Marconi #1

I'm reading Marconi by Mark Laboy (link). It's a biography of Guglielmo Marconi, who invented wireless communication. He is often credited with inventing the radio. His invention made the radio possible, but the claim is only partly true.

Pages 34-9 describe the technology of communication and its effects prior to Marconi's invention of wireless communication.

"Gutenburg's invention of movable type, in the mid-fifteenth century, was arguably the most important single development in communication technology of the past thousand years, in terms of its impact on the struggles for unhindered human expression and the corresponding attempts to exercise social and political control over it. Coupled with the spread of literacy, the printing press enabled the Protestant Revolution, among many other revolutions of modernity. But the thing about literacy, British cultural theorist Raymond Williams once wrote, is that you cannot teach someone to read the Bible without also, simultaneously and unintentionally, empowering them to read less holy tracts" (34).

"The "press" ... was by its very nature oppositional and mobilizational, encouraging and enfranchising individuals, and their publishers, to act more effectively as political citizens. Governments became more obsessed with a sense that they needed to control the press and,  not surprisingly, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1788, stated that Congress shall make no law interfering with freedom of the press. ... By the early nineteenth century, the press was a toll not only for democrats but for all sorts of propagandists as well" (35).

"[T]he introduction of the most important communication technology since the Gutenburg printing press [was] electrical wired telegraphy. By the 1830's, large commercial press interests as well as a new type of company, the national news agency, started to emerge. Press technology could operate as well on a very small scale as on a large one. Getting one's hands on a small printing press and using it to go into business or politics was not beyond the reach of entrepreneurs or activists. Telegraphy was another matter. Telegraphy was a complex technology, requiring huge capital investment; therefore access to it was regulated either by companies or governments, or, more typically, both. With the telegraph, for the first time, there was a separation of means and message, and the emergence of a belief that the tremendous power bestowed by ownership and control over the means of communication had to be offset by responsibilities.
    Another new feature of telegraphy was that messages sent along telegraph lines did not recognize national borders. (Neither did carrier pigeons, which is one reason it took some time for telegraphy to catch on.) ...
    The mail had to physically cross a border. Not so with the telegraph. ...
    Wired telegraphy had some significant limitations, however. It did not reach everywhere, and often needed to be combined with another, usually more primitive, form of communication. To send someone a "telegram," or "wire," one needed, first, to get the message to a local office. Then, at the other end, someone had to deliver it by hand to the intended receiver. There were issues of security and confidentiality" (35-37).

Wired telegraphy's language was Morse code.

"After the first international underwater cable was laid between Dover, England, and Calais, France, in 1850, the idea of a transatlantic cable started to take shape. ...
    The cable-based global communication infrastructure expanded ten-fold between 1870 and 1900, and double again in the next decade" (37-38).