Telegraph Energy Quotes

For the most part, Ranger had a consistent personality. He wasn't a guy who wasted a lot of unnecessary energy and effort. He moved and he spoke with an efficient ease that was more animal than human. And he didn't telegraph his emotions. Unless Ranger had his tongue in my mouth it was usually impossible to tell what he was thinking. But every now and then, Ranger would step out of the box, and like a little treat that was doled out on special occasions, Ranger would make an entirely outrageous sexual statement. At least it would be outrageous coming from an ordinary guy... from Ranger it seemed on the mark.

There has been a revolution in the way people think. They have just noticed, without daring to say it, that the old paradigm, according to which ‘the fate of humanity, individual and collective, is getting better every day, thanks to science, democratisation, and egalitarian emancipation’, is false. The age that believed it is over. This illusion has fallen. This progress (debatable anyhow according to people like Ivan Illich)[203] lasted probably less than a century. Today, the unintended consequences of mass technology are beginning to be felt: new resistant viruses, the toxicity of processed food, the exhaustion of the soil and the shrinking of the world’s agricultural production, the general and rapid degradation of the environment, the threat of the invention of new weapons of mass destruction to add to nuclear weapons, and so on. In addition, technology is entering its baroque age. The fundamental inventions were discovered by the end of the 1950s. The improvements to them made in later decades have contributed fewer and fewer concrete ameliorations, like so many useless decorative motifs added to the superstructure of a monument. The Internet has probably had fewer revolutionary effects than the telegraph or the telephone. The Internet is a significant improvement applied to a pan-communication that was already substantially realised. Techno-science is following the ‘80-20’ power law. At the beginning it takes 20 units of energy to obtain 60 units of force. Later it takes 80 units of energy to realise only 20 units of force.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

THERE WAS A CERTAIN PARADOX in this sudden release and movement of human energy—from continents away, no less—all to dig in the dirt for a shiny metal that, once dug out successfully, was melted into neat rectangular bars and made its way back into darkness, in bank vaults, never again to see the light of day. Yet this arbitrary construct underpinned the entire monetary system of the United States and the world. The same primal attraction that had once led pirates, conquistadores, and medieval sovereigns to search for gold was now being mirrored in an age when wires transmitted words at near the speed of light. The value of gold then, as now, was largely based on a seemingly universal agreement, an article of faith: that gold is valuable because others see it as valuable. Why should the discovery or nondiscovery of a yellow metal in the dirt in California have any impact on the utilization of industrial capacity, growth of crops, transportation of goods via rail, improvement of the telegraph infrastructure, or any other economic activity? But its religious effect, regardless of its logic, was undeniable. The flood of gold helped unleash significant economic activity throughout the world.

We have heard the stories: Duke Ellington would say, “I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” 5 Tennessee Williams felt that “apparent failure” motivated him. He said it “sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.” Many have heard that Thomas Edison told his assistant, incredulous at the inventor’s perseverance through jillions of aborted attempts to create an incandescent light bulb, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” 6 “Only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one. Many thanks . . .” read part of the rejection letter that Gertrude Stein received from a publisher in 1912.7 Sorting through dross, artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators have learned to transform askew strivings. The telegraph, the device that underlies the communications revolution, was invented by a painter, Samuel F. B. Morse, who turned the stretcher bars from what he felt was a failed picture into the first telegraph device. The 1930s RKO screen-test response “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little” was in reference to Fred Astaire. We hear more stories from commencement speakers—from J. K. Rowling to Steve Jobs to Oprah Winfrey—who move past bromides to tell the audience of the uncommon means through which they came to live to the heights of their capacity. Yet the anecdotes of advantages gleaned from moments of potential failure are often considered cliché or insights applicable to some, not lived out by all.

Thinking about this, I realize that, strictly speaking, the first radio telescope wasn’t built in 1932. It was the telegraph system that in 1859 got struck by the Carrington Event, a powerful geomagnetic storm caused by the sun. The sky lit up so brightly in some parts of the world that people thought night had turned to daylight. We didn’t fully understand what was going on at the time, but all those telegraph wires strung up on wooden poles across the US and Europe acted as antennas and absorbed a huge amount of energy, frying electrical equipment and electrocuting telegraph operators.

Within three years, a Russian diplomat in Saint Petersburg who was an amateur experimenter, Baron Pavel L’vovitch Schilling, had begun designing a telegraph system based on Oersted’s discoveries. Schilling demonstrated the system to Czar Alexander I sometime before the Czar’s death in 1825.