The electric telegraph allowed a conversation. It connected points on the globe as messages sped through copper at nearly the speed of light.
Not everyone was welcoming. Henry David Thoreau [...] groused: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
While Texas may not have had much important to learn from Maine, in the summer of 1860 Texas had a great deal to learn from Chicago: the Republican Party National Convention meeting at the Wigwam nominated Abraham Lincoln as its candidate for president. So started a chain of events that would kill twenty-five thousand white adult Texans and maim twenty-five thousand more, and that would free all two hundred thousand enslaved Black Texans within five years. Maine may not have had much to learn from Texas, but telegraphs reporting relative prices of Grand Bank codfish in Boston, Providence, New York, and Philadelphia were of great importance to Maine fishermen slipping their moorings.
Knowing the price of codfish is valuable, the freeing of hundreds of thousands of Americans is profound, and both only hint at the shift that came with telegraphed intelligence. Ever since the development of language, one of humanity's great powers has been that our drive to talk and gossip truly turns us into an anthology intelligence. What one of us in the group knows, if it is useful, pretty quickly everyone in the group knows, and often those well beyond the group, too. The telegraph enlarged the relevant group from the village or township or guild to, potentially, the entire world.
- J Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, New York, 2022, p.52-3.
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