Dazzling the Multitude Original Media Spectacles

Anthropologists and literary theorists are fond of emphasizing the particularistic and dramatic dimensions of lived communication. The particularistic dimension of communication is constituted in whatever of its aspects have the most individually intimate meaning for us. The dramatic dimension is the shared emotional character of a communicated message, displayed and sometimes exaggerated for consumption by a public. Its dramatic appeal and excitement depend partly on the knowledge that others are also watching with interest. Such dimensions have little in common with abstractions about information and efficiency that characterize contemporary discussion about new communications technologies, but may be closer to the real standards by which we judge media and the social worlds they invade, survey, and create. Media, of course, are devices that mediate experience by re-presenting messages originally in a different mode. In the late nineteenth century, experts convinced of the power of new technologies to repackage human experience and to multiply it for many presentations labored to enhance the largest, most dramatically public of messages, and the smallest, most intimately personal ones, by applying new media technologies to a range of modes from private conversation to public spectacle, that special large-scale display event intended for performance before spectators. In the late nineteenth century, intimate communication at a distance was achieved, or at least approximated, by the fledgling telephone. The telephone of this era was not a democratic medium. Spectacles, by contrast, were easily accessible and enthusiastically relished by their nineteenth-century audiences. Their drama was frequently embellished by illuminated effects that inspired popular fantasies about message systems of the future, perhaps with giant beams of electric light projecting words and images on the clouds. Mass distribution of electric messages in this fashion was indeed one pole of the range of imaginative possibilities dreamt by our ancestors for twentieth-century communication. Equally absorbing was the fantasy of effortless point-to-point communication without wires, where no physical obstacle divided the sympathy of minds desiring mutual communion.

Inventing the Expert Technological Literacy as Social Currency

Electrical professionals were the ambitious catalysts of an industrial shift from steam to electricity taking place in the United States and Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Thomas P. Hughes, Alfred Chandler, and others, that shift was made possible by key inventions in power, transportation, and communication, and by managerial innovations based on them that helped rescale traditional systems of production and distribution. The retooling of American industry fostered a new class of managers of machines and techniques; prominent among them were electrical professionals. The transformation in which these professionals participated was no class revolution, as David Noble has pointed out. Their job was to engineer, promote, improve, maintain, and repair the emerging technical infrastructure in the image of an existing distribution of power. Their ranks included scientists, whose attention was directed to increasingly esoteric phenomena requiring ever more specialized intellectual tools and formal training, electrical engineers, and other “electricians” forging their own new identity from an older one of practical tinkerer and craft worker. Servingmaid to both groups were cadres of operatives from machine tenders to telegraph operators, striving to attach themselves as firmly as possible to this new and highly visible priesthood. Electrical experts before 1900 were acutely conscious of their lack of status in American society relative to other professional groups. The American Institute for Electrical Engineers (AIEE), founded early in 1884, was the last of the major engineering societies to be organized in the nineteenth century. Professional societies had already been organized by civil engineers in 1852, mining engineers in 1871, and mechanical engineers in 1880. The prestige of other groups in the engineering fraternity, especially civil and mechanical engineers, came less from membership in professional societies, however, than from other circumstances. Their practitioners hailed from the upper and middle strata of society, were often products of classical education, and had developed distinctive professional cultures of their own well before the formation of their national organizations. This gave them an established and even aristocratic niche in society.

Annihilating Space, Time, and Difference Experiments in Cultural Homogenization

The most admired feats of the telephone, cinema, electric light, phonograph, and wireless were their wonderful abilities to extend messages effortlessly and instantaneously across time and space and to reproduce live sounds and images without any loss of content, at least by the standards of the day. Experts and publics agreed on the brilliance of this achievement. But wherever these extraordinarily sensitive new nerve nets extended, there was little genuine sense of cultural encounter and exchange. In electrical publications of the late nineteenth century, newly accessible lands and people were seldom cherished for any cross-cultural opportunities they offered, except abstractly. Concretely, they appeared as islands of cultural anomaly that new techniques of communication made available for absorption into the mainstream. Those who controlled the new electrical technologies not infrequently dismissed vastly different cultures as deficient by civilized standards, lacking even the capacity for meaningful communication. What late-nineteenth-century writers in expert technical and popular scientific journals practiced was a species of cognitive imperialism. Theirs were visions of a globe efficiently administered by Anglo-Saxon technology, perhaps with exotic holidays, occasions, and decorations in dress and architecture, perhaps filled with more items and devices than any single person could imagine, but certainly not a world to disturb the fundamental idea of a single best cultural order. What these writers hoped to extend without challenge were self-conceptions that confirmed their dreams of being comfortably at home and perfectly in control of a world at their electric fingertips. Even when, in the Utopian manner, their declared goal was to turn the status quo upside down in pursuit of a better world, few of their schemes failed to reconstitute familiar social orders and frameworks of interpretation. Only the scale of the community in which they imagined themselves as participants had changed. Changes in the functional capabilities of new media of communication were a matter of interested discussion by electrical scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and camp followers. Suggestions that the future of these devices lay in the organization of public intelligence systems to promote cultural harmony and perfection by displaying it to one and all were sympathetically received.

