The Transformation of the World (11 page)

The penny press publishers introduced the mass-circulation press to the United States before any other country in the world. One of the convictions of the new age was that newspaper reading and a willingness to pay for news
that used to be obtained for free by word of mouth were expressions of civic-mindedness.
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Around the year 1860 the shrill
New York Herald
(founded in 1835), which was read by middle-class readers for its abundant news columns, had a daily circulation of 77,000, the highest in the world. Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune
, the first American paper that was able to combine seriousness with popularity—and that included Karl Marx in London among its special correspondents—was reaching a readership of 200,000 in 1860 with its weekly edition.
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In the United States as elsewhere, all these developments required a railroad network to carry fresh editions overnight to distant corners. The first mass-circulation daily in France, Moïse Millaud's
Le Petit Journal
, appeared in 1863 at a quarter of the price of established newspapers.
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In Britain, where highbrow papers dominated the scene much longer than in the United States, the turn came when Alfred Charles William Harmsworth launched the
Daily Mail
in 1896; he would later, as Lord Northcliffe, become the first of the legendary Fleet Street magnates. By 1900, when the South African War was fueling the need for information, the cheap new morning daily was selling an incredible total of 989,000 copies. Globally, only Joseph Pulitzer's
New York World
was riding higher, with a circulation of 1.5 million (in 1898).
¹¹⁸
The London
Times
, at the height of its prestige and political influence, had a readership of just 30,000—the establishment that it
wanted
to reach, and no more.
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Another statistic will serve to emphasize the upward trend. In 1870 a daily total of 2.6 million papers was being sold in the United States, but by 1900 this figure had risen to at least fifteen million.
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A political “crusading press” came into being more or less simultaneously in the United States and Britain. Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born owner and chief editor of the
New York World
, built it up from the early 1880s into a financially successful paper specializing in investigative articles and social criticism. In Britain, W. T. Stead, the inventor of the interview, used a similar combination of information with political campaigning for his
Pall Mall Gazette
. But such papers did not merely react to events: they were soon trying to create them. They exerted public pressure on governments, forcing them to reverse old laws and pass new ones. This meant that, unlike in continental Europe, the press was not simply the mouthpiece of political parties and tendencies; its owners and chief editors were able to give free rein to their own convictions and obsessions. Paradoxically, the commercialization of news—which reached a new level with the growth of advertising and publicity—increased the independence of the newspaper founders. If they obtained half their funding from publicity, they had much greater leeway than if they were dependent on political patrons and parties.
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The quality press, as we know it today, and also, with fine gradations, the popular press, developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The social type of the modern journalist came into being. Around 1900, countries with press freedom and a literate public spawned a large group of specialists in the collection and presentation of news. One of these countries was Japan, which
already had an active record of publishing in premodern times. Closing the gap with developments in the West, it acquired a fully fledged press system in the course of the 1870s and 1880s, driven by new-style journalists and proprietors, employing cutting-edge technology, and adapting to the changes in society since the Meiji Restoration that began in 1868: rising literacy within a state education system, a nationwide mail network, and structural transformation of the public sphere thanks to a parliamentary system and the formation of political parties. The first major newspapers were not, as in China, founded by foreigners. Japan took in cultural elements from the West and gave them its own distinctive imprint. Characteristically, journalism remained close to the leading institutions of higher education; it was only a short step from ranks of the top universities to the chief editorial positions. A long-simmering rivalry between Tokyo and Osaka added a lively note of tension in an otherwise centralized and rather uniform country.
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Global Communications

One of the features of the nineteenth-century press was the global character of its leading organizations. The major newspapers felt they had a responsibility to print news from all over the world—indeed, only if they were capable of providing international coverage could they “hit the big time.” The foreign correspondent was a new breed. At first he was scarcely distinguishable from the war reporter; the first man who rushed between locations to write about uprisings, sieges, and battles for the reader back home was William Howard Russell of the London
Times
. He relayed his impressions from India, South Africa, and Egypt; from the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Russell, who was no militarist and no friend of imperialist adventures, carried the genre of war journalism to literary heights that had rarely been seen before.
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The kind of reporter he invented was here to stay, and the
Times
made a special effort to cultivate it.

When Russell began his career he still had to send his reports to London by mail, but the cabling of the world by telegraph changed the conditions for long-distance reporting within the space of twenty-five years. The electrical overland telegraph came into use in 1844. The first durable underwater cable was laid across the English Channel in 1851, and a permanent transatlantic link was established in 1866.
¹²⁴
By 1862 the worldwide terrestrial telegraph network was 150,000 miles in length; by 1876 India and all the settler colonies of the British Empire were linked to the home country and one another; and by 1885 Europe could be reached from nearly all large cities by underwater cable. The telegraph network was much too cumbersome, overloaded, and expensive to be described as a “Victorian Internet”—it absorbed 15 percent of the
Times
'expenditure for 1898—but the basic model was there for a historically unprecedented world wide web.
¹²⁵
It was much more centralized than today's Internet. The telegraph lines themselves,
as well as the financial threads of a global cable business that served the needs of commerce more than those of the press, converged in London.

