Mastering Inner Space: Telecommunications Technology and Geography in the
20th Century

 Ronald F. Abler
 Executive Director, Association of American Geographers

 International Geographical Congress
 Seoul, Korea
 16 August 2000

 Outer and Inner Spaces

 Most people born after 1960 remember exactly where they were at 1:56:15
a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on 21 July 1969, when Neil A. Armstrong stepped
onto the surface of the moon. I would be very much surprised if anyone here
today remembers where he or she was on 24 May 1844, when Samuel Finley
Breese Morse, one of the many tinkerers and scientists trying to develop a
device capable of transmitting information over distance, demonstrated a
workable prototype telegraph by sending the message "What hath God wrought?"
a distance of 40 miles from Baltimore, Maryland to Washington DC. The Morse
telegraph's practicality resided more in its binary code than in its
transmission technology. It had been preceded by a series of techniques for
transmitting information over distance ranging from signal fires capable of
sending a single, simple message ( "the Armada is coming!") through various
kinds of optical and electric telegraphs that permitted the transmission of
complex message, albeit slowly.

 The development of a workable telegraph in 1844 and of a commercially
viable telephone 32 years later sparked a sustained industrial boom
unprecedented in human history, especially in geographical terms. Telegraph
circuits spread over the United States and the world at a pace unmatched by
any previous innovation. The electrification of human communication that
began with the telegraph was reinforced by the telephone. Within two years
of Bell's innovation hundreds of telephone companies had been founded under
licenses issued by what was eventually to become the American Telephone and
Telegraph Company, or AT&T. Out of AT&T's laboratories a century later came
many of the building blocks and conceptual models of the digital computer
that is the foundation of today's information and internet society.
 We are all familiar with the ways the outer space programs of the United
States and other countries have fired the imaginations of people in all
walks of life throughout the world. Boys and girls now dream of growing up
to be astronauts in much the same way youngsters dreamed of becoming
railroad engineers a century ago. We tend often to think of the future in
terms of the science and technology of extra-terrestrial space, as
exemplified in the popularity of programs such as Star Trek. Much of the art
we associate with the future, for example Robert T. McCall's mural at the
Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida, depicts the human past and future as
inextricably linked to outer space.

 Today we associate high technology and great opportunity for the future
with the programs begun in the 1960s to explore outer space and with the
digital revolution brought on by computers and the internet in the 1980s and
1990s. Had someone of my generation come to maturity between 1850 and 1900
rather than 1950 to 2000, he or she would have viewed telegraphy and
telephony as the most advanced technologies of the day, as the critical and
exciting keys to an alluring future.

 The technologies employed to link and unite the inner spaces of worlds well
known in the second half of the nineteenth century are analogous in many
ways to the technologies of outer and inner spaces that have been sources of
wonder to those of us alive during the second half of the twentieth century.
Moreover, the geography of telegraphy and telephony in the nineteenth
century set the stage for the geography of intercommunications technologies
that produced today's information society. In the same way, I believe,
developments in telecommunications over the last half century help us
identify some of the questions that will occupy the attention of geographers
interested in communications technologies over the next few decades. I will
review briefly the geography of intercommunications in both the nineteenth
and the twentieth centuries, to see what might be inferred about a
geographical agenda for the information society on the threshold of the
twenty-first century.

 Telecommunications Challenges and Solutions

 Telecommunications, as the word implies, are communications conducted over
distance. My definition of "telecommunications" includes the specific
techniques of mail, telegraphy, telephone, and the multiple forms of data
and information transmission that use today's internet. For simplicity's
sake I will focus here almost exclusively on telephony, bearing in mind that
the challenges, solutions, and principles evident in telephony are virtually
identical in any other telecommunications medium.

 The challenges to easy, inexpensive communications over distance inhere
geographically in the need to move messages across distance, the need to
route or direct messages to their respective destinations, and the need to
perform both tasks at costs that are reasonable within times that users deem
acceptable. More broadly, communication volumes must be sufficient to yield
revenues that will cover the costs of operations and yield profits
acceptable to entrepreneurs attempting to provide such services. More
succinctly, the primary telecommunications problems-which are inherently
geographic-are transmission, switching, and establishing a threshold of use
that generates self-sustaining growth.

