ABSTRACT
The simplest and most important point about the telegraph is that it marked the decisive separation of "transportation" and "communication." The telegraph ended that identity and allowed symbols to move independently of geography and independently of and faster than transport. Virtually any American city of any vintage has a telegraph hill or a beacon hill reminding us of such devices. Line-of-sight telegraphy came into practical use at the end of the eighteenth century. The National Convention approved the adoption of the telegraph as a national utility and instructed the Committee of Public Safety to map routes. The pre-electric telegraph would provide an answer to Montesquieu and other political theorists who thought France or the United States too big to be a republic. The effect of the telegraph is a simple one: it evens out markets in space. After the telegraph, commodity trading moved from trading between places to trading between times.
