Krajewski 2014
Krajewski, Markus. World projects : global information before World War I. 2014.
in the second half of the nineteenth century, big business no longer ori- ents itself according to national borders. The age of corporations begins, and they pursue their business in the international setting and thus build new commercial empires.
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As the laying of railroad ties was accompanied by the erection of telegraph poles, the deep sea cable was sunk beneath the main routes of the steamboat lines to produce “direct exchange of thought” 1across continents. What remains decisive for the development of media such as the railroad, telegraphy, steamboat travel, or mail is the fact that they can hardly be described independently of one another. Rather, they intertwine even during their respective formation, dovetail, must be synchronized or adapted to one another, so that at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, a proper multimedia sys- tem evolves from different networks that produces specific effects.
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Along with the gradually solidifying network of steamboat lines that brought Europe into more regular contact with other parts of the world than sailboats had previously been capable of, the foundation emerged for an international infrastructure on which economic, personal, and infor- mational exchange would be based.
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The nautical network doesn’t only demand the possibility of connec- tions to the railway. The railway also serves as an example with regard to regularity and timing of travel.
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…the gradual shaping of a global nau- tical network, the frequency of its schedules, and the continual connec- tion to remote parts of the world are governed by a different set of laws than the demand for vacant seats for passengers. For the formation of new shipping lines that link each port in this way into a network of con- nections that encompasses the entire globe obeys the primacy of the postal system. It is a conditio sine qua non that an inconspicuous sign is attached to each transmission, which by its simple presence is neverthe- less meant to standardize entire empires.
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As a result of the Universal Postal Union, not only do the principal transmission possibilities condense into a multi- media system consisting of people, goods, and information to be deliv- ered but rather, according to another hypothesis, the upturn in the use of the term world itself begins to demonstrate its impact. The Universal Postal Union contributes like almost no other institution to the notion of Welt being brought into circulation as a model prefix.
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…the cable companies—in contrast to other indus- tries under high industrial conditions—already form comparatively early cartels, which, because of the multinational orientation of oceanic teleg- raphy, always operate internationally and thereby globally. Thus world- wide networking follows the paradox of expansion with simultaneous centralization.
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…surren- dered the power of temporal control to the means of transport. Time in the nineteenth century finds itself firmly in the grasp of railroad corpora- tions. And if with each change along the route the operating company of the rail connection also changes, and thus the reference point for time, this poses difficulties for the traveler.
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…since 1880, the unified time for each locale in all of England has been the “railway time,” which, for its part, had already been standardized among the various corpo- rations three decades before. The United States likewise expanded the points of local time to flat areas and, in 1883, divided the approximately eighty railway times of its states into four zones…
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It is the absence of an inconspicuous letter (lowercase a) on a timetable that turns out to be the cause for a train’s failure to appear, upon which—in this case the object of desire—Fleming waits in vain in the backwoods Irish town of Bandoran in June 1876. Four months after he waited for twelve unpleasant hours in the train station at Bandoran, from 5:35 p.m. to 5:35 a.m., Sandford Fleming produced a plan that would take the sim- ple exchange of a signifier as cause to transform the complex administra- tive framework consisting of various time designations, which in coun- tries other than England were complicated even before the idiosy…
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of railway time and its many clocks, into a worldwide definition.
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Following the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884, the politicians in Washington ultimately only spared particular local times of his unified concept. Albeit coordinated to a standard day and divided into twenty- four time zones, they were nevertheless oriented according to political boundaries and not—as the engineer had planned—according to a rigid, geometrical system of longitude.
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In the second half of the nineteenth century, traffic interconnects into a network that, on one hand, is persistently expanding to establish its func- tionality in ever finer branches, ultimately with worldwide scope. On the other hand, this network called global transport systematically smoothes the principal difference of locomotion by land or sea…
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Or asked differently: what experiences on a regional level permit the projector to carry his plans over to worldwide scale. What mechanism provides for the transition from the local to the global?