A (Geographical) Paradox

 As an aside, I should note a distinctive quality of interconnecting
networks that Thomas Falk and I labeled the "utility-penetration paradox."
The dilemma faced by entrepreneurs who hope to establish intercommunications
networks can be illustrated by the unlikely example of a person owning the
only telephone in the world. He or she might take selfish pride and pleasure
in having something no one else has, much as the private owner of a valuable
painting might relish exclusive access to it. As a means of communication,
however, the world's only telephone would have zero utility. Connect that
telephone to another, however and it acquires value; make it possible to
connect it to 10,000 others, and its utility rises sharply. The capacity of
today's telephones to reach almost any other telephone on earth makes them
so indispensable that many of us are never without them. For an entrepreneur
trying to start a new interconnected network, the fundamental challenge is
selling the first two terminals. Beyond the first pair lies the problem of
selling enough additional terminals to build a viable network. A consequence
of the paradox distinctive to interconnecting networks is that few have
truly diffused geographically. Such networks have historically been
established by governments or by entrepreneurs with access to capital
sufficient to connect the threshold number of users needed to make the
medium minimally viable.

Transmission

 Returning to network fundamentals, the raw problem of moving information
across distance yielded to a variety of transmission media. Mail has been
carried by almost every means of transportation ever invented. In telegraphy
and telephony, single strands of wire gave way to multiple wires bundled
into cables, which in turn were superseded by such higher capacity channels
as coaxial cable, directional microwave transmission, and fiber optic links.
Each successive transmission medium could move more information among
places, beginning with a single conversation on a pair of wires. Bundled
wire cables could transmit the equivalent of hundreds of simultaneous
conversations. The coaxial cables and microwave technologies developed
simultaneously in the 1930s carried tens of thousands of conversations or
their information equivalents. Fiber optic cables now carry the equivalents
of millions of simultaneous conversations or even more, depending on the
kind of multiplexing employed. I should note here that for well over a
century, every innovation in transmission technology and capacity has been
heralded as providing virtually unlimited communications capacity for the
future. I note further that every forecast of unlimited capacity has been
woefully shortsighted. Unlimited transmission capacity (or bandwidth) is a
chimera and will remain so. Like highways, transmission media stimulate the
very traffic that chokes them in short order, sparking yet another quest for
a medium with greater capacity.

Switching

 Stringing a pair of wires from each telephone to every other telephone is
one polar geometry for providing access to any randomly selected pair of
instruments. Beyond a network of three or four nodes, that solution becomes
impractical. Even a directly connected network of 100 nodes would require
4,950 pairs of wires to be strung across the landscape, as well as some
means of terminating that many wires at each terminal. Alternatively, one
could connect every telephone in a network to a single central node and
accomplish the interconnections there and only there. Again, even in small
networks, that solution quickly becomes unwieldy and inefficient. The
switching capacity required at the single interchange would be enormous, and
the wiring required would be inefficient owing to the fundamental
geographical fact that most requests for interconnection are local.

 It's not clear that telephone exchanges were part of Bell's original
thinking, but they were established as early as 1878 and have been a
critical component of electronic information technologies ever since.
Originally staffed by young men, attending switchboards quickly became women
's work. Foreshadowing the software developers and computer scientists who
have taken fiendish delight in tormenting neophytes in this century, the
arrogant male operators of the late 1870s and early 1880s treated customers
rudely, even profanely. By 1882 male telephone operators were history,
superseded by the fairer, gentler sex possessed of a more helpful nature.
Male or female, human operators switched calls by making manual connections
between the pairs of wires leading to telephones with flexible cords. Being
labor intensive, manual switching was an early target for automation.
Electro-mechanical switches began to replace human operators about the time
of World War I, and subsequent innovations largely eliminated human
operators by 1970.

