Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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The root changes that made the modern world what it is can be described as the nearelimination of constraints of space and time. These two changes are deeply intertwined. Weshall also see repeatedly that the real lifestyle-changing technology was often fairlyprimitive, and that modern high technology is often just an improvement on a revolutionthat was already won using much more primitive methods.
Technologies for communicating instantly across wide areas have always been around.Signal fires and smoke signals have been used in many times and places. In the RomanEmpire, chains of signal towers could be used to send messages the breadth of the Empirewithin hours, limited only by the time it took each tower to read and relay the signals.In the 19th century, chains of signal towers employing semaphore signals - systems ofcolored arms that could be set in different positions - were erected in a number ofEuropean nations. The inventors of these early systems solved many problems in informationtechnology, such as ways of compressing signals and techniques for detecting andcorrecting errors in transmission. These systems were actually called telegraphs.The heliograph made use of sunlight reflected off mirrors to send messages. It hadthe obvious drawbacks of being usable only in daylight and clear weather, but the greatadvantage of portability, and saw some use by the U.S. Army in the Southwest, whereconditions for its use were excellent. All of these technologies were special-purposesystems, limited only to extremely important and official messages, and they had littleimpact on the everyday lives of most people.
All that changed in 1844, when Samuel Morse sent the first electrical telegraph messagefrom Washington to Baltimore. The word telegraph had been around for decades, as we haveseen, and the device itself was actually invented in 1831 by Joseph Henry of Princeton(the same Henry famous in chemistry and physics). Morse perfected its practical andcommercial application. At about the same time, he was doing the same thing withphotography in America. By 1850, America had thousands of miles of telegraph lines. News,not just national but local, and personal messages could be sent instantly andcomparatively cheaply. The effect was, pardon the pun, electrifying. When Thoreau lamentedthat modern man would get up from a nap and ask if there was any news, he was referring tothe impact that instantaneous communication had on society.
To connect the East with the newly-won territories on the Pacific, a group ofentrepreneurs reverted to an idea millenia old - fast riders. The Pony Express wasinaugurated in April, 1860. It made it possible to get information from coast to coast inabout a week, at the then-staggering cost of $5 an ounce for letters, but even as theriders travelled, they were being paralleled by telegraph line. The Pony Express went outof business after 19 months and never turned a profit, surely the most colorful andromantic business failure in history. The telegraph line to California was completed justbefore the outbreak of the Civil War and was instrumental in keeping the far West in theUnion. We tend to forget that America had frontiers in other directions as well;Californians knew of Lincoln's assasination within hours, but the news took two weeks toreach northern Maine.
America and Europe might be tied internally by telegraph lines, but news between thetwo still took at least a week by fast steamship. Transoceanic telegraph cables wereproposed in the 1860's. The technology is daunting. The cable has to be insulated wellenough to survive immersion in thousands of feet of ocean water, and means have to bedeveloped to retrieve the cable and fix it if it breaks. Cable-laying ships were devisedand means of insulating the cable as it was laid perfected, and the first transatlantictelegraph cables were in service by 1869. By 1900 the world's oceans were laced by cables.
Two vignettes from the dawn of trans-oceanic telegraphy are revealing:
In 1876 the steamer Jeanette left San Francisco for the Bering Strait, in anattempt to reach the North Pole from the Pacific side of the Arctic. The attempt was afailure; the ship never got beyond 76 degrees north, was frozen in the ice, and eventuallycrushed. The crew dragged longboats over the pack ice and rowed to the Arctic coast ofSiberia. One boat capsized in a storm and the other two separated. Both boats landed withthe occupants horribly frostbitten and near starvation. The crew of one managed to reach avillage, and two of the healthiest survivors sledged over a thousand miles south toIrkutsk where there was - a telegraph. They were able to get word to America of the fateof the expedition. Rescue expeditions had been searching the Arctic for two years lookingfor them. Tragically, the crew of the other boat was located in the spring, all dead ofstarvation and cold.
