Heidi J. S. Tworek

The Telegraph and the Bank: On the Interdependence of Global Communications and Capitalism, 1866-1914

This article uses the example of submarine telegraphy to trace the interdependence between global communications and modern capitalism. It uncovers how cable entrepreneurs created the global telegraph network based upon particular understandings of cross-border trade, while economists such as John Maynard Keynes and John Hobson saw global communications as the foundation for capitalist exchange. Global telegraphic networks were constructed to support extant capitalist systems until the 1890s, when states and corporations began to lay telegraph cables to open up new markets, particularly in Asia and Latin America, as well as for strategic and military reasons. The article examines how the interaction between telegraphy and capitalism created particular geographical spaces and social orders despite opposition from myriad Western and non-Western groups. It argues that scholars need to account for the role of infrastructure in creating asymmetrical information and access to trade that have continued to the present day.

Political and Economic News in the Age of Multinationals

This article compares two media multinationals that supplied different genres of news, political and economic. Most media companies provided both genres, and these categories often overlapped. Still, investigating two firms founded in twentieth-century Germany shows how product differentiation affects the organization, geographical orientation, and business models of multinationals. While political news had the greatest impact when it was free and ubiquitous, economic news was most effective when it was expensive and exclusive.

The Savior of the Nation?: Regulating Radio in the Interwar Period

In 1924, Baron John Reith, the fi rst general manager of the BBC, waxed lyrical about the role of broadcasting in British society. Reith called broadcasting “a servant of culture and culture has been called the study of perfection.” 1 Like many in the interwar period, Reith invested radio with almost sublime potential to elevate listeners, overcome the trauma of World War I, and bridge class divides. Reith actively molded content to achieve these goals, like those involved in radio elsewhere. Aft er the destruction of World War I, utopian hopes emerged for national radio communities that could fl ourish under the umbrella of international technical standards for issues such as spectrum. Many have examined radio systems as national phenomena or categorized them based upon private or public-sector funding. In 1946, Judith Waller, director of Public Service at NBC, argued that there were three radio systems: state-owned; the British Royal Charter system of an independent nonprofi t, public corporation; and the American commercial system. For Waller, institutional arrangements necessarily led to particular ideas of the audience and programming. Media content emerged from national politics and funding systems derived from political choices. “In dictator-controlled countries,” wrote Waller, “the objective of broadcasting is to give the people what the state wants them to have; in Great Britain the objective seems to be to give the people what they ought to have; in America broadcasters give the audience what it wants.” 2

Magic Connections: German News Agencies and Global News Networks, 1905–1945

In March 1917, a German satirical magazine, Kladderadatsch, devoted an entire special issue to a very particular type of business. In over thirty pages of poems, articles, and cartoons, Kladderadatsch polemicized against the British news agency, reuters. One cartoon (figure 1) featured an evil gremlin gnawing on a world with green oceans, while his gnarled fingers grasped the globe and telegraph cables extended from his sharpened fingernails. “Lies are the law of the world! reuters cable network teaches that,” the caption declared. But why, in the midst of one of the most crucial phases of world war I, did a German magazine focus on the news agency as the most nefarious aspect of Allied propaganda? And why did the magazine, like German elites, believe that the news agency, combined with cables, held such power to influence opinions and shape the course of the war? Magic Connections explains why German elites became so invested in the global news business and attempted to reform one of the very premises of modernity: the organizational structure of global communications. In the early 1990s, Anthony Giddens posited that the “pooling of knowledge represented by ‘news’” was an essential condition for the globalization of modernity, while Arjun Appadurai classified “mediascapes” as one of five dimensions of global flows.1 Magic Connections combines business history with this global perspective to trace how infrastructures, ideas, and individuals created news. German elites focused their energies on one type of firm to control the collection and dissemination of news—news agencies. The first

Imagined use as a category of analysis: new approaches to the history of technology