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What is decisive is that global transit as a system offers a multitude of “possible transport connections” (Voigt 1965, 1067) at every junction, at each of its switch points.
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In other words, under the conditions of global transit, the itinerary of a journey can rely on a hitherto unknown contingency of routes that ultimately promise to bring everything together.
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Through the development of the transit system, the geography of Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is quite gradu- ally integrated in the form of stagecoach routes, but all the more rapidly in the nineteenth century under the conditions of the railway, steam- ship, and telegraphy. The timetable can be understood as a symbol of this expansive consolidation. Thus a small theory of the timetable should now be developed by means of a brief historical derivation, to outline the expansion of the individual, disconnected itineraries into a supra- regional compendium that spans continents, to characterize the process from route to connectivity as an interconnection of the world (of transit) in paperback fo…
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The timetable developed in an initial step from the compilation of indi- vidual itineraries into a compendium that, initially stemming from a few main routes, listed the possible connections and the corresponding transfers to the destinations along the main line. The basis of this devel- opment is the establishment of the Ordinari mail after 1530, a system dependent on regularity, permanence, and publicity that, unlike before, brought the cities of central Europe together through a network of postal stations for every man at the behest of a client or, as the case may be, according to the exclusive instruction of a prince.
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…the postal service begins to normalize the early modern space-time frame- work, in that it makes the stretch of road from one stage of the journey to the next calculable. A post was fifteen kilometers, or two hours. 9This standardization forms the foundation for the predictability of routes and simultaneously makes it possible, barring potential disruptions in the form of muddy roads after a storm, for example, to publicize itineraries with increasing precision.
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…the precision of departure times climbs from the listing of days, which was previously common, to hourly events. Around 1820, the express mail service then began to use minute-by-minute scheduling— still before the existence of railroads. Thus the timetable with entries in minutes traces its origin back to the itinerary of the express mail.
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10With this more exact synchronization at the latest, the route directories begin to convey the impression of a news and travel infrastructure that is as regular as it is supraregional.
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Rather, this effect stems equally from another process: spatial expansion.
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As a rule, however, the com- pendia of itineraries encompass a territory that coincides with national borders, as in France, Italy, or England.
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Over the course of the nineteenth century, the timetable begins to gather a whole ensemble of media as, in addition to the mail and rail- way routes, selected (mail) steamship lines and telegraph connections also appear.
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This exemplary inter- play can be seen in Hendschel’s Telegraph, the 1847 postal timetable of Ulrich Friedrich Hendschel, a destitute Hessian postal worker, or in its “official” successor, the Imperial Timetable of 1878.
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By combining the trans- port services of the patchwork rug that is central Europe into a fiction of transport–technological unity, people like Hendschel or Friedrich List ([1833] 1897), with his “Railway-System,” configure a dominion that must subsequently only be christened as the German Reich.
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In the same year as Hendschel, his British counterpart George Bernard Shaw (1801–53) publishes the first edition of his well-known—even to Phileas Fogg— Continental Railway Guide. Continuously expanded and updated, this handbook appears after 1847 and initially contains the itineraries of the European continental railways, which praise their own precision in the …
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Thus the Continental Railway Guide serves in a certain
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sense as a consistently expansive (parallel to colonial gains) international extension of Bradshaw’s Monthly General Railway and Steam Navigation Guide for Great Britain and Ireland, which documents the departure times of British (and Irish) transportation as of December 1841. Thus the world is deconstructed into two editions, one for the British Isles and the other for the rest.
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The uninterrupted routes that emanate from a junction like London denote the most important trusses, in that they bring the foun- dation of an empire into contact with its colonies. They establish chan- nels of power in a fashion that is as strategically advantageous as it is transport–technologically efficient: channels like in Suez, but above all channels of communication.
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That a canal is more than simply a vista for the transport of (human as well as information–technological) broadcast entities can be seen particularly well in the opening of the Suez Canal, which emerged for its part as a proper media ensemble.