After a failed revolt in Ireland, ten Irish rebels were exiled to life in the penalcolony of Australia. After ten years, sympathizers devised a plan to free them. They hiredan American whaling vessel to travel to Australia to carry the escapees. Meanwhile,advance men travelled across America and then across the Pacific by ship. Two groups ofconspirators travelled in opposite directions to rendesvous on the opposite side of theplanet. The prisoners escaped and were spirited out to the American ship, whileBritish authorities comandeered the only other ship around, a coastal steamer. After atense confrontation in which the whaler nearly rammed the steamer, the convict ship madeit safely into international waters. Now to get to America. Had this happened a decadelater, the British Navy would certainly have intercepted them, but since there was notyet a telegraph line to Australia news of the escape failed to reach Britain in timeand the Irish rebels made good their escape.
The interplay of technological progress in this episode is fascinating. The escapeworked because transportation technology made it possible to travel freely around theglobe, but information technology had not quite caught up. Had it been attempted a fewyears later, it would certainly have failed.
Yet fate can move in two directions at once. At the same moment that it was driving menon to destroy the unity of their society it was also making certain that they would not beable to do it. Men who were whipping themselves up to the point where they would refuse totry to get along with one another were, at the same point of time, doing precisely thethings that would bind them together forever whether they liked it or not. The impulse todisunion was coming to a land that, more or less in spite of itself, was in the very actof making union permanent.
The steamers came down from Lake Superior that spring, carrying iron ore to furnaces onthe lower lakes, and this was the first spring it had happened. Always before, LakeSuperior had been landlocked - forever blue, forever cold, the scent of pine in the cleanwinds that blew over the water. In the mountains by the lake there was a great wealth ofmetals, but this wealth was locked up, out of reach, and the St. Mary's River cametumbling down in white foam through, a green untouched wilderness. A few schooners hadbeen hauled overland, creaking on rollers, dozens of oxen leaning into heavy wooden yokes.Some of these vessels, once afloat on the upper lake, brought small deckloads of red ironore down to the Soo, where it was shoveled into little cars that ran on wooden rails, withteams of horses to haul the cars down below the rapids, where the ore was loaded intoschooners that had come up from Lake Erie.
In midsummer Indians would camp by the rapids, to cast their nets for whitefish, havingweek - long feasts in the little clearings by the river.... Jesuits in their black robeshad been here in the old days, and trappers bound for the beaver country, and a handful ofsoldiers - soldiers of the French King once upon a time, and then British redcoats, and atlast United States regulars. ...And the river and the land about it were empty, the northwind murmuring across a thousand miles of untouched pine trees, the whole of it as remote(as Henry Clay once contemptuously pointed out in the Senate) as the far side of the moon,and as little likely to affect anything that happened in the rest of the country.
All of that was changing. A canal had been dug around the rapids in the St. Mary's,with two locks in it - men hauled the lock gates around by hand, and the water cameburbling in to rock the little wooden vessels that were being locked through - and now thesteamers could go all the way from Cleveland and Detroit to the new ports of the Marquetterange, to bring ore down to the new furnaces. Eleven thou - sand tons of it would go downthis year, ten times as much as had ever gone down before, and nothing would be the sameagain. Nothing would be the same because the canal and the shipping were the visiblesymbols of a profound and unsuspected transformation.
The puffing wooden steamers, stopping at the old sailors' encampment to take on woodfor fuel...were part of a vast process that nobody had planned and that nobody could stop;a process that was turning America into an entirely new sort of country which could dopractically any imaginable thing under the sun except divide into separate pieces. In Ohioand Pennsylvania the blast furnaces and foundries and rolling mills were going up,railroads were reaching from the forks of the Ohio to the Lake Erie shore to take coal oneway and iron ore the other, and there would be more trains and steamers and mills andmines, year after year, decade after decade. America would cease to have room for thingslike an empty wilderness at the Soo.... It would have no room, either, for a feudalplantation economy below the Ohio, veneered with chivalry and thin romance and living inan outworn dream, or for the peculiar institution by which that economy lived, or for thehot pride and the wild impossible visions that grew out of it. The old ways were going, anoverpowering compulsive force was being generated, and the long trails of smoke that layon the curving blue horizon of Luke Huron were the signs of it.
It was not just iron ore. The Illinois Central Railroad was finishing the seven hundredmiles of its "charter lines," running from Chicago down to the land of Egypt,where the Ohio met the Mississippi, with a cross line belting the black prairie from eastto west with a terminus at Dunleith on the upper Mississippi. It was running fabulous"Gothic cars" for sleepers, with staterooms and berths, and washrooms fitted' inmarble and' plate glass, and in Chicago it had just built the largest railroad station inthe world. (Too large by far, said eastern railroaders, and here on the edge of nowherenot half of the station would ever be used. Within a decade it would be outgrown, needingenlargement.)
