What hath god wrought
What hath god wrought
what hath god wrought
1 What hath God wrought!
2 Morse, Samuel Finley Breese (F. B.)
См. также в других словарях:
Hath — (h[a^]th), v., 3d pers. sing. pres. of
what — I. pronoun Etymology: Middle English, from Old English hwæt, neuter of hwā who more at who Date: before 12th century 1. a. (1) used as an interrogative expressing inquiry about the identity, nature, or value of an object or matter New Collegiate Dictionary
wrought — Hana ia. What hath God wrought (Nah. 23:23), kupaianaha ka hana ana a ke Akua … English-Hawaiian dictionary
GOD — IN THE BIBLE The Bible is not a single book, but a collection of volumes composed by different authors living in various countries over a period of more than a millennium. In these circumstances, divergencies of emphasis (cf. Kings with… … Encyclopedia of Judaism
Oxford History of the United States — The Oxford History of the United States (1982–present) is an ongoing multi volume narrative history of the United States published by Oxford University Press. Contents 1 Woodward editorship 2 Kennedy editorship 3 Volumes … Wikipedia
Electrical telegraph — A printing electrical telegraph receiver, and a transmitter key at bottom right An electrical telegraph is a telegraph that uses electrical signals, usually conveyed via telecommunication lines or radio. The electromagnetic telegraph is a device… … Wikipedia
Numbers 23 — 1 And Balaam said unto Balak, Build me here seven altars, and prepare me here seven oxen and seven rams. 2 And Balak did as Balaam had spoken; and Balak and Balaam offered on every altar a bullock and a ram. 3 And Balaam said unto Balak, Stand by … The King James version of the Bible
Arnold Brown (General of The Salvation Army) — Arnold Brown (December 13, 1913 ndash; June 26, 2002) was the 11th General of The Salvation Army (1977 1981).He was born in London, England, the son of officers of the Army. While he was still a young boy, his family emigrated to Canada, and it… … Wikipedia
Sarah Josepha Hale — Sarah Josepha Hale, 1831, by James Reid Lambdin Born October 24, 1788 Newport, New Hampshire Died April 30, 1879(1879 04 30) (aged … Wikipedia
Anne Royall — (June 11 1769 mdash; October 1 1854), by some accounts the first professional woman journalist in the United States, was born Anne Newport in Baltimore, Maryland. Anne grew up in the western frontier of Pennsylvania before her family migrated… … Wikipedia
American Morse code — also known as Railroad Morse is the latter day name for the original version of the Morse Code developed in the mid 1840s, by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail for their electric telegraph. The American qualifier was added because, after most of the… … Wikipedia
What hath God wrought!
Смотреть что такое «What hath God wrought!» в других словарях:
Hath — (h[a^]th), v., 3d pers. sing. pres. of
what — I. pronoun Etymology: Middle English, from Old English hwæt, neuter of hwā who more at who Date: before 12th century 1. a. (1) used as an interrogative expressing inquiry about the identity, nature, or value of an object or matter New Collegiate Dictionary
wrought — Hana ia. What hath God wrought (Nah. 23:23), kupaianaha ka hana ana a ke Akua … English-Hawaiian dictionary
GOD — IN THE BIBLE The Bible is not a single book, but a collection of volumes composed by different authors living in various countries over a period of more than a millennium. In these circumstances, divergencies of emphasis (cf. Kings with… … Encyclopedia of Judaism
Oxford History of the United States — The Oxford History of the United States (1982–present) is an ongoing multi volume narrative history of the United States published by Oxford University Press. Contents 1 Woodward editorship 2 Kennedy editorship 3 Volumes … Wikipedia
Electrical telegraph — A printing electrical telegraph receiver, and a transmitter key at bottom right An electrical telegraph is a telegraph that uses electrical signals, usually conveyed via telecommunication lines or radio. The electromagnetic telegraph is a device… … Wikipedia
Numbers 23 — 1 And Balaam said unto Balak, Build me here seven altars, and prepare me here seven oxen and seven rams. 2 And Balak did as Balaam had spoken; and Balak and Balaam offered on every altar a bullock and a ram. 3 And Balaam said unto Balak, Stand by … The King James version of the Bible
Arnold Brown (General of The Salvation Army) — Arnold Brown (December 13, 1913 ndash; June 26, 2002) was the 11th General of The Salvation Army (1977 1981).He was born in London, England, the son of officers of the Army. While he was still a young boy, his family emigrated to Canada, and it… … Wikipedia
Sarah Josepha Hale — Sarah Josepha Hale, 1831, by James Reid Lambdin Born October 24, 1788 Newport, New Hampshire Died April 30, 1879(1879 04 30) (aged … Wikipedia
Anne Royall — (June 11 1769 mdash; October 1 1854), by some accounts the first professional woman journalist in the United States, was born Anne Newport in Baltimore, Maryland. Anne grew up in the western frontier of Pennsylvania before her family migrated… … Wikipedia
American Morse code — also known as Railroad Morse is the latter day name for the original version of the Morse Code developed in the mid 1840s, by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail for their electric telegraph. The American qualifier was added because, after most of the… … Wikipedia
What Hath God Wrought
The telegraph was an even more dramatic innovation in its day than the Internet
Winter 2010
On May 24, 1844, Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, seated in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, tapped a message into a device of cogs and coiled wires, employing a code that he had recently devised to send a biblical text: “What hath God wrought.” Forty miles away in Baltimore, Morse’s associate Alfred Vail received the electric signals and returned the message. As those who witnessed it understood, this demonstration would change the world.