Community and Class Order Progress Close to Home

Much of the literature on electricity in the late nineteenth century can be read as the wishful template of a world that electrical professionals believed they would create, given the opportunity. The world that looked most comfortable to them was less the egalitarian one they professed to desire in their more serf-conscious public moments than one in which the stability of familiar social and class structures would be preserved, with the important exception that other people would come to recognize the wisdom of professional electricians’ values, and might even think, look, and act very much like electricians themselves. With the more general application of electricity throughout society, electricians believed, the world could change only to their advantage. For them, electricity was the transformative agent of social possibility. Through their power over it, it would be a creator of social miracles. Electricity had the vitality of a natural force; they had charge of its control and direction. Experts felt that society had yet to grant them the recognition appropriate to so weighty a social responsibility. They were also concerned about the possibility of this natural force’s getting out of control, particularly their control. Thus, at the same time that electrical professionals were confidently and proudly prophesying Utopian accomplishments through the proper exercise of electrical knowledge, especially at the most abstract levels of discussion about the future of civilization they were also conducting an anxious, less publicized discussion about the possible social catastrophes of electrical metamorphosis. A metamorphosis it surely was, though in the early stages. While electric lights and trolley cars constituted the most visible proof of change in the urban environment, electric telephones had also diffused with impressive rapidity. Early telephone figures are difficult to find and often unreliable. Our best evidence probably reflects only orders of magnitude. Phone figures for the late nineteenth century are rarely broken down into residential and business telephones, or by region, although these were key factors in telephone density and distribution. It is difficult to be sure, after the Bell patents expired in 1893 and the telephone business temporarily opened up to a number of small competitors, how accurate was the reporting of independent telephones.

Locating the Body in Electrical Space and Time Competing Authorities

In any culture codes for bodily communication are conventionally elaborated and, like other codes, require skillful manipulation. The body is the most familiar of all communicative modes, as well as the sensible center of human experience, which lives or dies with it. Upon it, all other codes are inscribed to a greater or lesser extent. There is no form of communication that does not require the body's engagement, though printed and written messages may involve a smaller direct range of its perceptual and motor capacities than oral-gestural messages do. In addition, strange experiences are often translated and made familiar by comparisons with the body, and by categories of classification derived from the body's experience. The body is a convenient touchstone by which to gauge, explore, and interpret the unfamiliar, an essential information-gathering probe we never quite give up, no matter how sophisticated the supplemental modes available to us. The body is also squarely at the critical juncture between nature and culture. It is nature, or in any case man's most direct link to nature, capable of opposing and resisting it at least for a while, either its own or that external to it. The inscription of cultural codes upon the body is perhaps the principal means of detaching it from nature and transforming it into culture. The body and its actions, therefore, have a richly ambiguous social meaning. They can be made to emphasize perceived distinctions between nature or culture as the need arises, or to reconcile them. Because men use what is known to them to make sense of what is not, a deep inquisitiveness about the relationship between electricity and the human body was part of the process of becoming socially acquainted with that novel and mysterious force in the late nineteenth century. And though electricity might be discussed either as an extension of nature or of the body, or as something opposed to and outside them, it was defined in any case inescapably with reference to them.

Introduction

New technologies is a historically relative term. We are not the first generation to wonder at the rapid and extraordinary shifts in the dimension of the world and the human relationships it contains as a result of new forms of communication, or to be surprised by the changes those shifts occasion in the regular pattern of our lives. If our own experience is unique in detail, its structure is characteristically modern. It starts with the invention of the telegraph, the first of the electrical communications machines, as significant a break with the past as printing before it. In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work. In the long transformation that begins with the first application of electricity to communication, the last quarter of the nineteenth century has a special importance for students of modern media history. Five proto-mass media of the twentieth century were invented during this period: the telephone, phonograph, electric light, wireless, and cinema. This period is not the usual starting point for the social history of Anglo-American electric media, which is generally assumed to begin only with the institutional birth of film and broadcasting and the development of large audiences in the twentieth century. The present study modestly attempts to push back those beginnings to the late nineteenth century, when Anglo-American culture was fascinated by the communicative possibilities of the telegraph, the telephone, and the incandescent lamp—choices that may come as a surprise to contemporary sensibilities focused on twentieth-century mass media. For media historians, the phenomenon of twentieth-century electronic mass media lies like a great whale across the terrain of our intellectual concern. Asked to explain what sort of phenomenon it is, most of us will unhesitatingly point to the hundreds of millions of radio and television sets that are bought by consumers and promoted by vast industries. This artifactual notion is pervasive and not much debated, for it seems simple, obvious, and convenient.