Welcome back for the second of our two-part interview with my neighbor, Clifford Pyncheon. Last time we discussed the ways the railroad is changing society and the idea that time is a spiral, continuously revisiting old ideas in new ways.
NH: So we’ve got the railroads, and now we have the telegraph. If the railroad is to make us nomads, then how do you predict the telegraph will change the way the world works?
CP: Electricity—the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence! Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by the means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it! [1]
NH: Oh, Cliff. You don’t even know.
CP: It isn’t just me. Samuel Morse himself wrote “it is not visionary to suppose that it would not be long ere the whole surface of ths country would be channeled for those nerves which are diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout in the land, making in fact, one neighbourhood of the whole country” [2].
NH: Hmm, kind of like how I can hop on over to Twitter, click on the sidebar and find out what things people are talking about in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, St. Louis—heck, even Indonesia, the UAE or the Dominican Republic.
That reminds me of an 1851 book called Religion of Geology, in which Edward Hitchcock says: “The principle which I advance in its naked form is this: Our words, our actions, and even our thoughts, make an indelible impression on the universe. Thrown into a poetic form, this principle converts creation ‘Into a vast sounding gallery;/Into a vast picture gallery;/And into a universal telegraph.’” [3]
CP: “This sentence I am now uttering shall alter the whole atmosphere through all future time.” Hitchcock [4].
NH: “The air is one vast library on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.” Charles Babbage, inventor of the computer [5].
Were they talking about the telegraph, or this medium through which I am now talking to you from 160 years in the past? What was that about history being cyclical?
Ciao for now, hip cats.
[1] Hawthorne 183-184
[2] quoted in Swann 6
[3] quoted in Swann 6
[4] quoted in Swann 7
[5] quoted in Swann 7
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