Wheat was the word, along with iron. America was be - ginning to feed Europe, and theprice of grain had gone up and up. Farmers were driving a hundred miles or more, inIllinois and Wisconsin, to reach railroad stations and lake ports with wagonloads ofgrain, and there were long lines at the elevators; often enough a man had to wait twenty -four hours before he could discharge his load. On the lakes a grain schooner could earnher cost in a single season. ... On the docks at New York were crowds of immigrants, manyof them knowing no single word of English except for some place name like Milwaukee orChicago; somehow they found their way to the comfortless trains that would take them West,and at Buffalo they boarded the creaking side - wheelers, barrels of bedding and crockeryand crates of furniture on the decks, wagon wheels lashed in the rigging, to finish thejourney to something that they could find nowhere else on earth.
In the East men who looked to the Pacific coast looked overland now, and not around theHorn. The great day of the clippers was over. The noble winged Sea Witch was a forgottenwreck on a reef off the Cuban coast, the Flying Cloud lay idle at her wharf for want of acharter, and it no longer paid to build ships that could advertise ninety days toCalifornia. California was peopled and fully won, the great leap to the Pacific had beenmade, and what was important now was to fill in the empty space.
In this year 1856 there was a typical family opening a new farm in Iowa, and thisfamily's story expresses the whole of it.
For a quarter of a century this family had lived in Indiana, settling there when a goodfarm could be bought from the government for two dollars an acre, building in the wilder -ness a home that was almost entirely self - sufficient; one man recalled that "Wecould have built a Chinese wall around our home and lived comfortably, asking favors of noman." This was sturdy frontier independence, romantic enough when seen from adistance, but nobody wanted to put up with it any longer than he really had to. For therewere no markets - "no demand and no price." A drove of hogs might be chivvied150 miles through the woods to Cincinnati, to be sold there for $1.50 per hundred pounds;what could be bought with the money thus obtained was costly, with calico selling for 40cents a yard and muslin for 75 cents, and with tea costing $1.50 a pound.
As the western country opened, this isolation ended. As roads were built and peoplemoved in and cities and towns sprang up, with steamboat and railroad lines handy, newmarkets were opened; crops could be sold for a decent sum, necessities and luxuries couldbe bought; and the mere fact that there were people all around brought prosperity, so thatthis particular family at last sold its Indiana farm for $100 an acre and moved on toIowa, to do the whole thing over again.
The psychologist Maslow developed his famous need heirarchy, which arrangeshuman needs and drives in order of priority:
There are, of course, many individual variations. Some people will sacrifice comfortand perhaps even survival for self-esteem. In some cases the self-esteem may be a matterof preserving social status (risking death rather than appearing cowardly, for example),in other cases adherence to some code of ethics (for example, risking death to protectvictims of genocide). On the whole, though, most people tend to sacrifice self-esteem forcomfort and comfort for survival. Exceptions tend to occur when needs higher on the scaleare met in abundance; it's more common for relief workers to give up a meal to helpsomeone than for concentration camp inmates.
Refugee situations illustrate the need heirarchy in action. Workers with aidorganizations often make welfare reformers look soft in comparison; they are adamant ininsisting that refugee relief provide for survival, but not comfort. It is not hard forWestern relief efforts to provide standards of living so far beyond those normally foundin some parts of the world that refugees are actually discouraged from returning home. Asone aid worker remarked to me in Kurdistan, "it's amazing how nasty you sometimeshave to be to people to help them."
In a perverse way, the emergence of human cantankerousness in disasters and refugeesituations is a good sign. It means that people are sufficiently confident of survivalthat they can begin worrying about comfort and self-esteem again. It means thelife-threatening crisis is largely over.
Technology is the key to satisfying the first two levels. It doesn't take muchtechnology to assure survival under reasonably benign conditions, or even quite harsh ones- the Inuit figured out how to survive in the Arctic thousands of years ago. Comfort takesa bit longer, although American society is already in some ways too comfortable for itsown good and even the worst American slum offers amenities like electricity, indoorsanitation and running water that would have been considered fabulous luxuries by thestandards of ages past. Indeed, having visited several places that have catapulted fromsevere poverty to relative affluence in a single human lifetime, it is hard in suchsettings to see technology as anything but an unmixed blessing.