On the outskirts of Moscow, the Russian company KrioRus is freezing people – dead people, to be precise, together with a number of equally dead animals. KrioRus is Russia’s first cryonics company. Its founders believe that if cooled to −196 °C at the exact moment of clinical death, people can later be resuscitated. Later is defined as ‘a time when science had advanced sufficiently to cure [those people] of old age or illness’ that had caused their death. One founder of KrioRus, Danila Medvedev, drew inspiration mainly from science fiction and especially books by Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. Science fiction informed a scientific business. More than that, KrioRus relies fundamentally on imagined uses of cryonic technology. Since the 1960s, this imagined use of technology, or rather the imagined future purpose of cryonics, has led Russians and Americans to spend millions of dollars on freezing dead bodies today. After two American companies, KrioRus is the world’s third largest cryonics company with up to 140 frozen ‘patients’.1 Members of the cryonics’ ‘weird world’, as the Financial Times called it, are united by their vision of how the technology of freezing people might prolong life. Alongside ideas about different purposes or users for a technology, technologies also offered a way to imagine and structure the future. Imagining how technology could be used was often distinct from actual use. This special issue explores the multiple dimensions of imagined uses of technology. Here, we use telegraphy as our case study. Telegraphy, we argue, is particularly apt for exploring the interpretive territory of imagined use. On the one hand, its price structure generated a relatively small number of users. On the other hand, news sent by telegraph reached a much greater number of people and opened up a space for imagined uses of telegraphy amongst the many who read news sent by telegraph but never entered a telegraph office. In its role as news medium the technology opened up the very information space necessary for these visions of use in the first place. Our four articles demonstrate that alongside actual use, imagined uses of a technology fundamentally become an integral part of processes of technological development, innovation and design. Historians of technology have made great strides in understanding the multi-faceted processes of innovation and use. The ‘great man’ history of inventors is a methdological relic replaced by analyses that include multiple social groups in innovation processes, the influence of technology-in-use on innovation and investigations of the social construction

The natural history of the news: An epigenetic study

Scholars, editors, and reporters have tended to treat news and journalism as synonymous. This conception has privileged a particular kind of journalism often called the Anglo-American model. This study argues journalism has been a type of news reporting for a relatively brief period. Using the concept of epigenetics, the authors argue that journalism is usefully seen as a coating on the DNA of news, which has existed for centuries. Journalism emerged as a result of special factors. As powerful as the Anglo-American model was, it was never fully realized, nor could it become the regnant model throughout the world. Journalism will carry on, but along with many other types of news, all of which carry coatings from the past.

How not to build a world wireless network: German–British rivalry and visions of global communications in the early twentieth century

Abstract Edward Snowden’s revelations laid bare an unprecedented scale of state influence on communications technology. But government elites have frequently shaped technological development through their beliefs about potentially nefarious uses of communications. This article argues that beliefs about how other states or groups might use a technology can shape innovation. In particular, German visions about the British use of cables spurred German investment in developing wireless telegraphy. Germans imagined that the British were using cable technology to damage Germany’s reputation, spy on Germany and ‘poison’ neutral countries against the Central Powers. The German government and military at first created a colonial wireless network to bypass British cables. In World War I, however, they sought to establish a world wireless network. In the end, innovation was significantly shaped by how Germans imagined their enemies’ uses of communications technology.

Editorial: Communicating Global Capitalism

On 6 October 1913, the news of Colonel James E. Tate’s suicide hit the front page of the New York Times. The newspaper blamed a rather strange phenomenon – the rise of the parcel post. Tate, ‘formerly a capitalist’, had held substantial stock in private express companies. Such companies were the only means to deliver parcels in the US before January 1913, when the US Postal Service introduced parcel post. Parcel post became wildly popular: approximately 300 million parcels were sent in the first six months of operation. As shares in private express companies plummeted, Tate suffered heavy financial losses. While he left no evidence of his motives, the Times headline delivered the verdict that Tate had committed suicide because he had been ‘hit by parcel post’. Had shares in communications companies killed the capitalist? Six years later, Upton Sinclair, the muckraking journalist, offered a rather different interpretation. He claimed that even suicides such as Tate’s merely represented another potential source of profit for newspapers seeking to sell copies. Newspapers’ sensationalist depictions of deaths seemed to Sinclair ‘typical of the capitalistic mind, which is so frugal that it extracts profit even from the suicide of its victims’. Even worse, the New York Times had only spun Tate’s death as suicide caused by parcel post because the paper supported private express companies as part of New York’s ‘political and financial machine’, as Sinclair put it.

The Death of News? The Problem of Paper in the Weimar Republic

In the early 1920s, the press faced an existential challenge. Publishers proclaimed the death of news, not because nothing was happening, but because there was insufficient paper to print newspapers. While historians of the early modern period have long investigated material constraints on the spread of information, the problem of paper in Weimar Germany shows that the economics and politics of supply chains continued to shape cultural production in the twentieth century as well. Rationing during World War I subsequently became a crisis in the 1920s, when paper shortages, which had started as an issue of prices and supply chains, ballooned into a discussion about the role of the press in political and economic life, about the relationship between the federal states and the central government, and about the responsibility of a democratic government to ensure an independent press. Paper became a litmus test for the relationship between politicians and the press. The failure to resolve the crisis not only undermined the trust of publishers in Weimar institutions, but, this article argues, also enabled greater control by right-wing media empires. The public sphere, it turned out, had a very material basis.