 The geography of switching offers a fascinating topic that is too complex
to be pursued here. Suffice it to note that the tradeoff between
constructing long transmission lines to a few switching centers or
alternatively, constructing short transmission lines to many centers,
governed the density and location of such centers in the past and that
tradeoff will continue to influence the geometry of telecommunications
networks in the future.

Organization, Vision, and Agency

 Natural networks happen in response to basic natural forces and
constraints. Telecommunications networks do not happen; they are the
deliberate products of goal-oriented human activity. From the outset of
telecommunications, centrally-directed coordination and planning were
prerequisite to achieving communications over distance. Postal systems have
been government monopolies from the Persian empire onward. In most of the
rest of the world, infant telephone systems were conceived or kidnaped in
infancy by national postal services, with generally negative consequences.
In Anglo America, the failure of the United States Congress to exercise its
rights to Morse's telegraph patents left telegraph and telephone in the
private sector.

 Inventing dispersed operating systems was a distinctly new geographic
challenge in the mid-nineteenth century, one that arose simultaneously in
railroading and telecommunications in their shared infancy. As they
co-evolved, the private and public networks inventing organizational and
management techniques often traded ideas and individuals, progressively
building geographic concepts and methods of that we take largely for granted
today. Academic geographers have become devoted considerable attention to
national and multinational corporations in recent decades. The roots of
those organizations and indeed of the global economy lie in the
transportation and telecommunications networks invented in the nineteenth
century.

 "Make no little plans," enjoined Ralph Waldo Emerson, "They have no power
to stir men's souls." The handful of key individuals who sketched out the
broad outlines of telecommunications in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries certainly subscribed to Emerson's dictum. But why? What factors of
personality, upbringing, education, and experience explain their abilities
to articulate visions of future telecommunications networks that came to
harness the work of thousands and millions of individuals, over a century of
more or less progressive effort, to yield today's information society? No
firm explanations have emerged from my study of telecommunications
technologies, but some of the possible causes certainly intrigue.

 Born in 1791, Samuel Finley Breese Morse was the son of Jedidiah Morse, a
New England cleric known to many of us as the author of The American
Gazetteer published in 1797. It was the first American geography. The
American Gazetteer and its accompanying map were widely reprinted and used
during the early nineteenth century. It's difficult not to believe that his
father's fascination with geography on continental and global scales
influenced Morse and contributed to his devotion to developing the network
that would come to move information across and among continents well before
his death in 1872.

 Morse first made his living as a painter and photographer and founded the
National Academy of Design. In 1832, he conceived the idea of an
electromagnetic telegraph while returning from Europe. Morse's telegraph
offered little improvement over the dozens of others extant at the time,
until his development of an efficient code. Though known subsequently as
Morse code, it was most likely devised by Alfred Vail, the son of one of
Morse's financial backers. Vail senior was an industrialist, the owner and
operator of the Morristown, New Jersey Speedwell Iron Works, where Morse
built his original, three-mile experimental line. When the United States
Congress declined to purchase Morse's patents he and his backers faced the
problem noted above, that of building and managing what must by its very
nature be a dispersed but coordinated geographical organization.

 Morse and Alfred Vail turned in 1845 to Amos Kendall (1789-1869), United
States Postmaster General from 1835 to 1840. Kendall became the architect
and builder of what was to become Western Union, the largest North American
telegraph system. History and geography repeated themselves in 1885 when
Gardiner Hubbard (Alexander Graham Bell's chief financial backer) hired
Theodore Newton Vail to be General Manager of the infant American Telephone
and Telegraph Company. Theodore Vail was a cousin of the aforementioned
Alfred Vail, and had been a telegrapher in his youth. He subsequently joined
the U.S. Postal Service. By 1885 he was General Superintendent of the
Railway Mail Service, an operation that had by then become continental in
scale. Vail became the architect and builder of AT&T. The vision of
integrated, national service he carried from the postal service to AT&T
guided its subsequent evolution right through the forced breakup of the Bell
system in 1988.

