The Transformation of the World (155 page)

In first-generation countries, which could not yet simply import a readymade package—and even afterward most technologies retained a special national aspect
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—the necessary experience had to be assembled from scratch.
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The construction and running of a railroad required a large amount of know-how in iron and steel technology, machinery, geology, mining, telecommunications, site organization, finance, personnel relations, timetable coordination, and the design of bridges, tunnels, and stations. Much had to be improvised before all this was put on a “scientific” basis. While technical problems awaited a solution, legal matters such as land acquisition and related compensation also had to be addressed. Moreover, the railroad was often a political issue with a deeper military significance. In the United States, however, and to some extent in Britain, strategic considerations played a much smaller role than in continental Europe, so that the state—except during the interval of the Civil War—could safely forgo direct involvement.

The railroad network as we know it today (in some cases already reduced when compared with 1913 or 1930) was essentially complete by 1880 in Britain,
France, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, and by the end of the century in the rest of Europe. The spread of technology across borders meant that it was very difficult for a country to go its own way, the only partial exception being track gauges. George Stephenson, the “father” of the railroad, laid down a norm of 4 feet, 8.5 inches, which was also adopted elsewhere because of Britain's technological dominance in the field. The Netherlands, Baden, and Russia initially opted for a wider gauge, but in the end only Russia held out. By 1910, with only one short interruption to switch gauges, people could travel by train all the way from Lisbon to Beijing. In the same year, the transcontinental network also embraced Korea, where a railroad boom had started around 1900. This completed the unification of Eurasia in terms of railroad technology.

The Railroad and National Integration

The new “iron horse,” initially competing with the fastest mail coaches ever put into operation,
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offered a novel experience of the swiftly passing countryside and sparked debate about the desirability of the modernity that it seemed to epitomize.
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It brought about the need and the chances of a new kind of spatial politics.
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In France the “railroad question” became a central topic of elite discussions in the forties, and it was only in the face of great resistance, mainly from Catholic conservatives, that the new invention was held to serve the country's prosperity.
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When the railroad later appeared in other parts of the world and unleashed similar reactions, people in Europe had long forgotten their early fears and held up backward, superstitious Orientals as figures of fun. The first project in China, the ten-mile Wusong railroad near Shanghai, was dismantled in 1877, just a year after its completion, because the local population feared it would destroy the harmony of natural forces (
feng shui
). This was ridiculed in the West as a primitive defense against the modern world. Yet it took only a few more years for the Chinese to understand the desirability of the railroad, and in the early years of the twentieth century patriotic members of the provincial upper classes collected large sums of money to buy back railroad concessions from foreigners. In 1911, an attempt by the imperial government to develop a centralized European-style railroad policy became the most important factor in the fall of the Qing dynasty. Regional and central forces fought for control over a modern technology that offered handsome profits to Chinese as well as foreign financiers and suppliers. In China, the railroad wrote history on a grand scale.

At that time, not long after its late entry into the railroad age, China was already capable of building and running its own subsystems of a national network. Until then most of the railroads, though under Chinese government ownership, had been funded by overseas capital and built by foreign engineers. An early major exception was the technically difficult stretch from Beijing to Kalgan (Zhangjiakou) in the Northwest, whose completion in 1909, entirely devised and implemented by Chinese engineers, linked the state railroad system to the caravan trade from Mongolia. Foreign experts recognized it as an impressive
feat, achieved at relatively low cost; the rolling stock, however, was not made in China. Thereafter, any railway built with Chinese capital made a point of dispensing with non-Chinese engineers.
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A similar symbol of resistance to European control and influence, motivated by geostrategic interests in the face of direct French and British penetration, was the Hijaz railroad from Damascus via Amman to Medina, with a branch line to Haifa. In the decade and a half before the First World War, the Ottoman Empire made the final bid for mobilizing its own resources in a great effort. Whereas other Ottoman railroads, including the famous one to Baghdad, had been established by Europeans, the Hijaz route was supposed to be funded, built, and managed by the Ottomans themselves. The plan was less successful in this respect than the Beijing-Kalgan railroad, since foreigners working under a German boss made up a much larger proportion of the construction engineers.
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But the basic message was clear: a non-European state could best demonstrate its prowess by creating its own technostructures in line with European standards. This, of course, was the Japanese formula—much admired but not so easy to copy.

