A century and a half after Peter the Great had created his window on the West at St Petersburg, a handful of future oriented Occidentals and Russians sought to use the opportunity offered by the Russian territorial expanse to globalise a new communications technology. Thwarted in its efforts to lay submarine cables in the Atlantic between North America and the Old World, the Western Union Telegraph Company arranged with Russia to circumvent the obstacle via an overland route joining the Okhotsk and Baltic seas. There were unexpected economic, political, and social consequences to this ambitious and complex technological venture.
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References
1.
The first recorded optical telegraph was a hilltop to hilltop system of using torches to convey signals in Greece (about 425bc).
2.
An editorial recapitulating this appeared in Scientific American, 26 October 1861, 261.
3.
See, for example, Martin Van Creveld's treatment of telegraphy as a strategic system, ‘Technology and war, from 2000 B.C. to the present’, 160–170; 1989, New York, NY, Free Press.
4.
A good account of this developmental period of undersea cable telegraphy is found in ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’, 11thedn, Vol. 26; 1911, Cambridge.
5.
There is ample documentation on the ‘Great Eastern’. For the purposes of the present paper, see Ref. 9.
6.
The ‘pianoforte wire sounding apparatus’ is described in V. Hoskiær: ‘Laying and repairing of electric telegraph cables’, 4 and 6;1876, Copenhagen, Spon.
7.
See Sci. Am., 15 September 1860 and ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’, 14th edn, Vol. 29 (Macropaedia), 698; 1985, Chicago.
8.
Sci. Am., 3 March 1860.
9.
DuganJ.: ‘The great iron ship’, 166 and 190;1953, New York, NY, Harper & Brothers.
10.
Sci. Am., 2 June 1860.
11.
Sci. Am., 9 June 1860.
12.
Sci. Am., 21 January 1861.
13.
TaylorBayard, Chargé d'Affaires in the Russian capital, and Secretary Seward, respectively, 19 December 1862 and 14 January 1863, ‘Foreign relations of the United States’, Part 2, 774 and 778; 1863, Washington, DC, Government Printing Office.
14.
DallW. H.: ‘Alaska and its resources’, 355; 1870, Boston, MA, Lee and Shepard. Dallwas named scientific director of the Western Union expedition in 1866 after the death of Robert Kennicott (see p. 357); G. A. Schreiner relates, in his ‘Cables and wireless and their roles in the foreign relations of the United States’ (1924, Boston, MA, Stratford), that the United States Congress passed an act in 1864 ‘to encourage and facilitate telegraphic communication between the eastern and western continents…’ (p. 40).
15.
‘Message of the President of the United States and accompanying documents, Part I, 38th Congress, 1st Session’, Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1864.
16.
DallW. H.: ‘Alaska and its resources’, 356(see Note 14).
17.
A complete representation of the intended route is found in ‘P. McD. Collins’ proposed overland telegraph via Behrings Strait and Asiatic Russia to Europe, under Russian and British grants’; 1864, New York, NY, J. H. Colton, which may be inspected at the Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. Stalin's gulag along the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk became a cause célèbre after the Second World War, when the USA refused to import from the USSR the ‘Chatka’ brand of tinned crabmeat. The US Department of Commerce refused this gourmet merchandise, for which the Soviet Union would be paid in much needed dollars, because it was produced by workers in political detention.
18.
KennanG.: ‘Tent-life in Siberia and adventures among the Koraks and other tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia’, 4; 1881, New York, NY, G. P. Putnam's Sons.
MorfillW. R.: ‘The story of Russia’; 1893, New York, NY, G. P. Putnam's Sons.
21.
A thorough appreciation of the reasons for Russia's sale of Alaska is found in M. Poniatowski: ‘Histoire de la Russie d'Amérique et de l'Alaska’; 1958, Paris, Horizons de France.
22.
ManningC. A.: ‘Russian influence on early America’, 175–180; 1953, New York, NY, Library Publishers.
23.
A successful book was Kennan's‘Siberia and the exile system’, first published in1891. Praeger, New York, issued a reprint with maps and illustrations in 1970.
24.
As cited in R. K. Massie: ‘Peter the Great. His life and world’, 762; 1980, New York, NY, AlfredA. Knopf.
25.
GeorgeG. St: ‘Siberia: the new frontier’; 1969, London, Hodder& Stoughton. A modern account by an American engineer who spent his boyhood in Irkutsk.
26.
JensenO.(ed.): ‘America and Russia’; 1962, New York, NY, Simon& Schuster. A general history in which there is commentary to the effect that American attitudes concerning tsarist Russia were attributable to Kennan's revelations (pp. 118ff).
27.
NormanH.: ‘All the Russias’; 1902, London, WilliamHeinemann. In a footnote there is mention of another of the Kennan party's members, Harry de Windt (or de Wyndt), who left America in 1901 for Yakutsk on a scheme to join the Russian and US railways at the Bering Strait (p. 154). No such project came to realisation.
