The Great Fizzle

Abstract

This chapter explores the promise of social unity through networks by looking at the religious nationalism that emerged in the United States around the Atlantic telegraph. As Americans tensely watched the struggle to transmit the world’s first transatlantic telegram, a diverse community—from Protestant missionaries to civic leaders—spoke of the newly united world that electric speech would create in explicitly Christian terms. Public statements that claimed the telegraph as destined and blessed by God were not merely religious ways of speaking about the telegraph; the affective weight born by this Christian vocabulary and imagery forged the affiliation of the telegraph with dreams of global unity in particularly durable ways. This chapter examines alternative imaginaries of obsolete telegraphs (e.g., grapevine telegraph, spiritual telegraph, optical telegraph) that have lost cultural meaning to demonstrate that affect, not the technology itself, produced and sustained network imaginaries of national and global connection. The fragile cable of 1858 and the united “whole world” it was said to create point to the materiality and contingency inherent in the discursive and affective labor of forming public culture.