from The Economist, December 31, 1999.

         Talking to the world

         NO REVOLUTIONS in technology have as visibly marked the human condition as those in
         transport. Moving goods and people, they have opened continents, transformed living standards,
         spread diseases, fashions and folk around the world. Yet technologies to transport ideas and
         information across long distances have arguably achieved even more: they have spread
         knowledge, the basis of economic growth.
             The most basic of all these, the written word, was already ancient by 1000. By then China had, in
         basic form, the printing press, using carved woodblocks. But the key to its future, movable metal
         type, was four centuries away. The Chinese were hampered by their thousands of ideograms.
         Even so, they quite soon invented primitive movable type, made of clay, and by the 13th century
         they had movable wooden type. But the real secret was the use of an easily cast metal.
             When it came, Europe—aided by simple western alphabets—leapt forward with it. One reason
         why Asia’s civilisations, in 1000 far ahead of Europe’s, then fell behind was that they lacked the
         technology to reproduce and diffuse ideas. On Johannes Gutenberg’s invention in the 1440s were
         built not just the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but Europe’s agricultural and industrial
         revolutions too.
             Yet information technology on its own would not have got far. Literally: better transport
         technology too was needed. That was not lacking, but here the big change came much later: it was
         railways and steamships that first allowed the speedy, widespread dissemination of news and
         ideas over long distances. And both technologies in turn required people and organisations to
         develop their use. They got them: for individual communication, the postal service; for wider
         publics, the publishing industry.
             Throughout the 19th century, the postal service formed the bedrock of national and international
         communications. Crucial to its growth had been the introduction of the gummed postage stamp,
         combined with a low price, and payment by the sender (not, as till then, the recipient). Britain put
         all three of these ideas into effect in 1840 (50 years later, alas, than its first plan for a penny post).
             By then, the world’s mail was taking off. It changed the world. Merchants in America’s eastern
         cities used it to gather information, enraging far-off cotton growers and farmers, who found that
         New Yorkers knew more about crop prices than they did. In the American debate about slavery, it
         offered abolitionists a low-cost way to spread their views, just as later technologies have cut the
         cost and widened the scope of political lobbying. The post helped too to integrate the American
         nation, tying the newly opened west to the settled east.
             Everywhere, its development drove and was driven by those of transport. In Britain, travellers
         rode by mail coach to posting inns. In America, the post subsidised road-building. Indeed, argues
         Dan Schiller, a professor of communications at the University of California, it was the connection
         between the post, transport and national integration that ensured that the mail remained a public
         enterprise even in the United States, its first and only government-run communications medium,
         and until at least the 1870s, the biggest organisation in the land. And in most countries—the United
         States was an exception—the carriers of mail became in turn the providers of telegraphy and then
         of telephony.

