Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

At much the same time that the pragmatists of the Saturday Club were forming their friendship and their views, a very different group of pragmatists was having an effect on American life. Beginning around 1870, in the wake of the Civil War, America produced a generation of the most original inventors that nation – or any other – has seen. Thomas P. Hughes, in his history of American invention, goes so far as to say that the half-century between 1870 and 1918 was a comparable era to Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy or the Britain of the industrial revolution. Between 1866 and 1896 the number of patents issued annually in the United States more than doubled and in the decade from 1879 to 1890 rose from 18,200 to 26,300 a year.⁹¹

Richard Hofstadter, in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, has written about the tension in the United States between businessmen and intellectuals, of Herman Melville’s warning, ‘Man disennobled – brutalised / By popular science’, of Van Wyck Brooks chiding Mark Twain because ‘his enthusiasm for literature was as nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery’, of Henry Ford who famously remarked ‘history is more or less bunk’.

⁹² But America’s first generation of inventors do not seem to have been especially anti-intellectual. Rather, they inhabited a different culture and this was because, as we have seen, scholarship and research were still coming into being in the nineteenth-century universities. They were still predominantly religious institutions and would not become universities as we know them until the very end of the nineteenth century.

And likewise, since the industrial research laboratory didn’t come into common use until around 1900, most of these inventors had to construct their own private laboratories. It was in this environment that Thomas Edison invented the electric light and the phonograph, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, the Wright brothers invented their flying machine, and telegraphy and radio came into being.⁹³ It was in this environment that Elmer Sperry pioneered his gyrocompass and automatic control devices for the navy and in which Hiram Stevens Maxim, in 1885, set up for manufacture, and demonstrated, ‘the world’s most destructive machine gun’. By using the recoil from one cartridge to load and fire the next, the Maxim far surpassed the Gatling gun, which had been invented in 1862. It was the Maxim gun that inflicted a great deal of the horror in colonial territories at the high point of empire.⁹⁴

It was the German Maxim which inflicted 60,000 casualties at the Somme on 1 July 1916. And it was these inventors who, in collaboration with financial entrepreneurs, were to create some of America’s most enduring business and educational institutions, household names to this day – General Electric, AT&T, Bell Telephone Company, Consolidated Edison Company, MIT.

In the context of this book, perhaps the telegraph is worth singling out from these other inventions. The idea of using electricity as a means of signalling had been conceived around 1750 but the first functioning telegraph had been set up by Francis Ronalds, in his garden in Hammersmith in London, in 1816. Charles Wheatstone, professor of experimental philosophy at King’s College, London, and the man who had first measured the speed of electricity (wrongly), was the first to realise that the ohm, a measure of resistance, was an important concept in telegraphy and, together with his colleague Fothergill Cooke, took out the first patent in 1837. Almost as important as the technical details of telegraphy was Wheatstone and Cooke’s idea to string the wires alongside the newly built railways. This helped ensure the rapid spread of the telegraph, though the much-publicised capture of John Tawell, who was arrested in London after fleeing a murder scene in Slough, thanks to the telegraph, hardly did any harm. Samuel Morse’s code played its part, of course, and Morse was one of several Americans pushing for a transatlantic cable. The laying of this cable was an epic adventure that lies outside the scope of this book. While the cables were being laid, many had high hopes that the more speedy communication they would permit would prove an aid to world peace, by keeping statesmen in closer touch with one another. This hope proved vain, but the transatlantic cable, achieved in 1866, made its mark quickly in commercial terms. And, as Gillian Cookson has written in The Cable: The Wire that Changed the World, ‘From this moment began a sense of shared experience, a convergence of cultures, between the two English-speaking nations.’⁹⁵

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Enemies of the Cross and the Qur

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an – the End of the Soul