 Within these broad outlines lie some fascinating details of how Samuel
Morse, Alfred Vail, Amos Kendall, Alexander Graham Bell, Gardiner Hubbard,
and Theodore Vail came to realize that the networks they were attempting to
build must be viewed as integrated, coordinated systems of continental and
even global scale. Planners and craftsmen less far-seeing than they focused
on local or regional aspects of telecommunications services. Kendall and
Theodore Vail in particular quickly realized that their networks must be
seen as whole, as truly integrated systems in which each and every component
was designed to function seamlessly with each and every other element over
continental scales. Also hidden in this sketch, but well documented elsewher
e, are the financial maneuvers in which almost everyone involved engaged. We
are wont to think of today's dot com booms and busts as something new under
the entrepreneurial and financial sun. They have numerous precedents in the
stock sales and manipulations, hostile takeovers, mergers, and lawsuits that
were commonplace after the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s. Everything that has
happened in the United States stock markets in the last ten years would be
familiar to Theodore Vail-in the two months after he joined the Bell system
he raised more than $450,000 in capital for the new enterprise, mostly among
personal friends.

 Outer and Inner Spaces

 Permit me to stretch the motif of outer and inner spaces somewhat further
as a way of highlighting some points to which I believe we must attend as we
try to tease out the agenda for geographical research and teaching on the
information society. Today in contrast to the past, it is especially
important to distinguish the inner space of telecommunications technologies
from the outer space of the way customers use them. We will also think more
clearly about the information society if we attend to the differences
between the perspectives internal to geography and those of interest to
geography's customers, the audiences we wish to reach in our research and
teaching.

Technology

 Producers and users invariably view telecommunications technologies
differently. Producers deal with the inner spaces of their technologies, the
infrastructure and operations behind the scenes where the work of
telecommunications is accomplished. Consumers see the outside in the forms
of the terminals via which they access technologies, the services rendered
to them, and the prices they pay for using media. Accordingly, producers and
consumers deal with different geographies. Traditional pricing for non-local
telephone services was based solely on the distance between two telephones
without regard for the substantial differences in the actual cost of
providing interconnections. The network cost of linking two telephones
located in small villages 1,000 kilometers apart might be fifty times
greater than the cost of connecting two telephones separated by the
identical distance if both telephones were situated in large cities served
by bulk transmission links. Average cost pricing-charging an identical
distance-based fee for both calls-shielded customers from the inexorable
laws of economic geography. Those providing service could not ignore that
internal geography, which had to be dealt with when planning facilities and
setting prices.

 A general inattention to inner and outer geographies is compounded in
modern telecommunications by the invisibility of components that were once
obvious to customers as well as to producers. Wires and cables have gone
underground. Radio signals are invisible and the antennae they use are
innocuous in most places, though pitched battles are now being fought in
some locales over attempts to place mobile phone towers in particularly
scenic or sacred locations. My students once enjoyed field trips to
telephone exchanges because of the sights, smells, and sounds associated
with electro-mechanical switching. All they would see in one of today's
telephone exchanges would be a large computer that doesn't even hum.
Regardless of their invisibility, geographers hoping to understand
telecommunications technologies will learn far more if they analyze both
producer and consumer geographies. They are, have been, and will continue to
be different geographies.

 Producers and consumers can agree, for example, that the perfect
telecommunications medium would be instantaneous and ubiquitous. Indeed the
entire history of telecommunications has been a quest to make
intercommunication instantaneous and ubiquitous. Telephony and its offshoots
have come perilously (some might say maddeningly) close to achieving those
two goals. For consumers, a third desideratum in a perfect medium is that it
be costless.  Understandably, producers do not share that view. The real
costs of many telecommunications services have dropped sharply since 1960
making them close to costless for many consumers. All the same, most
customers would like to see them reduced to lower levels, and prices will
remain a fundamental point of contention between producers and consumers.