         Spreading the news

         The change has not only been one of speed and distance, though, but of audience. At the start of
         the millennium, with rare exceptions—kings, chiefs and churchmen—a man’s words could reach
         no further than his voice, not just in range but in whom they reached. Gossip moves fast, be it
         from medieval mouth to ear or mobile phone to phone. But, for some purposes, efficient
         communication is mass communication, regular, cheap, quick and reliable. When it became
         possible it transformed the world. Now one voice could reach distant thousands.
             Of all the mass media, from ancient official or personal inscriptions on stone to today’s satellite
         broadcasts, those printed on paper have had the most profound influence. The book, pamphlet
         and newspaper have spread knowledge (and nonsense), transforming economies, politics and
         religion.
             Before Gutenberg, books—even the reading of them, let alone the ownership—were largely the
         preserve of monks and the rich. Churchmen had their works of devotion; a few bibliophiles,
         thinkers and students were keen to read classical authors. But all had to be copied by scribes, not
         machines. Then came Gutenberg’s device and within 50 years Europe was peppered with around
         9m books, and presses turned in 60 German towns alone. In 1498, 18,000 letters of indulgence
         were printed in a single city, Barcelona. By 1539 Europeans were printing books in the New
         World too.
             From then on, supply and demand boomed. There had to be an audience able to read, of course;
         but the spread of education saw to that. Europe’s rising middle classes, increasingly literate,
         demanded Bibles that they could read themselves in a language they understood, as well as details
         of new philosophic, geographic and scientific discoveries. Printing spread plays and poetry.
             None of this advance just happened. It required printers and in time a new industry, publishers.
         For centuries after Gutenberg, there was little change in the way books were made. Leather covers
         were used, and thick paper. All aspects of the trade were dominated by the printer. He was the
         publisher and retail bookseller as well.
             He was also soon recognised as a potentially subversive force. From the early days of printing the
         church had tried to censor books, drawing up an index of forbidden ones. The Inquisition kept
         authors and printers in line. Philosophers, to prevent their works (or themselves) being burnt, were
         obliged to dedicate them to the proper authorities, even if the rationalist content was actually
         subversive. Monarchs were not far behind the church in their suspicion, requiring books to be
         licensed. And they persisted in this practice far longer than the church could. Writers in
         19th-century Russia repeatedly hit trouble with the censors; their 20th-century successors were to
         hit it worse.
             The censors were too late. Already the 18th century, and then, above all, the industrial revolution,
         had changed the world of books. Demand for books and learning—and distraction—exploded.
         With improved transport and better technology, the 19th century took books to the masses,
         novels to young ladies and texts to the new universities. Writers, printers and distributors were no
         longer bound together. “Literature for the millions,” promised Archibald Constable, a gifted
         bookseller and an owner of the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the start of that century. By the end of
         it, 6,000 new titles were being published annually in Britain alone.
             As with books, the spread of newspapers had a profound effect on European society. The first
         ones, in the late Middle Ages, specialised in commercial news, mainly from abroad. But by the
         time of the English civil war in the mid-17th century, there were some 300 newspapers reporting
         the battles from one side or the other. A sign of newspapers’ importance from an early date is the
         effort governments made to restrict their sale, through taxes or simple repression. Britain’s
         18th-century Stamp Act was known as a “tax on knowledge”. The first country to guarantee press
         freedom was Sweden, in 1766.
             With the industrial revolution newspapers were transformed from campaigning pamphlets or
         carriers of specialist knowledge to big business. New technology brought down costs:
         hand-driven presses gave way to steam-driven ones, and then electric ones. By the late 19th
         century newspapers could be produced by the hundred thousand in a few hours. Their nature also
         changed, and their price. The tabloid press was born, its taste for scandal, exposure of
         wrong-doing, hard-hitting editorials and smooth fabrication no less then than now: the Hearst
         press worked hard to start the United States’ 1898 war with Spain; the London Daily Mirror
         savaged the lack of lifeboats on the sunken Titanic.

