Confronting Reality

In March 1838, while preparing to present his findings to the Akademie in Munich, Steinheil had also proposed to pursue his trials along the very first Bavarian—and German—railway line between Nuremberg and Fürth. As Gauß had suggested before him, he hoped in particular to determine whether the metal tracks themselves might be used to conduct electric current and serve as a telegraphic circuit.⁹¹ Bavarian Interior Minister Karl von Abel supported the idea, emphasizing to King Ludwig I‘the important role which it is probable that this new means of communication will play in the near future’.⁹² As the stakes involved were raised, however, such broad statements of support and enthusiasm called for more justification.

Back in 1836, Leo von Klenze had heard rumours that the Saxon government had allowed a telegraph line to be erected alongside the new railway between Dresden and Leipzig—no doubt related to Gauβ’s negotiations with the company.

At the time, Klenze had already begun to consider how the government might respond if similar requests were put forward by railway companies in Bavaria, and what the state’s attitude to this new means of communication should be.⁹³ By 1838, when King Ludwig I approved the request for an extra 500 gulden to complete Steinheil’s trials, he too expressly requested that the question be addressed as to ‘how [the telegraph] is to be used to the advantage of the state’.⁹⁴ If the state was to engage in the development of this technology, its concrete interest in the matter was to be identified.

The response, however, was uncertain. Even two years later, in 1840, Interior Minister Abel stated that it was not yet possible to evaluate whether the advan-tages of the telegraph for the purposes of the state and the public administration would outweigh its costs, as not all results had yet been collected. Crucially, he also believed that the telegraph‘could interfere all too deeply with the administrative organism and the correspondence methods of the public authorities’. Furthermore, any income which might be generated by the public use of a telegraph service would have to cover the losses incurred by the state postal service.⁹⁵

Abel did believe that Steinheil’s trials should be pursued along the Nuremberg–

Fürth railway line, but he admitted the unpredictability of its future utility. In Bavaria, the general public was clearly understood as the most likely primary user of the new technology, which would thereby constitute a source of income for the

⁹¹ BHStA, MInn 45175/1, Steinheil to Ludwig I, 16 Mar. 1838.

⁹² BHStA, MInn 45175/1, Abel to Ludwig I, 10 May 1838.

⁹³ BHStA, MInn 45175/1, L. v. Klenze to Ludwig I, 20 May 1836.

⁹⁴ BHStA, MInn 45175/1, Abel to Ludwig I, 10 May 1838, approval from King Ludwig I on 12 May 1838.

⁹⁵ BHStA, MInn 45175/1, Abel to Ludwig I, 13 Apr. 1840.

state. However, ‘as with every invention which can be of general use’, Abel reported to the king, it was impossible to tell‘if there is a need for such a product before its diffusion’ [underlined in the original]. Furthermore, he believed,

‘nobody can predict to what extent it will become viable and stimulate a usage which might little by little become a general need’.⁹⁶ Informing Steinheil that further trials would be conducted along the new Munich–Augsburg railway instead, Abel explicitly stated that their purpose was ‘to discover whether the public will use this new means of communication to an extent which will make its construction significantly profitable on a long-term basis . . .’.⁹⁷To the king, on the other hand, Abel emphasized that ‘the object is nonetheless so important and designed in such a way’as to justify support for future experimentation.⁹⁸

This continuous oscillation between rather vacuous statements concerning the importance, utility, and ‘benefit’ of the technology on the one hand, and the impossibility of assessing these qualities on the other, reflects the authorities’ repeatedly changing field of vision as they sought to identify their immediate interests while keeping the ultimate, distant objective in their sights. It testifies to the enduring power of the original expectations associated with the technology, just as these were confronted with reality.

Bavaria was not peculiar in this regard. In Prussia, news of Steinheil’s experi-ments and the same rumours of a trial along the Saxon railway had stimulated interest in electrical telegraphy, but opinions remained divided.⁹⁹Of course, since the establishment of the Berlin–Cologne optical telegraph line in 1832, there existed a Prussian department dedicated to the technology, led by Major Franz August O’Etzel and under the authority of the Ministry of War. But it was very much O’Etzel’s personal enthusiasm which had led to its introduction and development.¹⁰⁰The military arm of the Prussian state, in fact, had been reluctant to abandon its ideal of quasi-medieval warfare, and was only slowly becoming more receptive to the utility of‘modern’technology in general.¹⁰¹

In any case, the process stalled when the minister of the interior reported that the minister of war was rather sceptical as to the use of the telegraph for policing purposes:‘[I]t does not seem to him to be the time to establish general measures for the aforementioned purposes, because the invention has not yet reached a stage at which it may be possible to make a definitive decision relating to its utility

⁹⁶ BHStA, MInn 45175/1, Abel to Ludwig I, 13 Apr. 1840.