For thousands of years messages had been limited by the speed messengers could travel and the distance eyes could make out signals, such as flags or smoke. Neither Alexander the Great nor Benjamin Franklin, two thousand years later, had known anything faster than a galloping horse. Now instant long-distance communication was possible for the first time.
At the beginning of the 19th-century, the United States remained an agrarian country of limited technology. Most people lived on isolated farmsteads, their lives revolving around the weather and the hours of daylight. Many people grew their own food; many women made their families’ clothes. It was the difficulty of transportation and communication that kept Americans’ lives so primitive. Only people who lived near navigable waterways could easily market their crops and procure the money to buy commodities that were not produced locally, which they could barter with their neighbors or the local storekeeper. With transportation costs high, only luxury goods could bear the costs of long-distance transportation over land. Information from the outside world was a precious luxury.
But 50 years later the United States had experienced a revolution in communications, typified by Morse’s dramatic action. The invention of the steam-powered press, reinforced by radical improvements in papermaking, drove an enormous expansion of the printed media. Improvements in transportation, such as the Erie Canal, the steamboat, and the railroad, facilitated the production and dissemination of newspapers, magazines, and books. The printed media affected every aspect of life.
Two of the largest and most widely diffused institutions of 19th-century America worked to foster the communications revolution. Public education provided a literate audience for the printed media. The Post Office Department, the largest activity of the federal government in peacetime, efficiently distributed the ever-increasing number of newspapers and magazines that fed the curiosity of the public and stoked the fires of partisan political debate.
Improvements in transportation and communication liberated people from isolation—economic, intellectual, and political—and brought Americans progressively deeper into a global economy. Meanwhile the United States was extending westward until it reached the Pacific, creating a transcontinental empire that was integrated by these very innovations in transportation and communication.
The telegraph probably lowered the cost of business transactions even more than the Internet has so far today; it certainly seemed to contemporaries an even more dramatic innovation. Commercial applications of Morse’s invention followed quickly. Farmers and planters increasingly produced food and fiber for far-off markets. Their merchants and bankers welcomed news of distant prices and credit. The newly invented railroads telegraphed train movements to avoid collisions on the single tracks of the time. The telegraph solved commercial problems and at the same time had huge political consequences.
When Morse tapped out those four words on his electric telegraph 165 years ago, he was not only decoupling communication from travel and enabling and speeding up commerce, but also fostering globalization and encouraging democratic participation.
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TRANSCRIPT
VOICEOVER: Media. It surrounds us. We live our lives in it and through it. We structure our lives around it. But it wasn’t always this way. So how did we get here? And where is the media technology that increasingly governs our lives taking us? This is the story of The Media Matrix.
There’s a story about the famous Battle of Waterloo in 1815 that is not usually included in the history textbooks.
The story is that John Roworth—a trusted employee of Nathan Rothschild, the English heir of the infamous Rothschild banking family—was at the battlefield that day and, when the battle was decided and it was apparent that Napoleon had been defeated, he raced off on horseback, bearing the news across the English channel. The messenger arrived at his employers’s London office a full 24 hours before the official government courier and Rothschild, always looking for a way to turn a profit, decided to use the news to his advantage. He made a show of selling his shares at the London Stock Exchange and the public, believing the famed stockbroker had received word that Napoleon had won the battle, began selling as well. The stock market plummeted and Rothschild secretly bought up the shares at rock-bottom prices. By the time the news finally reached Londoners that Wellington—not Napoleon—was the victor at Waterloo, the coup was complete: Nathan Rothschild was the richest man in the realm.
This story, like so many historical adventure yarns, has been much decorated in the retelling: John Roworth was not at Waterloo, for one thing, and there was no great market sell-off in the hours before the official news of the battle reached London. But the central part of the tale is true: Nathan Rothschild did receive early news of Napoleon’s defeat and he did «do well» by that information, as Roworth admitted in a letter the month after the incident.
Enter Samuel Morse.
Morse was not a scientist or an experimenter, but a painter. He claimed that the idea for sending messages through electrical wires came to him in a flash of genius on a lengthy ship journey from Europe to America in 1832, and thus that he deserved credit as the sole inventor of the telegraph.
In reality, research along these lines had been going on for nearly a century. The idea of sending electrical messages through wires was first proposed in Scots Magazine in 1753 and it was demonstrated numerous times over the years—most memorably by Francisco Salvá, who in 1795 connected wires to human test subjects, assigned each of them a letter, and instructed them to shout their letter out when they received a shock.