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After its completion in 1869, the Suez Canal appears in the singular. However, it has actually always consisted of a highly integrated media ensemble, a diverse arrangement of various canals: “A telegraph wire runs through from Port Said to Suez, following…
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At its ends and junctions, the canal establishes cities from the drawing board and infrastructure like mail stations, rail- way stations, or harbors, in this case, Port Said or—midway between stations—Ismailia. This development can easily be abstracted from the shipping canal in Suez and conceived of as a general effect of (commu- nications) channels. A canal rarely comes alone. 14New hubs parasitize it, which in turn result in new channels, and so on.
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The determi- nants of the timetable are emancipated from rigid geographical circum- stances in favor of quickly accessible travel–technological connection points in desolate places (Port Said) and peripheral locales (Brindisi), which stand under the dictates of accelerated connectivity. The timetable moves these “artificial nodes” into line with traditional locations. It serial- izes the stations of global transit according to the law of maximum speed…
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Thus the difficulty of traveling in the nineteenth century appears less in the time between departure and arrival as in the span between arrival and renewed departure. Here the problem of boredom sometimes pre- sents itself:
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The requirement for the synchronization of ship and rail is the regu- larity and temporal precision of the routes, which can only be calculated after agreements between operating companies and owing to conven- tions such as the standardization of time. Thus global transit is made leg- ible. The itinerary becomes an information–technological transmission…
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Thanks to this mimetic genealogy, starting from the calèche to the train compartment and the interior of the steamboat 20onward to the cabin of the high-speed steamship, it appears as if the passenger has never really had to leave his original vehicle.
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Global transit, which rests above all on the basis of the Universal Postal Union, proves to be the effect of an interface optimization. Its high con- nectivity, which encompasses not only the contingency of the routes pro- duced by the multitude of travel possibilities offered but also the smooth connection of principally different systems such as rail and ship, causes the interface of the individual means of transport or transmissive media
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to disappear.
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…he symbolic order of a time- table, with its tables of places, arrival and departure times, organizes the interplay of individual means of transport in the real world into a system known as world transit, which coalesces through its connectivity into a proper multimedia system.
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Thus the transition from the local to the global lies within the struc- ture of a network itself. Just as the network depicts the totality of the con- nections between its points, the timetable records the complexity of the (global) transport scene.
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The timetable provides the transition from the local to the global. Only with its help does global transit become leg- ible. It is a simplex.
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The timetable elicits nothing less than this notion of a
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totally addressable world, accessible even in its most remote nooks and crannies.
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The term networking already appears quite early at the beginning of the developing global transit, during the construction of the first railway lines, artificial waterways, and telegraph lines. One of the first theorists of the transit network who grasped the new modes of transmission as a system and thus spoke of connective possibilities, networks, and nodes was Friedrich List, in his Outline of a German Railway System of March 7, 1835.
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…what is unknown leading up to the turn of the century is the degree of mutual penetration of individual components as well as the integration into a single network, which reaches the universal transmission of people, goods, and information. The stretching and branching out, the density and frequency of this multimedia system, prove to be the decisive fea- tures to elicit the notion of a networked world that, in its basic accessi- bility, no longer has any gaps or insurmountable boundaries. Everything, whether it be a place or a person, seems addressable and accessible, with a minor expenditure (of time, which proves after its standardization to be agreeable, if not compliant).
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“One could hardly be exaggerating if one said that the world as we know it was first produced by the intercontinental cables of the 19th century” (Kittler 1996, n.p.). The world around 1900 is that which the transmissive system of cables, routes, and standards holds together. In the international exchange of global transit around 1900, the basic circuitry of globalization is configured.
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Global transit is the media– technological a priori of the global projects. It forms the conditio sine qua non of internationality as such. It is first the expansion, consolida- tion, and acceleration of transit that produces the global innovations in the world around 1900. Accelerated by railway networks, in the wake of steamship lines and brought to mind by telegraph wires, a notion devel- ops that makes all such grand projects feasible.
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