Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1857-1900

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Between 1857 and 1866 the public's attention was caught by the drama of the repeated attempts to lay a submarine cable across the Atlantic for the transmission of telegraphic messages. Over subsequent decades, a range of technical constraints led to concerted scientific endeavour to overcome obstacles in the sending of messages electronically. This project draws on discussions of twenty-first century digital culture and its limit points to establish why it is that the scrambling of messages was as significant for Victorian culture at large as the sending of flawless messages. It is our hypothesis that pleasures and excitements produced by the new technology were productive of new cultural forms in literary writing and fine art. These cultural forms adopt at one and the same time the emotional repertoire proper to heedless, abstract technophilia and that associated with an uneasy recognition of recalcitrant materiality.The enquiry will move between material objects and conceptual ideas. We will ask what were the particular practices and sensations generated by telegraphic communication. We will ask what was the range of British public commentary and graphic imagery produced in response to the drama and developing technology associated with the telegraph. A doctoral study on Victorian illustration and graphic reportage (embedded in the research project) will lend a specific dimension to our engagement with issues of news, and information. A second embedded doctoral study on the short story will address general questions of abbreviation and seriality. In addition to the public commentary on science and communications technology the project will work with scientific papers, the principles and forms of the instruments used for telegraphy and the scientific investigations that drove telegraphy. The project will transform the cataloguing and web presentation of the Wheatstone Collection of scientific papers and instruments held by KCL. Wheatstone (1802-1875) was a pioneer in the technologies of the telegraph. We will consider apparatus and instruments such as the induction relay, galvanometers, voltaic batteries and telegraph transmitters and receivers, and indeed the armoured cable itself in terms of their functions and materials. We will draw on archival materials associated with the development of the telegraph. The problems exercising inventors and technicians will offer us sets of opposing terms with which to look into Victorian culture such as proximity/distance and conductivity/impedence.We will ask whether the artistic form itself is subject to some of the processes and parameters that we have identified by means of key terms. What would compression, stretchiness or splicing, for instance, mean in the case of the novel or in the case of the short story? What would sequence, seriality or heat production mean in the case of mythological painting or landscape examples? We will approach the turn to the ornamental in late Victorian art asking whether it can be taken as evidence of a new logic of seriality predicated on the one-message-at-a time capability of the telegraph. Is the possibility of sequential encryption and decryption routinely adopted in telegraph-age literary and artistic culture? A focus on the associations and imaginings attendant on the telegraph will make it possible for us as scholars to acknowledge genre distinctions and attend to the specificities of different media and audiences but at the same time to develop interdisciplinary arguments of broad significance about Victorian culture.