Part #204: Six Against One
“Dear Dave,
Heard it on the grapevine that somebody blabbed about that business at the Bernese Embassy. All above board of course but you know what it could look like. Best get our stories straight before the IndyMerc runs with it, aydub? Meet you at the usual place seven thirty on the 14th. PS I’ll be wearing THAT dress.
Kate x.”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
NOTE: This was a dot matrix printout of gibberish, clearly a code. Indentations indicated that the reader had been decoding it on another piece of paper but at one point had accidentally let the two overlap so traces of a few words of the actual message were left detectable on the original printout. This was enough for our analysts to crack the code and reproduce the intended message. – THANDE INSTITUTE FOOTNOTE
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(Dr. David Wostyn)
—and also remember I’ve been formatting the global technology overview parts as ‘interludes’, you didn’t lose the format template did you—
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From: “Those Were The Days: The Nineteenth Century and its Lessons Today” by Sir H. P. Willoughby (Kt.) (2004)—
Every book that writes about the period 1854-1896 seems determined to begin by debunking the name Long Peace. And indeed it is inappropriate, but we should not dismiss the reasons why it was adopted in the first place. Obviously this name for this 42-year age, a couple of generations, was coined in retrospect, when the titular Peace had come to and end with the Pandoric War and the ‘new dark age of chaos and uncertainty’ that it heralded. At the time, commentators mainly spoke of the period’s prosperity coupled to rising inequality. Some, especially in the UPSA, called it a Golden Age: in retrospect this was changed to mocking terms such as Gilded Age to imply that the supposed glory had only been a thin coating with hollowness beneath. The Long Peace was a time when across the world the gap between rich and poor widened. This was not to say there was no social mobility, for many of the traditionally wealthy groups such as the old established aristocracy and churches fell into ruin while the ‘nouveau riche’, industrialists and merchants and the like, rose to take their place. This was not entirely a new thing, of course: men had been buying their way into the aristocracy thanks to a fortune made in trade for centuries, it was for example how the Pitt family in Britain obtained their status. But in the Long Peace this process accelerated considerably and overturned the social order in many countries. At the same time, much of the proletariat remained in a poor condition and grew increasingly envious of their ‘betters’. The old Great Chain of Being had broken down: the new ruling classes and other powerful figures could point to no divine justification for their superior position as the old aristocrats and ecclesiarchy could have, and those at the bottom of the pyramid were becoming increasingly unwilling to put up with their position. Of course, the simplistic proletarian revolutions of the past were considered discredited in many countries. Portugal in particular was considered an abject lesson; every newspaper across Europe and the Americas periodically carried a woodcut of a huge block of stone that the dictator Duarte da Costa erected in Praça da República[1] in Lisbon, bearing his four fundamental principles of the regime:
KILL THE NOBLEMAN
KILL THE PRIEST
KILL THE ALIEN
BREAK THE REST
Faced with that, there was little chance of Neo-Jacobinism being able to gain a foothold as a positive alternative to the inequality of the Long Peace. It would take time for new ways to arise, whether they be those of the Mentians or indeed the Societists. At least the poor could be happy that in this age they would not be conscripted and sent off to war—or could they? The chief criticism of the name Long Peace is that it is an example of Eurocentrism, for the world was scarcely free of warfare in this period. Even in Europe, the Peninsular War demonstrates that peace was hardly universal. But the important thing to realise is that none of these clashes escalated to consume continents or the whole world, as had occurred with the Great American War, Popular Wars, Jacobin Wars or themany conflicts of the eighteenth century. They remained isolated and restricted, chiefly by mutual agreement of the powers: the level of economic integration and exchange between them meant that war was increasingly bad for business. You might turn a quick profit selling weapons and then offering reconstruction for a price, but in the long run a steady and reliable trade system uninterrupted by conflict would pay out more.
