92 | Mass Media and Historical Change
Telegraphy
Previous studies on world history and globalisation have stressed media
change as an important driving force in this process, frequently pointing
to the role played by the telegraph, news agencies and the popular press.
However, these have generally not gone beyond a few introductory remarks,
while historical accounts have concentrated on themes like the global
economy, colonialism and cultural exchange (see, e.g., Wendt 2007; briefly
on the media: Osterhammel 2009: 63–83). Future research would do well
to incorporate the respective mechanics of the new global media into world
history in general.
Doubtless studies of the telegraph as a medium and motor of globalisa-
tion can be approached in very different ways. Seen from the vantage point
of both scientific and technical history, this already applies to its inception
during the 1830s, in which researchers from different countries participated.
While visiting a Heidelberg professor, William Fothergill Cooke, the British
inventor of the telegraph, saw a needle telegraph developed by a Russian;
together with the British electro-physicist Charles Wheatstone he refined,
patented and tested it in a trial run. The electromagnetic telegraph of the
American Samuel B. Morse and the facsimile telegraph of the Scotsman
Alexander Bain followed a few years later. After 1850, intense work began
on a worldwide cable system, which in spite of immense costs and many set-
backs, was spurred on by grand visions and expectations of profit. The first
cable was laid from London to Paris in 1851, out as far as the Crimea four
years later, and, after many reversals, across the Atlantic in 1866. Starting in
the 1870s, telegraph cables from Europe extended as far as Rio de Janeiro,
Cape Town, Australia, Calcutta and Peking, so that a global media network
can be said to have existed since that time (cf. Wobring 2005). Economic
interest in South Africa was the primary reason for including Africa in the
global network during the 1880s. Another factor was that the telegraph pro-
moted global accords. Thus in 1865 the World Telegraph Accord in Paris
made the Morse code a single, cross-boundary world ‘language’ for this new
medium, and established international conventions that standardised the
transmission of telegraph signals. Henceforth the International Telegraph
Union (ITU) coordinated communications and held annual meetings.
As early as the nineteenth century, telegraphy served to promote the
awareness that the world and its cultures could cooperate in an innovative
way. Samuel Morse had already prophesied that telegraphy would ‘make
one neighbourhood of the whole country’. After the telegraph connections
between England and France were in place, Punch saw the two countries as
‘The New Siamese Twins’ (quoted in Read 1999: 13). The transatlantic cable
was compared to an umbilical cord that would unite Great Britain and the