The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870-1920

Prelude

prelude T h e s m i t h s o n i a n i n s t i t u t e h a d j u s t p u r c h a s e d an early version of the telephone, or “far speaker,” when David Starr Jordan arrived in Washington, D.C., for the first time in 1877. “Connecting the basement with the fourth story, we were greatly amazed and delighted to find that we could hear over the wires. In case of doubt, one would put his head out the window and call: ‘I’m talking through the telephone; can you hear me now?’”1 Jordan was lucky to experience the magic of the telephone at such an early date. It was not until much later that most individuals had the opportunity to recognize a human voice speaking to them through a long thin wire. Jordan, however, did not come to the Smithsonian to use the telephone. He had come to introduce himself to a coterie of talented young naturalists assembled by the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, Spencer F. Baird. Baird was one of the first great institution builders in American biology. As a young man he had dedicated himself to natural history with an especial passion for building collections. This passion came to full flower when Baird was appointed as the assistant secretary to the Smithsonian Institute and the first director of the National Museum. One of Baird’s greatest talents was developing extended spec7 3 imen-collecting and data-gathering networks by using his position to hire talented young naturalists. Jordan was one of these young naturalists. Still, Jordan’s charming anecdote about the telephone offers interesting lessons on the relationship of communication and transportation infrastructures to late nineteenth-century experience. First of all, it points to how communication and transportation technologies modified experiences of space and time. For instance, it was now possible to carry on a conversation between offices in the basement and the fourth floor of the National Museum. As we will see, fieldwork in natural history was not immune to these changes; consequently, understanding the dynamics of these changes helps us to understand some of the transformation in American natural history at the end of the nineteenth century . Cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has imaginatively explored the ways that technologies have transformed human experience in his books on the development of railway technology, the electrification of light, and the early traffic in spices and stimulants.2 For instance, in The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch coins the term “panoramic travel” to describe how riding on the train transformed viewing the landscape: “There the depth perception of pre-industrial consciousness was, literally, lost: velocity blurs all foreground objects, which means that there no longer is a foreground—exactly the range in which most of the experience of pre-industrial travel was located.”3 In panoramic travel there is a “quantitative increase of impressions that the perceptual apparatus has to receive and to process.”4 Since viewers cannot begin to grasp all the details, they concentrate instead on defining the pattern of the whole. In the section that follows, I will develop Schivelbusch’s insight about perceiving the landscape from a moving train into a larger framework for understanding the role of recorded observations of place at the end of the nineteenth century in America. The development of extended communication and transportation infrastructures opened up new possibilities for natural historians to gather specimens. Institution builders like Spencer Baird used the development of these infrastructures to increase dramatically the number of specimens and amount of data they gathered. What emerged was a “panorama” of new observations of the interior of the American continent. The challenge presented by this panorama was in finding a way to process information in a way that kept track of the details without losing perspective on how the details fit together to form a big picture. Even more important is how Jordan’s story touches upon one of the inter7 4 / I I / F I S H - M A R K E T P H E N O M E N O L O G Y esting aspects of technological networks: they develop nonlinearly. The history of the cultural effects of technological development has been very good at documenting how communication and transportation technologies have transformed our sense of time and...