When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850 (review)

When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. By Daniel R. Headrick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. viii+246. $29.95.

Daniel Headrick's excellent book probably could not have been conceived fifteen years ago, before the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The book embodies the truism that each generation of historians reinterprets the past for the readers of its own day. It belongs to a growing genre that seeks to expose the historical origins of our present information age--other recent examples include Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman's Information Ages (1998) and Tom Standage's Victorian Internet (1998)--but it sets a new standard for this genre.

Headrick has gone further back than most authors, to the "Age of Reason and Revolution," the period from 1700 to 1850 that saw in turn the Enlightenment and Romanticism, political upheaval in Europe and the Americas, and the industrial revolution. Identifying five categories of "information system" that achieved a highly evolved form during this period, he devotes a chapter to each: the classification of knowledge, the transformation of information, the display of data, information storage, and communications.

The selection of representative topics within each in these areas from among many possibilities gives the book a slightly arbitrary quality. For example, the chapter on classification systems covers the development of scientific nomenclature from Linnaeus to Lavoisier, and concludes with a section on metrication; the chapter on information transformation covers the development of statistics from political arithmetic to census-taking and social statistics; and the chapter on the display of information looks at mapmaking and the graphical display of quantitative data. It will be apparent from this selection of material that the book strongly reflects Headrick's own background and expertise. For another writer, ideas of classification might have been equally well explored in the context of documentation, while information transformation could have been illustrated by reference to the development of accounting. The final two chapters describe the storage of information, illustrated by dictionaries and encyclopedias, and communications technologies, illustrated by early postal and telegraph systems.

The delineation of the book into five themes is perhaps necessary for coherence, but it gives rise to some problems because the technologies themselves do not allow such a clean categorization. For example, the concept of dictionaries and encyclopedias as information-storage devices is not wholly convincing. One could just as well argue that they are classification and display systems for the universal body of knowledge stored in libraries and human minds. Further, the argument set forth throughout the book that the world of knowledge can be separated into distinct "systems" for 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...