Unlike shipping and air transportation, the railroad was ultimately a vehicle of national integration. Back in 1828 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, at almost eighty still a keen observer of his time, had assured Johann Peter Eckermann that he “was not uneasy about the unity of Germany,” since “our good high roads and future railroads will of themselves do their part.”
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In particular, they integrated national markets or even created them where none had existed before. This is most visible in regional price differentials: today a loaf of bread costs more or less the same across a national economy. In 1870 wheat prices varied by as much as 69 percent between New York City and Iowa, but by 1910 this had fallen to 19 percent.
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The internationalism of the railroad leaps to the eye in Europe, where the confluence of national networks into a single (almost) continent-wide network was a major achievement.
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It brought pan-European norms, such as a degree of timetable discipline and punctuality, and standardized many travel experiences. But since railroads could not cross the seas—even Napoleon's vision of a Channel tunnel was realized only in 1994—their
globalizing
effect was rather limited. The Trans-Siberian too, with its low passenger volumes, was no more than a modern Silk Route: a thin strip linking regions across huge distances, without joining them together into a quantitatively significant network. The Asian railroad systems remained unconnected with one another (the sole exception being the Siberia—Manchuria—Korea route). The Indian system, blocked to the north by the Himalayas, was never extended as far as Afghanistan, so that Russia would not have a gateway for an invasion of the Subcontinent; to this day, Afghanistan remains a country virtually without railroad facilities. Insofar as the railroads were instruments of “railroad imperialism,” there was no need—outside India—to build them up into European-style national systems encompassing places of lesser strategic and economic importance.
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In Europe, governments ensured that railroad policy was conducted in the national interest. For a whole century the railroads were a focus of rivalry between France and Germany,
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and their significance for troop mobilizations played a major role in conflict scenarios prior to the First World War. In large parts of the world, however—Latin America (except Argentina, which had a large network centered on Buenos Aires), Central Asia, and Africa—the train never had as great an impact on society as it did in western Europe, the United States, India, or Japan. Traditional forms of travel (walking, cart, or caravan) went unchallenged for a long time and had many advantages over the more expensive and inflexible railroad. Asian or African societies that had for good reason always been wheel-less remained so for the time being.
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Indeed, it was not unusual for these regions to skip the railroad age, passing directly from human or animal motive power to the all-terrain vehicle and propeller-driven aircraft. Where railroads existed, their integrative effect sometimes remained weak because of the looseness of connections with rivers, canals, and highways. Tsarist transportation policy wagered everything on the train after the 1860s, but it neglected to construct paved feeder roads. The age-old impenetrability of the Russian and Siberian wastes therefore changed little, and huge regional variations in transport costs were a sure sign of the low level of integration.
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Cabling the World

The total length of submarine cables grew from 4,400 kilometers in 1865 to 406,300 kilometers in 1903.
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Cable laying in the last four decades of the nineteenth century created a planetary network, ushering in a telegraph age that would last several decades until long-distance telephony became reasonably affordable.
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For the first time in history, private correspondence involved a mixture of different media: handwritten or (from the 1870s onward) typed letters, interspersed with terse telegrams. Only in the last quarter of the twentieth century did the fax, e-mail, and mobile phone seal the fate of telegraphy.

The cabling of the world was an extraordinary feat, since it meant laying thousands of miles of thick, specially coated cable under the ocean waves, while the logistics on land was often not much more straightforward. It did not, unlike canal or railroad construction, require a huge deployment of manpower, and the technology was less invasive in urban environments. By the mid-eighties, the globe was, quite literally, wired up. In addition to the transoceanic cables, there were the much more numerous links over shorter distances: every medium-sized city, at least in Europe and North America, had its telegraph office, and the lonely operator in a godforsaken station in the Midwest became a stock-in-trade of later Hollywood movies. Rail track and telecommunication cables were often laid together, partly because a train was more or less essential to repair broken wires in remote areas. In Australia the first telegraph actually came into operation a few months before the first railroad line.
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The basic principle of telecommunication is that dematerialized information travels faster than people or objects.
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This goal may be achieved in various ways. In the nineteenth century, the great new medium with a globalizing effect was the telegraph, not the telephone. The history of the latter began three or four decades later with the opening of exchanges in New York (1877–78) and Paris (1879), soon to be followed by interurban connections (United States in 1884, France in 1885). At first it did not mean the creation of an intercontinental network. The telephone, as it developed in the late seventies, still had a very short range and was limited to intra-urban communication—and a city like Shanghai, where it was introduced in the 1881, sported only a handful of devices. Its early history is overwhelmingly American.
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In the 1880s and 1890s its potential increased not only within but also between cities; then technological progress speeded up after 1900, and once again after 1915. However, links between North America and the rest of the world were not possible until the 1920s, became reliable only in the 1950s, and could be afforded by ordinary individuals only from the late 1960s on. The original technology was developed almost entirely at Bell Laboratories, and subsequently AT&T enjoyed a kind of monopoly insofar as that was possible under antitrust legislation. Bell and AT&T held the key patents and marketed them internationally.

The national telephone networks that sprang up in the early twentieth century were nearly all state monopolies, and sometimes, as in Latin American countries, governments gave preference to state-run telegraphy.
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Where it came into use early on, the telephone was a tool for people who had also rapidly adopted the telegraph. The first user groups were New York stock dealers, who soon learned to handle the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell.
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Batch production of Thomas Alva Edison's later model began only in 1895. By 1900 one in 60 people in the United States owned a telephone; the figures for Sweden, France, and Russia were one in 115, one in 1216, and one in 7000, respectively. Such an important institution as the Bank of England had just connected up for the first time.
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In 1900 the United States was on the way to becoming a telephone society, as the use of telegrams for private messages was on the decline; in Europe the new device made its mark only after the First World War.

It took an unusually long time for the technology to result in a fully operational network. National systems were generally in existence by the late 1920s, but for political rather than technical reasons several more decades passed before it was possible to have a reasonably comfortable international conversation. The fact that a public telephone company was established (in 1882 in India, 1899 in Ethiopia, and 1908 in Turkey) says little about the actual significance of the medium in a country's life.
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It turned out to be unsuited for many of the purposes for which it was developed. In 1914, for example, the wired field telephony of the German army could not keep up with advances on the Western front, while the few radio telephones were not up to the task. Technology was therefore unable to provide the rapid and precise coordination of troop movements that the Schlieffen Plan required for the decisive breakthrough.
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