When electricity was like the internet and even worried about its health effects

The debates about electricity in the nineteenth century were as passionate and strange as those we have today about the internet, its democratic potential and its effect on our brain. In fact, farmers were the first to use electricity as if it were the Internet, as a means of communication. They did it through the barbed wire that surrounded their land.

With the advent of the use of electricity, many nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Petr Kropotkin or Patrick Geddes, considered that this physical phenomenon they could barely understand would lead to a new social era in which the city and the countryside, work and leisure, they would reconcile.

It was not strange that so many hopes were placed on electricity because, apart from ignoring the physical foundations on which it operated, it was advertised enthusiastically by experimenters and organizers of shows.

Since Luigi Galvani used it to contract the legs of the frogs, as if it animated the muscles of the frogs, or of his nephew performing shows where the bodies of recently executed murderers were animated, electricity had been acquiring the status of a medium. decentralized and democratic communication.

The release of electricity

Evgeny Morozov, in his book 'The madness of technological solutionism', alludes to a book whose translation of English would be 'The silent revolution or the future effects of steam and electricity on the human condition'. Published in 1852, he spoke then of the "perfect network of electric filaments" that promised "the social harmony of humanity".

It was also considered that electricity would promote the decentralization of society by generating abundant energy at low cost, or as Morozov puts it, "not to mention the complex and controversial history, replete with prolonged battles and spiteful debates, of the physical infrastructure that it made possible the wide availability of the electrical supply ".

Electricity as infrastructure

In fact, in the wake of the infrastructure, electricity began to look more than ever before the first years of the Internet due to the way it was used by farmers and ranchers.

So much so that, since the telephone had not yet reached the rural area, the barbed wire was the only medium of long distance communication. As if they connected each farmer's land together, well, where the data packets were the electrical impulses.

The first cables arrived from 1874. At the time of greatest boom, farmers, ranchers and American rail companies tended more than a million and a half kilometers of barbed wire per year. As James Gleick explains in his book 'The Information', "as I was not willing to wait for the telephone companies to decide to leave the urban centers, the country people formed telephone cooperatives of barbed wire."

And, naturally, this Internet of barbed wire also caused the same anxieties among many, who considered it addictive and a way to lose intimacy. The superintendent of the Wisconsin line showed his concern for young people, since they spent "all the time making the cable spark."

Fortunately, there were also those who defended these new systems of network communication, in which the telegraph and the telephone were involved, such as the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley. He reflected that in the life of that 1912 "the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken as a result of the growth of an intricate mesh of broader contacts, which makes us strangers in the eyes of people living in the same house [...] diminishing our economic and spiritual communion with our neighbors. "

Like the internet now, go.