So while actual wars did exist in the Long Peace, the public imagination has tended to focus more on the ‘metaphorical’ wars, the ideological and cultural struggles—and the technological ones. Not that these were
entirely metaphorical, as we shall see. The greatest of the technological conflicts was, of course, the Telegraph Wars. The name is scarcely hyperbole. This was a new kind of war, a war fought chiefly not by nations but by corporations (and not the kind of corporations that fought with private armies in India or China). It was a global war of sorts, a war which ultimately put most of civilised humanity on one side or the other. And it raged for about 25 years, from around 1850 to 1875, taking in a large chunk of the Long Peace. It began, of course, with MacLean and Naughtie in 1848. They were not the only electrical inventors worldwide to dimly perceive the potential of electricity for signalling systems, but when their prototype system changed the course of history with the ENA’s bungled attack on Charleston, it immediately occupied the attention of the watching world. Which included the numerous Optel companies criss-crossing the globe, companies which had until this point never had to refer to their product as anything other than ‘telegraphy’, companies which knew there would be trouble.
In 1848 Optel was around fifty years old as a mature technology, having been developed in its modern sense by the Chappe brothers in France at the close of the eighteenth century. From that beginning it had spread across the world, its sheer usefulness meaning that, Francis II of Austria aside, it was rarely included in a list of ‘banned Jacobin French ideas’ by regimes. Simple mechanical paddles evolved to hexameric[2] shutterboxes capable of transmitting huge volumes of information across a country or even a continent at speeds no messenger could match. The complexity of interpreting the system and the codes created a new lease of life for blind people, who followed the example of Derrault and Haüy to escape their former disadvantaged position at the fringes of society. They were suddenly in high demand for their ability, once trained, to quickly recognise and interpret the hexameric shutterbox codes when they were converted to punched tape by a mechanical system of six needles linked to controls operated by a lookout reading the boxes on the next Optel tower along. By the 1840s, European high society included a number of powerful blind people; this had not been entirely unknown before, but they had always been members of existing aristocratic families whose disability was excused, whereas now they included some who had risen up from the gutter to wealth and prosperity thanks to Derrault and Haüy.
Complex Optel networks existed in most countries, generally denser in smaller ones than in larger ones—in the ENA, there was considerable Optel density linking the ‘Arc of Power’ cities which collectively occupied a region similar in size to England, but little in the way of inter-city towers once one went west into the more sparsely populated western hinterland. Much the same was true in the UPSA, though its government paid for a loss-making national system at the end of the 1830s (which, to their annoyance, was soon obsoleted). The one exception to this rule was France, whose wholehearted embrace of the technology under any and all of its political regimes resulted in network maps so densely overlaid with towers that the cities and provinces beneath were barely visible. The remarkable thing about Optel is that it never reached the status of an economic bubble: there were always more messages to carry, almost regardless of the cost: government, corporate, media, personal. The invention of systems that could break down even an image into code (albeit at prohibitive expense considering the length of the code) meant that journalists could transmit sketches and even crude asimcons to their presses from a story in the provinces or even the front line of a war. It didn’t matter. The public lapped it up. Even white elephants[3] like Isambard Brunel’s
Le Colosse captured the public imagination.
“Telegraphy [meaning Optel] has shrunk the world,” wrote Philip Bulkeley in 1843. “One would be forgiven, reading some of the messages published in the papers, for thinking it has also shrunk people’s minds.” The reality, as Bulkeley well knew, was simply that people who had formerly had little means of communication were suddenly in contact with a wider country, a wider world. Young sons from rural villages who had left home to seek their fortune in the city—as had happened in so many previous generations—suddenly were not cut off from their roots, but could stay in regular contact with their parents and family back home. Daughters who married into other families no longer left their birth family behind to the extent they had before. Both groups expanded their horizons compared to their ancestors, possessing more of a sense of context for their own lives—and the alternatives. Can it be a coincidence that this was the era where Cythereanism blossomed, or public literacy and appetite for reading boomed?