⁹⁷ DMM FA005/0582, Abel to Steinheil, 13 Apr. 1840.

⁹⁸ BHStA, MInn 45175/1, Abel to Ludwig I, 13 Apr. 1840.

⁹⁹ E. Feyerabend,Der Telegraph von Gauss und Weber im Werden der elekrischen Telegraphie (Berlin, 1933), pp. 182, 187.

¹⁰⁰ Wessel,Die Entwicklung des elektrischen Nachrichtenwesens in Deutschland, p. 146.

¹⁰¹ E. D. Brose,The Politics of Technological Change in Prussia: Out of the Shadow of Antiquity, 1809–1848(Princeton, 1993), pp. 164–89; D. Showalter,Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology and the Unification of Germany, (Hamden, Conn., 1975), pp. 143–60.

and suitability for these purposes.’¹⁰² Uncertainty was still preventing state authorities from making the leap of faith required to invest in the technology.

Where support was forthcoming, moreover, interests did not always align. As will be explored in Chapter 2, the main initial source of investment in telegraphy would come from another newly emerging sector—railway construction. Britain had led the way when Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke installed their electrical telegraph system along a segment of the Great Western Railway in 1838.

The apparatus was used for the purposes of signalling, and similar applications of the technology were to help regulate railway traffic throughout German states and in France from the early to mid 1840s. For railway companies, the more imme-diate utility of the technology perhaps required a smaller leap of faith.

In Bavaria, the railway-based trials proposed by Steinheil in 1838, which had been relocated from Nuremberg to Munich, had called for collaboration with the München-Augsburger Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft. By the end of October 1840, the company informed Steinheil that they were prepared to begin the trials at his convenience. Having then installed his telegraph system along the railway track between the towns of Maisach and Olching, Steinheil seems to have left the installation to the supervision of the railway company’s own staff, but technical issues arose when the line was left unattended.¹⁰³ Writing angrily to the board of directors, Steinheil asked, ‘why should it be that the galvanic telegraph is only advantageous where there are railways? Purely and solely because of the supervi-sion of the wires and its reparation . . . by the personnel which is already assigned to the supervision of the tracks . . . This supervision and preservation of the line is thus the only thing which materially links railways and galvanic telegraphs.’¹⁰⁴

Steinheil, it seems, had not understood the logistical utility of the telegraph to the railway company itself. Around the same time, Steinheil made a note of the questions which he would have to put to the Railway Committee, among which he asked,‘what use would the committee make of such a telegraph for its own purposes?’¹⁰⁵Yet the negotiations between the state and the company, and the earlier example of the Dresden–Leipzig line, had suggested that railways had their own reasons to employ the telegraph. The partnership between science and enterprise was put at risk by what appeared to be a clash of individual interests.

Steinheil’s unaccommodating attitude was also reflected in his disagreement with the state over the patent, orPrivilegium, for which he had applied in August 1838. Although south German states were relatively liberal in their attitude to patenting, Steinheil had sought particularly wide-ranging intellectual property

¹⁰² Feyerabend,Der Telegraph, p. 191.

¹⁰³ DMM FA005/0582, Directorium der M-A Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft to Steinheil, 22 Feb. 1841.

¹⁰⁴ DMM FA005/0582, Steinheil to Directorium der M-A Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, 8 Mar. 1841.

¹⁰⁵ DMM FA005/0582, Notes, undated.

rights over his telegraph system.¹⁰⁶As Interior Minister Abel explained to him, his request had been denied because he had asked for aPrivilegiumencompassing

‘exclusive execution (alleinige Ausführung)’of the project. The minister informed him that he was welcome to reapply for a patent, as long as he did not claim exclusive rights of usage.¹⁰⁷Although the government was yet to be convinced of the technology’s utility to the state, it was clearly not prepared to relinquish control over its future implementation. The friction which had emerged between the scientist, the railway company, and the authorities threatened to grind the process of technological development to a halt.