16: Streaming Messages

One of the most common forms of digital texts found today, streaming messages, had its beginnings in April of 1746, when a noted French scientist named Jean-Antoine Nollet had two hundred monks in Paris arrange themselves into a long line by instructing each of them to hold onto the end of a twenty-five foot iron wire. Once this mile-long human and iron chain was complete, Nollet then connected one end of the wire to a primitive battery and sent an electric shock along the line (Standage, 1999). This eighteenth-century experiment was the first of many tests of the theory that electricity could be harnessed to send a message via wire over great distances. The shock received by each of the monks was literally telegraphed from one end of the wire to the other.