The new technology laid the basis for the news agencies. Julius Reuter from Kassel, Germany, opened his office in London in 1851—the same year that transmission time across the Channel was shortened to a couple of hours. Two other Jewish entrepreneurs had already founded news agencies or “telegraph offices”: Charles Havas in Paris and Bernhard Wolff in Berlin. The Associated Press came into being in the United States in 1848. The agencies supplied reports to newspapers but also to governments and private individuals—including Queen Victoria from 1865. Reuter was so successful that he, the nobody from Germany, was introduced to the Queen of England in 1860. The Crimean War (1853–56) was the last major international event that was
not
mainly reported on by cable. By 1861, Reuter's firm—still the only news agency with a global reach—had built a network of correspondents that covered the whole of Europe as well as India, China, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Where the telegraph did not reach, it used the express mail service provided by steamships. Reuter's war correspondents covered the American Civil War (1861–65) from start to finish for readers in Europe. Increasingly, the agencies also reported on developments in science, the arts, and sports. As Julius Reuter built up his news empire, his agency became an “institution of the British Empire.”
¹²⁶

The agencies contributed to the globalized production and dissemination of news, passing it along without additional comment in a powerful expression of the ideology of “objectivity.” On the other hand, their standardized reports promoted a uniform kind of journalism, now that all print media were more or less in the same boat. Only a few major papers, headed by the London
Times
, sustained their own networks of foreign correspondents and kept their dependence on the agencies to a minimum. For the
Times
it was a matter of principle to have its own coverage at least of British imperial interests.
¹²⁷

Not until four centuries after Gutenberg did the printed news media enter the daily lives of more than a tiny educated stratum of society. The basic structures of the press, as we know it today, were created in the second half of the nineteenth century. The press used advanced technologies. It obeyed market laws and operated within a certain legal-political framework. Freedom of the press was a basic demand of liberals all around the world. The distinction between West and East here is, as so often, of little relevance. In many colonies of the British Empire the press was freer than in parts of central and eastern Europe. The new breed of journalist also embodied an important facet of the “intellectual.” Journalists exerted political influence as far away as India and China; they gave the public a face. The best of them contributed to the transition from the classical written language of the elite to more flexible idioms that broader, often newly literate, sections of the public found more accessible. Alongside “realist” art, statistics, and descriptive social science, the press was a further means of social self-observation in a world in which media-supported communication was
dramatically extending its reach. It still had a monopoly by virtue of the technology it used. The achievements of the young Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi, who built on the discoveries of his Serb-American colleague Nikola Tesla to transmit wireless messages across the Channel (in 1899) and then the Atlantic (in 1901), had not yet made the radio a
mass
medium. It would become that only after the First World War—and the boost given to the new technology by its naval and military applications.
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6 Photography

The Birth of Authenticity

Finally, the nineteenth century discovered how to use optical and chemical processes to record phenomena from the external world.
¹²⁹
A watershed in the century is the moment when the first recognizably genuine pictorial documents were produced. No one knows what Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) really looked like, but we do know how Frédéric Chopin (1810–49) appeared. Only paintings of Franz Schubert exist, but Gioachino Rossini, five years his elder, lived long enough to be photographed in the studio of the great portraitist, Félix Nadar. A few other heroes from the age of Romanticism and Idealism lived to see the age of photography, which dawned in 1838–39 with the invention of the daguerreotype, followed by the opening of the first studios two years later. There are photographic images of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Alexander von Humboldt as old men, but not of Hegel, Goethe, or Wilhelm von Humboldt (Alexander's brother), who all died before the advent of the new epoch. When King Friedrich Wilhelm IV asked Hermann Biow, the first German photographer, to come from Hamburg to Berlin in 1847 to make portraits of the royal family with the new technology, the famous Humboldt—who had recognized the revolutionary significance of Daguerre's invention a few months after it was made public—also sat for his picture to be taken.
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Once photographs became reproducible, in the early 1850s, personal “prominence” acquired a new meaning. Portraits of rulers and political leaders—Lincoln, Bismarck, Emperor Wilhelm I—found their way into countless living rooms. But so long as they did not appear in print on a large scale—which was economically infeasible until the early eighties—their individual features were known only to a limited number of people. When Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War hero and highest-ranking general of the Union army, arrived at the railroad station in New York, reporters were unable to pick him out in the crowd.
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Biow also made a large number of daguerreotypes of Hamburg's Alster district after the great fire of May 1842 had left it in ruins—one of the first photographic records of a disaster.
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After the Crimean conflict, all wars involving Europeans or North Americans were captured on photographic material. There are no photographs and virtually no graphic representations of the great
Taiping Rebellion in China (1850–64), whereas the American Civil War (1861–65) is abundantly preserved in pictorial memory for later generations. A single photographer, Matthew B. Brady, took more than seven thousand chemically prepared glass-plate images at and between the battlefields.
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Although in other respects, painting and photography often peacefully competed with each other, the vivid photographic reproduction of battlefields and living or dead soldiers spelled the end of the heroic war canvas. The cheap, easily transportable, hand-operated Kodak roll-film camera, which was invented in 1888, opened new possibilities for visual documentation. Few photographs of the Great Indian Famine of 1876–78 reached the international public, but when the catastrophe was repeated two decades later, every traveler or missionary was a witness potentially capable of documenting it.
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In its early days, photography was little appreciated as an artistic achievement on the photographer's part;
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its fascination was that it offered an objectivity and lifelikeness never seen before. Especially important was its use in the natural sciences—first in astronomy, then soon afterward in medicine (X-ray photography opened up a previously invisible realm).
¹³⁶
From the sixties on, pictures from the world of work were increasingly common. Not long before, travel photography and related applications in geography and ethnography had greatly increased in importance.