23 - Infrastructure: Women Writers Confront Large Technological Systems

Summary

On 17 November 1847, Senator Daniel Webster gave a speech to commemorate the ‘Opening of the Northern Railroad to Lebanon, N.H.’. Although the occasion for his speech was the extension of the railway, Webster does not limit himself to a discussion of train travel. He also invokes steam boats and telegraphy, as if these systems are interrelated. Using the first-person plural, he includes his listeners in a shared experience of awe: ‘We see the ocean navigated and the solid land traversed by steam power, and intelligence communicated by electricity. Truly this is almost a miraculous era’ (Webster 1858: 419). He yokes electricity and steam together because they changed the way that he and many of his contemporaries moved through space, conceptualised time and understood progress.

Senator Webster’s example typifies the dominant narrative about technological development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New systems – however disparate – seemed to signify in aggregate that machinery and scientific knowledge could render the chaotic world more controllable to the individual user. Much has already been written about this understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century systems. For example, Stephen Kern (1983), Wolfgang Schivelbush (1997) and Armand Mattelart (1996) – to name only a few – have chronicled how the railway and other new systems altered the way Americans understood time. Schedules for arriving and departing trains homogenised the way towns marked time. And, although they function by dramatically different mechanisms, the steam engine and electric communication could make distant spaces seem more readily accessible. Communication and transportation systems also changed conceptualisations of space. As Robert MacDougall has shown, ‘One of the nineteenth century’s great clichés was that the rail and wire would “annihilate” space and time’ (2014: 9). Analysing the violence inherent in that word choice, he adds,

The pace of change in this era was exhilarating and at the same time wrenching and alarming to many Americans. Each advance in communication technology gave new powers to its users yet compounded the ability of distant people and events to affect those users’ lives. (9).

Advertisers, system builders and people who perceived themselves as benefitting from technological development promulgated narratives about large-scale systems as progressive and modernising. Indeed, in the chapter that precedes mine, Janice Ho argues convincingly that infrastructures helped to reshape the idea of the nation as a space that coheres through infrastructural flows.