Episode 7 — From Energy to Information: The Arteries of Civilization Open

May 24, 1844. The United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.

Samuel Morse sat down at the telegraph. His fingers were trembling. Years of failure, a shortage of funds, the cold shoulder of Congress. The moment he had staked everything on had arrived. The wire ran sixty-four kilometers, from Washington to Baltimore. At the far end of the copper line, Alfred Vail was waiting. Morse began to tap the telegraph key. Click, click, click. Short and long signals flowed along the wire. In the blink of an eye, a reply came back from Baltimore.

For the first time in human history, information broke free of the speed at which humans could travel.

The message was a verse from the Bible: What hath God wrought. With these words, Morse suggested that he had gone beyond mere technical success and touched the domain of God. In an age when nothing was faster than light, the electrical signal rendered the constraints of space powerless. Faster than a horse, faster than a train, faster than the wind.

If the first half of the Industrial Revolution is represented by the steam engine, the second half is represented by the telegraph and electricity. If the steam engine replaced human muscle, the telegraph was the first attempt to begin replacing the human nervous system.

The steam engine moved atoms. It burned coal to boil water, pushed pistons with the pressure of steam, and turned wheels to haul goods. It was the movement of matter. But the telegraph moved electrons. The electrical signal flowing over the copper wire carried information alone, without any movement of matter. This was the moment the arteries of civilization were opened.

Imagine it. Until then, news traveled at the speed of a horse. Word of who had won or lost a war took weeks to reach the capital. Stock prices were delivered by post, and a merchant had to wait until the next ship arrived. Information was always a thing of the past. The present was always locally isolated.

But the telegraph made the present simultaneous.

London stock prices could be checked in real time in New York. War orders were relayed instantly from the home country to the front. News that broke in the morning was reported on another continent by evening. Time was released from the constraints of space. This fundamentally changed the speed of capitalism. Capital began to move at the speed of information. Information soon became money.

Electricity flowed into the factory as well.

The steam engine produced power from a single large central engine and transmitted it to each machine through belts and pulleys. The layout of the factory was subordinate to the position of the engine. But electricity made it possible to attach a motor to every machine. Factory design became free, and efficiency was maximized. Even at night the factory was bright. The light bulb encroached even on sleep, the biological rhythm of the human body. The human being became an entity that could operate twenty-four hours a day.

This, too, was an important turning point in the externalization of human functions.

If printing externalized memory, the steam engine externalized muscle. And electricity was the externalization of the nerve signal. The electrical signal that travels from the human brain to the fingertips moved another machine hundreds of kilometers away through a copper wire. Human intention began to act instantly, transcending physical distance.

Civilization now began to look like a single enormous organism.

Factories pumped like a heart, railroads carried matter like arteries, and telegraph lines transmitted information like nerves. Cities served as the brain of this organism. Human beings functioned as the cells of this vast system. Each performed its own role and contributed to the maintenance of the system.

But there was still a limit here.

The telegraph was fast, but it still required human operation. Learning Morse code, tapping the key, interpreting the message — all of it had to pass through the human brain. The information was analog. It could be distorted by noise on the wire, and its transmission capacity was limited. The nervous system had been opened, but the signals it carried were still bound to the processing speed of the biological brain.

The body of civilization had grown enormous, and its nervous system had been rapidly connected. But the brain that controlled and judged all of it was still confined within the skull of each individual human.

Millions of machines turned and hundreds of millions of pieces of information passed back and forth, yet synthesizing it all and making decisions depended on the capacity of the individual human. This created a bottleneck. The body and the nerves were already networked, but the brain was still isolated.

This mismatch demanded the next revolution.

As the nervous system grew too fast, the brain could no longer keep up with its speed. Information overflowed, but the capacity to process it fell short. Humans wanted a faster calculator, a faster analyst. They began to convert analog signals into digital and to prepare to delegate human judgment to machines.

If electricity had opened the arteries of civilization, the next step was to change the nature of the information flowing through those arteries. From the continuous analog signal to the discontinuous digital signal. From the language of humans to the language of machines.

In the middle of the twentieth century, as the extension of the body neared completion, humanity once again faced its own limits. This time it was not the limit of the nerves but the limit of the brain. Why, with all this information, do we still judge so slowly? Why can we not solve complex problems without calculating them ourselves?

After the liberation of connection came the liberation of intelligence. The electrical signals on the wire began to turn into zeros and ones, and inside the vacuum tubes electrons began to dance. Everything was ready to implant a digital brain into the body of the Industrial Revolution.

Next: Chapter 3. The Acceleration of Connection — The Information Revolution | Zeros and Ones: Replicating Analog Humanity in Digital.