It's when technology is applied to the quest for self-esteem that many of the realproblems associated with technology arise. The quest for self-esteem often expressesitself in a drive for power, control, or supremacy over others, often with technology usedas the implement for attaining it. A great deal of the inequality in the world xxxxxxSince the powerful can confer status or the means to attain it on others, they can luretechnologists away from the solution of socially pressing problems into less productiveefforts.
Since nobody ever attains perfect self-esteem, it is possible to use technology tostimulate insecurities, jealousies, and appetites, or to promise fulfillment with thelatest gadget. With the latest car you are guaranteed acceptance, status, sex appeal, andat no extra cost, a means of transportation, too.
Critics of modern technology often propose solutions that make the problems worseinstead of better, usually because they see the problems as technological. Oneapproach is the Marxist approach of doing away with economic inequality by variousrestructings of the system. The fallacy of this approach was easily apparent in theshort-lived game Anti-Monopoly, which was pulled off the market after ParkerBrothers sued for copyright infringement. Although the game's backers saw the suit assimply another example of corporate power, the game really was a flagrant knock-off of Monopoly,except that winners accumulated "social consciousness" points rather than money.And therein lies the lesson: power and privilege is the name of the game, notmoney. If money is the route to power and privilege in a society, people will pursuemoney. If not, they will pursue whatever is. In Anti-Monopoly it was"social consciousness" points. In the former Soviet Union it was connections andParty position; the privileged group, the nomeklatura was not wealthy intraditional economic terms, but they enjoyed the lifestyle of the wealthy.
In extreme cases, economic reformers have called for the abolition of money itself.This experiment was literally carried out by the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia; Cambodia becamethe only nation in modern history to abolish money. It also saw a bloodbath (chronicledfor all time in the film The Killing Fields) in which perhaps a third of thecountry's population died. The proposition that money is the root of all evil could hardlybe more graphically disproven.
So what is the solution? I see it as threefold:
A lot of research has gone into understanding what constitutes attractiveness indifferent cultures. Some features seem to be universal; there are no known cultures inwhich the signs of aging are considered physically attractive, for example. It's wellknown that women tend to see attractiveness in different terms than men. Men tend toconcentrate on physical attributes. Women, who both biologically and culturally tend to beburdened with child-rearing, often tend to value attributes that relate to ability toprovide for and protect a family.
What does this have to do with technology? Very often the attributes that a time orculture consider attractive relate to the availability of resources, which in turn isrelated directly to technology. One of the most variable attributes of beauty is bodyproportion. Cultures dominated by scarcity tend to value heavy body styles whereascultures dominated by abundance tend to value slenderness. In cultures dominated byscarcity, thinness connotes poor nutrition and perhaps chronic disease, but heavinessconnotes health and perhaps as importantly, ability to procure sufficient food. Inabundance cultures, where freedom from hunger and disease is taken largely for granted,attractiveness often revolves around status, which in turn revolves around access toresources.
It is only recently that even our own society has achieved real abundance. Until wellinto the 20th century, undernourishment was a significant problem in the United States.The military, which now has standards for excessive weight, was concerned in World War IIabout recruits who were underweight.
As technology changes, the rules of attractiveness also change. Some of theimportant patterns..
The expression "blue blood" is not hard to understand. Look at your wrists.Note the blue appearance of the veins. "Blue blood" once meant that a person wasso insulated from the need to work outdoors that the skin was pallid enough for the veinsto show. To enhance the effect, women sometimes resorted to various white lead compounds.These had the advantage, if you can call it that, of giving the skin a permanent palloreventually. At the opposite pole of status, a "redneck" was somebody who had towork outdoors, becoming chronically sunburned in the process. (The term was once highlypejorative, but with entertainers like Jeff Foxworthy using the term, it has lost much ofits force.)
With the urbanization of America, the emphasis on attractiveness began to change. Suntans began to be seen as attractive and healthy; they signified enough leisure to spendtime outdoors.
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Created 18 September 1998, Last Update 29 September 1998