The Penguin History of the World

Quantitative change, though, brought qualitative transformation. Technical operations hitherto unfeasible because of the mass of data involved now became possible. Intellectual activity had never been so suddenly accelerated. Moreover, at the same time as there was revolutionary growth in the power of computers, so there was in their availability, cheapness and portability. Within thirty years a ‘microchip’ the size of a credit card was doing the job that had at first required a machine the size of the average British living room. It was observed in 1965 that the processing power of a ‘chip’ doubled every eighteen months; the 2,000 or so transistors carried by a chip thirty years ago have now multiplied to millions. The transforming effects have been felt exponentially, and in every human activity – from money- and war-making, to scholarship and pornography.

Computers are, of course, only part of another long story of development and innovation in communication of all kinds, beginning with advances in the physical and mechanical movement of solid objects – goods and people. The major nineteenth-century achievements were the application of steam to land and sea communication, and later electricity and the internal combustion engine. In the air, there had been balloons, and the first ‘dirigible’ airships flew before 1900, but it was only in 1903 that the first flight was made by a man-carrying ‘heavier than air’ machine (that is, one whose buoyancy was not derived from bags of a gas lighter than air). This announced a new age of physical transport; a hundred years later, the value of goods moving through London’s biggest airport was greater than that through any British seaport. Millions now regularly travel by air on business and professional concerns, as well as for leisure, and flight has given a command of space to the individual only faintly imaginable as the twentieth century began.

The communication of information had already advanced far into another revolution. The essence of this was the separation of the information flow from any physical connection between source and signal. In the middle of the nineteenth century, poles carrying the wires for the electric telegraph were already a familiar sight beside railway lines, and the process of linking the world together with undersea cables had begun. Physical links were still fundamental. Then, Heinrich Hertz identified radio-magnetic waves, and by 1900 scientists were exploiting electromagnetic theory to make possible the sending of the first, literally, ‘wireless’ messages. The transmitter and the receiver no longer needed any physical connection. Appropriately, it was in 1901, the first year of a new century to be profoundly marked by this invention, that Marconi sent the first radio message across the Atlantic. Thirty years later, most of the millions who by then owned wireless receivers had ceased to believe that they needed to open windows for the mysterious ‘waves’ to reach them, and large-scale broadcasting systems existed in all major countries.

A few years before this the first demonstration had been made of the devices on which television was based. In 1936, the BBC opened the first regularly scheduled television broadcasting service; twenty years later the medium was commonplace in leading industrial societies and now that is true worldwide. Like the coming of print, the new medium had huge implications, but for their full measurement they must be placed in the context of the whole modern era of communications development. Like the coming of print, the implications were incalculable, though they were politically and socially neutral or, rather, double-edged. Telegraphy and radio made information more quickly available, and this could be advantageous both to governments and to their opponents. The ambiguities of television became visible even more rapidly. Its images could expose things governments wanted to hide to the gaze of hundreds of millions, but it was also believed to shape opinion in the interests of those who controlled it.