         The electric message

         What we now call “hard copy” has continued essentially unchanged since Gutenberg. Letters are
         still written, books bound, newspapers—mostly—printed and distributed much as they ever were.
         But meanwhile, communication, individual and collective, has been revolutionised by electricity.
             The first telegraph was mechanical: a tower with movable arms whose positions could be read
         from afar with a telescope. In 1794, a line of these carried news of a battle within an hour of its
         end 210km from Lille to Paris. Over the next 40 years, such lines fanned out across Europe*.
             Then, in 1816, one Francis Ronalds, who had built a primitive electric telegraph in his west
         London garden, suggested the idea to the British navy. Any kind of telegraph, he was told, was
         “wholly unnecessary”. Not till 1839 did two British inventors, William Cooke and Charles
         Wheatstone, open a commercial electric telegraph along a 21km stretch of railway from London.
         Samuel Morse, an American, had also been working on telegraphy, and by 1838 had perfected his
         code. A wired world was on its infant feet.
             “The telegraph should be an instrument of politics, not of commerce,” snorted France’s minister
         of the interior in 1847. In vain: it transformed commerce. Indeed in the United States, thanks to the
         high charges of private companies, its use was almost entirely commercial. Railways used it to run
         their single-track lines safely; salesmen to transmit orders; market-men of every kind to learn
         prices, buy and sell; isolated farmers to send for spare parts; shipowners, once undersea cables
         had been laid—the first transatlantic one in 1858—to tell their captains where cargo was to be
         found.
             Next the telephone, initially greeted almost as sceptically as the telegraph. “Too many
         shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. Inherently of no value to
         us,” said Western Union in an internal memo, after being offered Alexander Graham Bell’s patent
         for $100,000. By 1910 the world had 7m telephones; by 1950, about 51m; by 1990, 520m; and
         today around 1 billion—plus almost 500m mobile phones, not 20 years after they came into use
         (and AT&T misjudged their commercial future, much as Western Union had erred a century
         before). These too have brought a new dimension to communication: suddenly, mankind can talk
         to the world from car, street, field or swimming-pool. More than that, mobiles have brought the
         telephone to millions in poor countries, where land lines were and often still are hard to come by.
             Yet it had not been immediately clear what the telephone’s best use would be. A service was set
         up in Budapest in 1893 to provide what one might call on-line news and entertainment,
         interspersed with advertising. In the evening it offered a children’s programme and lessons in
         English and French; on Sunday a grand concert. At its peak, in the 1920s and 1930s, the service
         had more than 10,000 subscribers, and it died only in 1944.

         The broadcasters

         That, briefly, was the first mass-communication by electrical means, a role soon to be
         monopolised by wireless. But the first use of wireless was for “telegraphy” at sea (the Titanic’s
         set was used mainly for passengers to keep in touch with land). And transatlantic telephone calls
         went by radio until the first submarine telephone cable to carry them was laid in 1956. In the early
         years of this century, AT&T saw radio as a potential threat to its landline network. Only now has
         that threat become real, as voice calls migrate to wireless (while television broadcasts,
         paradoxically, increasingly go by cable). By the 1920s, when radio shares were booming as madly
         as Internet shares were doing recently, AT&T had changed its mind and tried to become a big fish
         in broadcasting (only to bow out rapidly, to dodge antitrust lawsuits).
             The radio wave was soon to find its true vocation: as a mass medium, to rival the centuries-old
         newspaper press, and, with added entertainment, to outstrip it. This was especially true in the
         United States. Other countries, with their state-owned telegraph and telephone services, moved
         naturally on to state broadcasting. America allowed a ferment of competition to grow into a
         handful of (regulated) private networks. At first their broadcasts were subsidised from sales of
         radios, to get customers to buy the set. Then they invented the radio commercial.
             With it, communications were changing commerce yet again. National brands, which national
         magazines had begun to build, flourished on the back of national broadcast entertainment. As
         commercial radio and then television arose, so did whole new industries: advertising agencies,
         programme makers, public-relations consultants, stars. Hollywood’s bread and butter has long
         come from television; films are the jam.
             The step up from radio to television may seem an essentially technical one, however brilliant as
         such. Not so. A picture really is, in some respects, worth a thousand words, as magazines like
         Life had long since proved; and now the newsreel, once reserved to cinema-goers, was available
         in any home in any rich country at the turn of a switch. Television could shape politics, and did,
         witness American reaction to the Vietnam war. And, increasingly, “the news” is what happens on
         camera. Off camera, it just didn’t happen.
             Or if editors choose not to show it. Happily, though, satellite and cable broadcasting are changing
         that balance: no longer need viewers, even in some closed societies, rely on a monopoly, state-run
         broadcaster.
             Technology has also now brought the most potent tool of communication ever available to the
         individual. Using e-mail or website, he or she can now publish, to one recipient, to hundreds, to
         tens of thousands. The noise about the web is all about its use for selling and buying. Huge
         changes it will bring. But the best change may be a new empowerment of the individual; a return to
         pre-Gutenberg days, when one man’s voice could reach as far as almost any other.