the world outside of Europe, that buttressed my own views of the Little Ice Age. All that new data

A World Connecting: 1870–1945 ed. by Emily S. Rosenberg (review)

Every age rediscovers the past in its own light. Since the end of the cold war, we have become obsessed with globalization. It is not surprising, then, that a book about world history from 1870 to 1945 would stress that period�s global interconnectedness and modernity instead of the great power rivalries, world wars, depression, and totalitarianism that occupy most other books. To achieve this goal, the editor, Emily Rosenberg, has chosen five authors to write essays on different aspects of the period, each one almost book length. For the reader familiar with the chronology of important events such as wars, revolutions, and technological innovations, these essays complete the picture presented in more traditional world histories. For those without that level of knowledge, however, they will seem disjointed and confusing. In �Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood,� Charles Maier discusses the emergence of modern statehood in an analytic and not always coherent manner. Needless to say, this process was wrenching for traditional polities under pressure from the commercial and military might of the Western powers and their new political ideologies. Despite occasional tangents to China, Japan, and Latin America, the essay�s perspective is very Western-centric.

Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830 (review)

488 To examine its popularity, the author explores ballooning under the rubric of “popular science” rather than exploring technological issues. Yet one could argue that the exhibition of technical knowledge was all part of the enthusiasm of the audiences. Indeed, challenges following the discovery of gases—such as hydrogen—for the construction of these machines fostered changes in processes and materials, such as fabric, varnish, and pipes. The fascination in performance came as much from the fact that the flight embodied the progress of the Enlightenment as it did from the result of the skills and know-how of human hands. Occasionally, some flights would fail and Lynn rightly stresses the interest in these. Even though some expectations remained unfulfilled, which is, according to the author, where the romantic shift occurs, the vast majority of attempts were successful, achieving what was once believed to be impossible. So, some points raised in the book complete the various monographs on the subject, while proposing new assumptions. As Lynn points out, the sublime emerges from the beginning of the flights; the sublime as well as the technological progress go hand in hand, and change according to human advance in the mastery of the elements.

Why America Is Not a New Rome (review)

814 development of matter theory and the status of glassmaking is made clear with reference to ancient cultures; however, it is not pursued to the same degree in Beretta’s discussion of glass and alchemy in later centuries. This is a missed opportunity, because the shifting meaning of the popular paradigm that art imitates nature may have had a profound impact on the interpretation of ancient alchemy and glassmaking in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Imitation and counterfeiting form an important part of Beretta’s argument. Imitation could be greatly praised in the ancient world, and glass imitations of gems could fetch high prices, probably owing to the expertness of the illusion. Beretta demonstrates that it was this positive approach to imitation in the ancient period that encouraged glassmakers to perfect their art. His discussion of imitation presents a strong argument for the interrelationship of alchemy and glassmaking. However his analysis at times loses some of its impact because he does not define his terms precisely. “Imitation,”“counterfeit,” and “fraud” are loaded words today, and the book would have benefited from contextualized definitions of such terms. The Alchemy of Glass presents a strong and coherent analysis of the early association of alchemy and glassmaking. The book is an excellent example of how material history can draw together previously disparate areas of study and shed new light on well-known sources. Historians of alchemy, technology, and material culture will benefit from Beretta’s expert synthesis of alchemical, philosophical, and technical theory with the practice of glassmaking. He has opened the way for further research in this area.

The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream (review)

Robert Fulton is famous in American history as the inventor of the steamboat. In The Fire of His Genius, Kirkpatrick Sale, author of books about the European discovery of America, the Luddites, and other topics, sets out to debunk several myths about Fulton and give us a more balanced—and sometimes jaundiced—view of Fulton’s life and the world in which he lived. There is no question that Fulton was a genius. During the first forty years of his life, however, his genius consisted mainly in ingratiating himself with wealthy people by promising artistic and technological wonders. Only late and marginally did he become interested in steam power. His main obsession seems to have been naval warfare, in particular building human-powered submarines and the floating mines he called “torpedoes.” Although he was a failure as an artist and as a designer of weapons, Fulton was amazingly successful as a confidence man. He moved from the United States to Britain, from Britain to France, then back to Britain. At a time when Britain and France were at war, he was able to play one against the other, promising each country this his inventions would defeat its enemies, and threatening to divulge his “secrets” to the enemy if he were not paid handsomely. He ended up, at age forty, a wealthy man, having achieved nothing. His story should be an inspiration to traitors and blackmailers everywhere. In 1806 Fulton moved back to the United States and formed a partnership with Robert “Chancellor” Livingston, one of America’s early plutocrats. With Livingston’s money, he began constructing the North River, the steamboat that is still, mistakenly, called Clermont in many history books. Though Fulton claimed to have invented the steamboat, he did nothing of the sort, for the Philadelphian John Fitch had experimented with steampowered boats years before, as did the Frenchman Jouffroy d’Abbans and the Briton William Symington. Fulton’s genius consisted of building his boat in New York, the busiest port in the Americas, but a city beset with inadequate connections to its hinterland. As Fulton and many others realized, the Hudson River was the natural highway to upstate New York, but difficult for sailboats to navigate. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E

A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (review)

classification, transformation, display, storage, and communication does not translate readily into the contemporary taxonomy of information systems. Today, an information system is understood to embody four of Headrick’s themes—transformation, storage, display, and communications—and to speak of these as separate entities seems awkward. Again, the theme of knowledge classification is not on the same level as the other four, and really has no corresponding subsystem within a modern information system. However, these are quite minor criticisms of a very fine book and perhaps illustrate why writing a synthetic history is so difficult: what is a logical categorization to one person can seem a distortion to another. There is not very much that is “new” in this book; its originality lies in its point of view and the integration of a large body of secondary material. As a practitioner of information-technology history, I did find some information that was new to me, some ideas of which I was only dimly aware that were traced to their sources, while even very familiar material benefited by the juxtaposition to like technologies and by being embedded in Headrick’s framework. I should also say that this is an unusually readable book—I consumed it with real absorption over one holiday weekend. As a readable and accessible account of the very early development of information technologies, When Information Came of Age can be strongly recommended as suitable for undergraduate studies of information-technology history and as an essential library acquisition.

International Communication: History

Since ancient times, governments, merchants, and individuals have needed to communicate over long distances. The first public postal systems date from the seventeenth century. In the late eighteenth century, France built an optical telegraph network. Starting in the 1830s, electrical telegraphy spread in Europe and North America. The 1870s saw the laying of submarine telegraph cables connecting continents and islands. The early twentieth century saw the rapid development of international electronic communications: wireless telegraphy before World War I, radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, and global telephony and the Internet in the late twentieth century.