The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 by David Hochfelder (review)

There is a telling moment as David Hochfelder's history of the rise and fall of a communications network approaches its unhappy denouement. Western Union, operator of most of the nation's telegraph lines since Reconstruction, was taken over in 1909 by its erstwhile stepchild, American Telephone & Telegraph. AT&T's managers, schooled in efficiency and modern accounting methods, were appalled by the careless practices they discovered at Western Union headquarters. Noting the haphazard filing of important documents, one said that the office "looked like a page from Dickens" (p. 161). A simpler book would mine this anecdote for symbolic contrasts between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between the vanquished telegraph and the triumphant telephone. This is not that kind of book.

Hochfelder has created a nuanced synthesis of the technological, business, and cultural forces at work in an information revolution— and its domination by Western Union—from the Civil War to roughly 1920. Despite having become an iconic symbol of nineteenth-century technology, the telegraph was a system used directly only by a small percentage of Americans. Why, then, should we care so much about it? Hochfelder argues compellingly that the telegraph, as both a technology and a business enterprise, was indispensable for putting the "modern" in modern America. Some of the phenomena associated with it, including voracious public interest in a rapid news cycle, leveraging small information asymmetries for financial speculation, differential pricing of information transmission, and the value of in-house corporate research, feel positively up-to-the minute. And although this is not a polemical book, it is impossible not to notice the role of government action (or threats of it)—even decades before the Progressive-era regulatory state—in defining what was essentially a public utility.

The author uses the telegraph to explore the role of technology more generally in shaping modern life. The book is, in short, a brief for the history of technology as a fruitful area of humanistic inquiry: "to show how technologically driven social change has become fundamental to the human experience" (p. 180). Specialists in the history of technology need no persuasion on that point, but Hochfelder is clearly reaching for a broader audience. In declining to fall back on a false dichotomy between technological determinism and social construction, he aims for an analysis that "preserve[s] individual agency and remain[s] sensitive to social context while fully acknowledging that a technology's material attributes and capabilities shape its effects on individuals and societies" (p. 180). This approach suffuses the book; the fact that the programmatic statement comes only in the final paragraph means that readers who may have started the book looking for a particular story have instead been treated to a sophisticated interpretation of technological and social change in advanced capitalism.

Five chapters, framed by a brief introduction and conclusion, analyze 1) telegraphy as both a military tool and lived experience in the Civil War; 2) political and business challenges to Western Union's monopoly; 3) telegraphy's relation with journalism and written language; 4) its symbiosis with ascendant finance capitalism; and 5) the "industrial succession" of the telephone. Each chapter is deeply researched and carefully constructed; the last two feel like the book's center of gravity. An eight-page annotated chronology lifts much of the burden of background exposition from the text. A substantial and up-to-date essay on sources for each chapter likewise carries the historiographic weight and is a valuable tool for scholars and students.

Hochfelder's writing is lucid, engaging, and confident. The book will be of interest to a wide audience, from general readers to scholarly specialists. It could be used effectively in undergraduate courses and as an exemplar in graduate seminars.