IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023 - 18

Book Review
Book Review
Power Lined: Electricity: Landscape and
the American Mind-Daniel L. Wuebben
(Lincoln, NE, USA: Univ. Nebraska
Press, 2019, 236 pp.)
Reviewed by A. David Wunsch
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Lowell, MA 01854 USA
 Let me begin with a provocation: I assert that
Henry David Thoreau loved the telegraph. If you
have recently read Walden, you might well dispute
this with the following passage from Thoreau's most
notable work:
" We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph
from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas,
it may be, have nothing important to communicate...
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic
and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the
new, but perchance the first news that will leak
through into the broad flapping American ear will
be that Princess Adelaide has whooping cough. "
And I will take as my rebuttal a passage from Thoreau's
journal of 1851. In that year, walking alongside
some telegraph wires in Concord, MA, USA, he hears
the conductors vibrating in the wind. Enthralled by
their sound, which he compares to an Aeolian harp,
he remarks in his journal that the wires reminded
him that " there were higher, infinitely higher, planes
of life, which it behooved me never to forget. " The
Aeolian harp was an instrument devised in Europe,
about 200 years before Thoreau's writing, whose
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3299369
Date of current version: 21 September 2023.
sound evolved from the vibrations induced in a set
of gut strings by the wind.
This small contretemps whose source is one man
gives us a glimpse of the very rich subject in Daniel
Wuebben's book: a long history of how electric
lines (power, telephone, and telegraph) and the
poles and towers supporting them have engaged the
attention of poets, essayists, conservationists, artists,
and politicians. His work has a well-defined beginning:
in 1844, Congress appropriated money for
Samuel Morse to construct a telegraph line stretching
between Baltimore and the District of Columbia.
Strange to say, initially Morse planned to bury the
wires underground but a series of mishaps resulted in
their being suspended between poles. There seems
to have been no objection to their appearance and
the first message sent was, famously, " What hath God
wrought. " The message was appropriate: for the first
time in the United States, communication had been
reliably separated from transportation. By 1851, more
than 75 companies were sending Morse-coded messages
over wires with 21,000 miles of wires, much of
it along railroad rights of way-partly because railroads
were a natural ally of the telegraph, relying on
the telegraph to avoid accidents and send messages
of the status of trains. Seeing telegraph poles became
part of the landscape viewed by a train passenger.
18
0278-0097/23©2023 IEEE
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8185-7668
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023