Geography

 Geographers should always be careful to specify whose geography they
address in their discourse. Many intriguing geographies exist outside the
usual ken of academic or even practicing geographers. An example of a
producer's geography will make my point. The individual who in 1953 mapped
out the sectional center/ZIP Code system for transporting mail in the United
States used a Rand McNally Road Atlas and a dime store compass to plot the
locations of sectional centers and the territories they would serve. He was
a career postal employee entirely innocent of formal training in geography,
yet he knew his business and was a superb geographer. The proof of his
geographical pudding is Federal Express, which modeled its highly successful
collection and distribution network on the postal service's basic framework.
Dozens if not hundreds and thousands of similar empirical geographies exist,
and people contend with them day after day, whether or not certified
geographers pay any heed. There's no question that the world needs badly the
insights only academic and professional geographers can provide. Yet it's
healthy to be reminded that the worlds we ignore get along well without us.

 Where we risk sowing serious confusion is in failing to distinguish sharply
the geographies of the space outside academic geography from the inner space
of the discipline we pursue. When non-geographers come to us, they usually
seek insights into the geographical problems they face. Too often,
geographers tend to respond with ideas and methods more relevant to
internal, abstract debates about how to conduct academic geography. In
biblical terms, non-geographers come to us seeking bread and we give them
stones. We should serve ourselves and our societies more effectively if we
attended more to the geographies of the spaces outside our disciplinary
boundaries, and if we spent less time pursuing questions of interest only to
other geographers. Especially in our teaching of undergraduates, geographers
would be farther ahead in the long term if they restrained their natural and
even admirable wish to recruit apostles to our religion and focused more on
the most trenchant things we have to say about the empirical world.

 Whither Geography in the Information Society?

If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we would
better know what to do and how to do it.
--Abraham Lincoln

 The geographies of the spaces external to academic geography are
ineluctable. They will abide and people will continue to occupy them with
our without our tender attentions. Some professional geographers may be
dismayed by the success some non-geographers have achieved in organizing
space. I prefer to think that the geographic complexity of the world and its
persistence, even in the information age, are the best guarantors of job
security we could hope to enjoy. Given that neither the world's geography
nor academic geography is likely to wither away, an assessment of what we
know seems prerequisite to deciding what to do.

What We Know

 We know that geography matters and that it is forever. Friedrich Ratzel
characterized the technologies of telecommunication as raumbewältiger
(conquerors of space). The popular and geographical literature of the last
several decades has been heavily larded with both facile and learned
forecasts of the imminent demise of distance and space. Distance has not yet
been annihilated, nor will it be. Localities have not succumbed to
homogenization under the impacts of telecommunications and transportation,
nor will they. Even when customers or users are shielded from the internal
geographies that service providers cannot escape, system planners must still
grapple with them and geographers may have some useful things to say about
them. Moreover, a slow but seeming inexorable trend toward the application
of marginal-cost pricing for telecommunications services suggests that fewer
and fewer users of telecommunications services will remain shielded from
internal system geographies in the future.

 We know the basic principles that have historically governed the geography
and geometry of interconnecting networks and that will continue to do so in
the future. Tradeoffs between transmission costs and switching costs govern
the layout of telecommunications networks, as well as the geography of
electric power networks, interstate highways, and air transportation
systems, among others. In telecommunications, transmission (or linehaul) has
historically been cheap and switching dear, although both have fluctuated in
absolute terms as well as in relation to each other. Their relative costs at
any time shape the increments that are added to network edges or laid atop
networks that are already combinations of the tradeoffs extant during
previous eras of network development.

 We know the desiderata for the telecommunications networks of the future.
They will ideally offer instantaneous access to any location, from any
location, at minimal cost. Consumers will continue to try to drive the costs
toward zero. Service providers will continue to insist that they need
revenues sufficient to cover costs and a reasonable profit, and if not
prevented from doing so by competitors, will charge whatever the market will
bear. Keeping the desiderata of a perfect telecommunications network in mind
as the debates between consumers and providers (and increasingly irrelevant
regulators) play out will help greatly in gaining insights into what seem to
be arcane issues. The issues may indeed seem arcane, but they are rooted in
rock bottom fundamentals of the economic and social geography of
telecommunications.

