Richard R. John . Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications . Cambridge : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press . 2010 . Pp. viii, 520. $39.95.
David E. Nye · The American Historical Review · 2011
Richard R. John wrote this book on the telegraph and the telephone with the conviction that from “the eighteenth century to the present, technology and politics have been inextricably linked” (p. 6). Accordingly, his business history pays less attention to invention than to entrepreneurship. John begins with a look at the optical telegraph of Napoleon's France in the 1790s and focuses on the years from 1840, when Samuel Morse received a patent on his telegraph, until the early radio broadcasts of 1920. He concludes with a brief discussion of later networked communications. For readers new to these subjects, the text includes a useful chronology (pp. 414–423). John divides his story into four chapters on the telegraph (pp. 24–199) and six primarily about the telephone (pp. 200–406). In each industry, some of the same issues arose: notably, whether these forms of communication should be government operated, like the highways and the postal service, or be left in private hands. Morse argued that control of information was too important to be under commercial control. Many Jacksonian Americans agreed, including former Postmaster General Amos Kendall, who managed Morse's patent rights from 1845 to 1859. Kendall wanted to sell the telegraph to his fellow Democrats, who controlled Congress and the White House for many of these years. Yet they rejected public ownership, forcing Morse to create the private service he had lobbied against. The first really long telegraph line, from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., closely followed not the railroad but routes earlier established by the mail. While the Morse interests built some major lines and franchised others, they also sought to control the telegraph industry by defending their patents in the courts. This strategy eventually failed in the marketplace, where Western Union merged competing lines into one dominant corporation. In contrast, Alexander Graham Bell's company later used patents “as a springboard for technical advances” (p. 208) and developed such a strong infrastructure (notably long‐distance lines) that it dominated the phone industry for a century.