Not everyone in 1848 would say that Optel had been a universally good thing for the world. It was certainly becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to adopt the old method of escaping scandal by settling in a town a few dozen miles away under an assumed name. The old established postal systems were almost universally eaten by Optel companies: some countries had never had very organised postal systems in the first place, but in cases like the Thurn und Taxis postal company in the German lands they were subject to hostile takeovers by the powerful Optel companies, in that case Deutsch Telegrafie. China was the only place where the postal system was strongly established and influential enough that it was the Optel towers that were constructed under the auspices of China Imperial Post rather than the other way around. Of course, Optel could not do everything that a physical mail service could: it could not transport packages, for example. In Europe the Optel companies tended to spin off a separate mail service to handle those customers, whereas in the New World the greater distances meant that traditional post was still competitive and mail companies held onto the parcel delivery service.
Nonetheless, in most countries in 1848 Optel was without any significant competition. The breakthrough of MacLean and Naughtie changed everything. The Carolinians attempted to hold onto Lectel as a state secret throughout the Great American War, but the nature of their relationship with the UPSA meant this was futile—especially when the Lectel lines frantically laid down to link Ultima with the front line were often in part constructed by Meridian companies. Furthermore, many experimenters had been along the right lines already and it did not take long for the genie to emerge from the bottle. There could be no chance of the Optel companies suppressing the secret, much as they tried.
A few Optel companies decided to embrace Lectel as an additional service from the start, but most of them tried to suppress it as a competitor. For a couple of decades the newspapers were filled with broadsides delivered by Optel companies condemning Lectel, with scare stories ranging from the vaguely plausible (its messages being easy to intercept) through the questionable (as a Carolinian invention, it only worked if the cables were made with slave labour) to the outright insane (the electrical field off the cables near people’s houses resulted in any number of invented health effects such as cancer, sterility, miscarriages and birth defects). In any historical film set in the late 1850s or early 1860s, the less original directors can easily define the era by beginning with an establishing shot of an angry mob pulling down a set of Lectel cables. The nascent Lectel companies naturally retaliated, but Optel by this point was well-established enough that they could not use the same kind of scare stories. Tales of the Optel companies mistreating their workers, reading secret messages and creaming off profits for their executives might well be true in many cases, but they were less
exciting.
Some aspects of the Telegraph Wars were more rational, however. Many intellectuals would debate the relative merits of the two technologies. Optel’s great advantage was its hexameric system that meant six lines of data were operating at once (potentially more if additional shutterbox assemblies or towers were added). Lectel by contrast only had a single data line, being a unimeric system. Early Lectel systems (especially those set up by the minority of Optel companies that embraced the technology) sometimes tried to emulate the Optel setup with six lines corresponding to the six shutters, but this was generally inefficient, much more costly in terms of cables and vulnerable to the lines being crossed. The more succesful companies used unimeric Bicker code, which in fact dated back to the occasional use of heliography (also limited to a single code line of on or off). This ‘Six Against One’ framing of the argument tended to favour Optel in the minds of the public: six must be better than one, surely?
The advantages of Lectel, on the other hand, were that whereas Optel required periodic towers to transmit on the message over the curvature of the Earth—even if the message was being sent from say Liverpool to London and there was no need for anyone in between to read it—the same task could be achieved by a single uninterrupted Lectel cable with no time penalty for the message to be repeated and re-transmitted in between. This would also of course cut the required personnel numbers considerably—something else which made Lectel hated by Optel employees, especially the enfranchised blind. While Lectel also had use for blind operators, it would require far fewer of them.
