ABSTRACT
The telegraph occupies a unique place in the history of technology and its relation to the senses. In a manner similar to many contemporary means of communicating at a distance, from email to text messaging, the early telegraph network was primarily visual, employing a variety of optical technologies to transmit coded signals from one location to another, but with the introduction of the galvanic battery, the development of gutta-percha cable, and the employment of Morse code for the transmission of messages by electrical means, telegraphy became increasingly haptic. Emphasizing the ear over the eye, the electrical telegraph fundamentally altered the ratio of senses that subtended the models of subject formation that had come to characterize the Enlightenment, asserting the values of lateral connection and deep engagement more commonly associated with the feminine than the masculine self, and thus opening up a new and disturbing connection between technology and the women employed in its operation. In what follows, the social and political effects of the reorganization of the senses effected by the introduction of electrical telegraphy is explored in detail, with a particular concern for the ways in which these effects were first registered in and subsequently managed by the discourses of gender in the Victorian period.
