The Telegraph and the Control of Material Movements: A Micro-Study about the Detachment of Communication from...

Relatively recent historiographical approaches such as global or transnational history have attracted new attention to telegraphy and its role in processes of globalization. This renewed interest in submarine cables and overland wires has recently provided us with a reasonably good idea of how the global telegraph network developed in the nineteenth century, who its principal designers were, and where it was more and where it was less tight. Little, however, has been said so far about the actual matters communicated telegraphically, certainly not in any systematic fashion. Apart from individual telegraphic messages that gained prominence in political or military history, the contents of telegrams have attracted little historiographical attention. What was conveyed in telegrams has not been interrogated as to its significance in globalization processes. This article seeks to make a first step in this direction and suggests that only in a content analysis of everyday telegrams do the most important qualities of telegraphy become apparent. It introduces a small but coherent corpus of telegrams-the Bala railway telegrams-that provides us with a rare opportunity to study the contents of telegraphic messages in a systematic form. In the course of the analysis of the Bala railway telegrams the importance of this device's power to coordinate and control movement begins to show. By relating evidence from this micro-level study to the contexts in which telegraphy was employed on a larger scale, the article suggests that this capacity for coordination and control was the principal new quality introduced by the technology.