 We know that geographers possess in GIS one of the most powerful tools
extant for mapping and analyzing the geography of telecommunications
systems. Geographic information systems were originally developed to help
manage geographically dispersed natural resources. No phenomena are more
dispersed than global telecommunications networks. There exists, in fact, a
professional society devoted to the applications of GIS to networks and
especially telecommunications networks now named GITA (The Geospatial
Information and Technology Association), formerly known as AM/FM (for
Automated Mapping/Facilities Management) International. As GIS continues to
evolved into GISc (geographic information science), geographers should find
themselves in an excellent position to play key roles in analyses of
information society hardware and software, and in the uses people make of
that infrastructure.

 We know that geographers have a head start in addressing the human
dimensions of information societies. The International Geographical Union
established a Study Group on the Geography of Communications and
Telecommunications in 1984. That group's productive work has continued
though the last sixteen years and it will continue into the future. If any
national groups exist that focus on telecommunications research and teaching
I am unaware of them, either in geography or in related social sciences such
as anthropology, economics, history, political science, or sociology.
Geographers specializing in telecommunications topics may indeed be few in
number, but we form a larger nucleus and are better organized than those in
any other specialty.

What to Do

 Identifying definitively the specifics of an agenda for geography with
respect to the information society is a task that demands a breadth and
depth of knowledge far beyond that I have been able to bring to this
lecture. I believe IGU commissions and study groups would make valuable
contributions to our thinking and planning within the Union were they to
devote time at each of their meetings and symposia to identifying trends in
their respective specialties and opportunities that seem particularly
promising. With the caveat that I have not consulted widely, I suggest that
research over the next several years focus on two dimensions of access.

 Those of us privileged to use telecommunications intensively and regularly
often come to believe that access to those technologies is universal or
nearly so. Though I suspect that more progress has been made more rapidly in
providing general access to the internet than to any prior
telecommunications innovation (over fifty percent of United States
households now have internet access), many individuals and groups remain
unconnected. The geography of access is what might be expected: high rates
of participation in wealthy countries and very low rates of penetration in
most of Africa and Latin America, and in much of Asia. If, as I believe, the
distribution of talent and genius is largely random among the human
population, leaving large numbers of people disconnected from the nöosphere
telecommunications and the internet have created leaves us all poorer than
we need be. Finding ways to make basic access more universal is a grand
challenge, worthy of the best thinking we can muster. It is also one in
which the insights into the nature of connecting networks geographers can
provide and the GIS tools that geographers command may be particularly
helpful.

 If one of the major challenges geographers might address is hypoaccess, I
believe one of our grandest opportunities lies in hyperaccess.
Geographically, the most exciting recent development in areas of the world
that enjoy advanced telecommunications services is the near geographical
universality of telecommunications services and the rapid progress toward
ubiquitous computing. Imagine being able to assemble and integrate every bit
of information that exists about a place and being able to access and use it
at that place. That capacity is rapidly developing as computers, GIS, GPS
(global positioning systems), the internet, and wireless telecommunications
become more integrated. That capacity will enable geographers to used
archived information to enhance the reality of places, whereas stored
information has traditionally served as a substitute for places.

 I despise the terms "revolution" and "revolutionary." They have been
grossly misused in connection with communications technologies. Yet mobile
communications based on wireless telephony have produced broad regions in
which access to intercommunications services is rapidly becoming wholly
independent of location, and in which the two-way capabilities of unified
telecommunications and computing technologies could reverse patterns of
thought and practice that have prevailed in geography and related
specialties for millennia. The increasing ability to take information about
places to the places themselves rather than assembling it in laboratories or
offices far removed from sites of investigation strikes me as offering great
potential for improving the way geographers think. Historically, stretching
back to the beginnings of our craft, geographers have enjoyed field work but
done most of their analysis at a remove from the places and spaces they
study. Mobile computing can be used to eliminate the distinction between the
outer space of empirical problems and the inner spaces of geographic
information and analysis. I rank that potential and its consequences at the
top of my personal agenda for such time as I am able to devote to research
on telecommunications in the years to come.