Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1857-1900

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.

This interdisciplinary project on science in culture will bring together a number of relatively distinct constituencies, from those with an interest in the history of communications technologies or maritime history to those with an interest in Victorian literature and art. In every case there are bridges to be built between the academic specialists and the lay enthusiasts some of whom bring formidable levels of expertise to their participation. Involving the public at all stages will sophisticate our understanding of the issues and bring key ideas from the research to these publics. We will find non-academic participants through special interest groups both local and national, for e.g. local networks on telegraphy through the Institution of Engineering and Technology; the Science Museum London and the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester; art and literature enthusiasts through the William Morris Society (UK and USA); the Friends of the Watts Gallery; the Trollope Society; the Kipling Society.

A public symposium and an international conference at The Courtauld Institute for academics, students, school students, and interested members of the public will be publicized through the Courtauld Research Forum which has staff dedicated to outreach. The KCL partnership with the Times Cheltenham Science Festival and the Times Cheltenham Literary Festival will offer opportunities for the presentation of aspects of the research to engaged festival-going publics. We plan visits to each of these festivals at a mid-point in the research project.

The project includes an exhibition which will present ideas and links emerging from the research to a London exhibition-going public in a venue where the cross-links of art and science are regularly addressed. We are presenting a proposal for this exhibition to the National Maritime Museum and to the Wellcome Institute having instituted discussion with each. At the Wellcome it may be possible to mount an exhibition where one section of the exhibition relates to space, time, the body, and coding in a Victorian context and another section approaches these issues in relation to contemporary art and science. Whether at the Wellcome or at the NMM we will introduce an audioguide and use music, referencing Wheatstone's concertina, as one element of the experience (aiming to reinforce the argument about the somatic through the somatic aspects of the music); this will attract media interest. These venues have been selected on the basis of their strong records of focused exhibitions offered to a broad public where detailed historical investigations, complex ideas relating to the history of science and visual and aesthetic issues can be presented to visitors including school students, tourists from the UK and abroad, technophiles and consumers of culture spanning a wide age range. A messaging aspect of the exhibition (chance to take away a coded message on a paper strip) and interactive elements in the website will appeal especially to a media-conscious younger audience (from age 10-30). The strong awareness of C21st communications technologies among the younger age group offers us opportunities for serious engagement. Any exhibition webmaterials hosted by the exhibiting institution will be cross-linked to the project website designed and maintained by Department of Digital Humanities KCL and crosslinked to The Courtauld Institute's Research Forum website. A teacher resource (key stages 2 to 3) will be downloadable from the project website. Material relating to the exhibition will be incorporated into the project website which will include the enhanced web presentation of the Wheatstone collection. We seek to communicate effectively with the coming generation of scholars and enthusiasts with material that speaks to and builds on their global frameworks (and possibly abstract, theoretical assumptions) challenging them with a set of historical specifics.