Aside from the angry mobs, the Telegraph Wars in the popular imagination are typified by the many great races that proponents of the two methods challenged one another to. In the English-speaking world the most famous are the Sheffield-to-Manchester race of 1862 known as the Hermetic Pennine Challenge, and the American ‘Hughes vs Edwards’ Boston-to-Fredericksburg race of 1863. Optel won the former due to sabotage of the Lectel line by a paid-off farmer in Penistone, illustrating the dirty tricks often employed by both sides. In the American contest a year later, on the other hand, it was initially announced that the Lectel message had arrived an hour after its Optel counterpart...only for the judges then to reveal that in fact the Lectel had arrived hours before that, and the second Lectel message was the result of an additional copy ‘accidentally’ being transmitted to Highbank and bouncing back via Losantiburg. This clever move by the Lectel company in question, Hughes’ Franklingraph Inc. (escaping the accusation that Lectel was a Carolinian invention by cunningly pointing to Benjamin Franklin’s connection to electrical research and daring the Optel rivals to call Franklin un-American) meant the public became aware that while Lectel and Optel were comparable in speed over short distances in the Arc of Power, when it came to a message into the west, Lectel could achieve things that Optel could not dream of. Hughes vs Edwards is often rather chauvinistically cited as the end of the Telegraph Wars by Americans: obviously in other countries it was other incidents that tipped things towards Lectel. Some countries remained firmly wedded to Optel, such as France for national patriotic reasons, which would only allow Lectel to be run as a supplementary service by its additional Optel networks, and Portugal, which even after the counter-revolution in 1867 was run by a regime which wanted to be able to read all its citizens’ messages, and thought Optel easier to intercept than Lectel. In the 1890s when Portugal finally opened up to the world again, its ‘quaint’ surviving Optel network became something of a nostalgic tourist attraction.
The other great advantage of Lectel over Optel was that it could cross water far more easily. The Channel Skybridge, the floating balloons (and then steerables) equipped with miniature Optel setups that allowed messages to be transmitted from Britain to France and vice versa, had always been an expensive proposition. It had been hurt by the Inglorious Revolution and following insularity of the People’s Kingdom meaning there was less message traffic across the Channel, but it was just about recovered by the early 1850s—when Lectel spelled its death knell. The Skybridge company was unwilling to go down without a fight, however, and while at least two of the early Channel submarine Lectel cables appear to have failed ‘naturally’, some other cases seemed rather suspicious. In 1866 a Skybridge-operated ship was seized in Calais and found to contain a secret compartment equipped with an ironshark similar in design to the original Watson machine from the Great American War, but equipped with a giant pair of remote-operated shears as its weapon. The incident shocked society, not that the Optel companies wouldn’t sink to those depths (no pun intended) but that a weapon whose ‘uncivilised’ status was still hotly debated for use by national navies had fallen into the hands of a corporate entity. The affair ended with the Skybridge company being split and nationalised by the British and French governments, then eventually sold off and reinvented as a ferry company. In 1980 replica Skybridge steerables were built by the eccentric enthusiast Randolph Peavey, who now holds a Skybridge historical festival once a year despite the controversy surrounding the company’s dying years.
The Channel submarine cable was one of the first to be completed (coming at around the same time as the Øresund cable linking Zealand to Scania) but began an avalanche of similar projects, from the relatively modest East Florida to Cuba link in 1870 to the dramatic Transatlantic Lectel Company which, after a false start, finally linked North America to Europe in 1876.[4] By the year 1886, Lectel cables were linking the world as even Optel could not have dreamed of: but there was a price. Every hunter can be come the hunted. Optel had eaten the old mail services, and Lectel had eaten Optel: but in a quiet laboratory in Copenhagen, a man named Christian Ilsted was conducting experiments to analyse controversial new theories in physics, theories about there being invisible ‘colours’ of light beyond those visible by the eye. To prove they existed, he would need a means of detecting them. And, as Ilsted dashed off Lectel messages to his colleagues speaking of promising results, he little dreamed he would provide the predator to the medium he used.
Photel was coming...
[1] OTL’s Afonso de Albuquerque Square
[2] Six-bit, i.e. there are six shutters each capable of being either open (0) or shut (1).
[3] OTL this term only dates from the nineteenth century, but given public knowledge of Siam in TTL is if anything greater, parallel evolution has made Europe aware of it here as well.
[4] For comparison, in OTL a transatlantic cable was first laid in 1858 but soon failed, and communications were not restored until 1866.