Ignorant of this history, Morse had to rely on real scientists and inventors for his important breakthroughs. Like Professor Leonard Gale, who helped develop the technique of using relays to help the messages travel further than a few hundred yards. And Alfred Vail, a bright young machinist whose improvements to Morse’s crude prototype brought the idea into reality. Many even contend that it was Vail, not Morse, who invented the system of dots and dashes that we know as Morse Code.
The passage, from the book of Numbers, is one of praise—rejoicing at the wonders that God had wrought for Israel—and ends with an exclamation mark. But the telegraph message didn’t contain punctuation, and so the press misreported the phrase with a question mark at the end: «What hath God wrought?» The medium had already begun to change the message.
It’s difficult for us to appreciate just how incredible it was for those who first witnessed communication from a distance with a disembodied electric ghost. In fact, it was almost impossible for people to understand this type of communication in anything but spiritual terms. Even the word «medium» evokes the specter of contact with the spirit world.
When the radio was introduced to Saudi Arabia, the country’s conservative Islamic clerics declared it «the devil hiding in a box» and demanded that King Abdulaziz ban the infernal contraption. The king saw the potential use of the radio for the development of the country, but, relying on the clerics for support, he couldn’t outright reject their council.
Instead, the crafty monarch proposed a test: the radio would be brought before him the next day and he would listen to it himself. If what the clerics said was true, then he would ban the devil’s device and behead those responsible for bringing it into the country.
The next day, the radio was brought before the king at the appointed time. But the king had secretly arranged with the radio engineers to make sure the Quran was being read at the hour of the test. Sure enough, when he switched it on and passages from the Quran were heard.
«Can it be that the devil is saying the Quran?» he asked. «Or is it perhaps true that this is not an evil box?» The clerics conceded defeat and the radio was allowed into Saudi Arabia.
We may laugh, but the Saudis were not the first or the last to mistake media technology for devilry. In 1449, Johann Fust—the scion of a wealthy and powerful family in Mainz—lent Gutenberg an enormous sum of money to start producing his famed Bible and confiscated the books from the printer when he couldn’t afford to repay the loan. When Fust later appeared on the streets of Paris, selling multiple copies of Gutenberg’s Bible, the bewildered Parisians—who had never seen printed books before and so couldn’t imagine how so many strangely identical copies of a manuscript could be produced so quickly—arrested him for witchcraft.
The essence of the mass media—its ability to project the voices of people who aren’t there using electronic gadgets and wireless networks—is the essence of magic, bringing to life the scrying mirrors and palantirs of lore. But is this media technology a dark art, or can its powers be used for good?
As the new medium of commercial radio rose in the early decades of the 20th century, listeners had cause to side with the Saudi clerics in their determination that it was, in fact, a devil in a box. Listeners like those who tuned into a strange news report on the Columbia Broadcasting System on the evening of Sunday, October 30, 1938.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. Toronto, Canada: Professor Morse of McGill University reports observing a total of three explosions on the planet Mars, between the hours of 7:45 P.M. and 9:20 P.M., eastern standard time. This confirms earlier reports received from American observatories. Now, nearer home, comes a special announcement from Trenton, New Jersey. It is reported that at 8:50 P.M. a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton. The flash in the sky was visible within a radius of several hundred miles and the noise of the impact was heard as far north as Elizabeth. We have dispatched a special mobile unit to the scene, and will have our commentator, Carl Phillips, give you a word picture of the scene as soon as he can reach there from Princeton. In the meantime, we take you to the Hotel Martinet in Brooklyn, where Bobby Millette and his orchestra are offering a program of dance music.
Of course, this wasn’t a news broadcast at all. It was the infamous «Halloween Scare,» Orson Wells’ radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which infamously caused panic among some members of the listening audience who were flipping through the dial and mistook the dramatized news «interruptions» for actual reports of a Martian invasion.
It’s become fashionable in recent years to downplay the incident as a myth. There was no real scare, only a few dimwits who got frightened. The newspapers—looking for any excuse to belittle radio, its fast-rising competition for the public’s attention and corporate advertising dollars—ginned up the story and sold the public on a panic that never was.
But there was something to the Halloween Scare. The City Manager of Trenton, New Jersey—mentioned by name in the broadcast—even wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to demand an immediate investigation into the stunt. In response, a team of researchers fanned out, collecting information, conducting interviews and studying reports about the panic to better understand what had happened and what could be learned about this new medium’s ability to influence the public.
Cantril’s report on Wells’ Halloween broadcast, The Invasion from Mars, concluded that such a large-scale media-induced frenzy could happen again «and even on a much more extensive scale.» This was important information for the funders of the Princeton Radio Project; their next major research project was a study of how radio could be used for spreading war propaganda, an increasingly important subject as the world slipped into the maw of World War II.
The question of electronic media’s ability to influence the public became even more important as the radio revolution of the early twentieth century flowed into the television revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Television had actually been ready to roll out as a commercial medium in the 1930s, but the Depression and then the war delayed the mass production of television sets. The first mass-produced commercial television hit the market in 1946, and it soon became one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history to that point, finding its way into the majority of American homes within a decade.
Strangely, as sociologist Robert Putnam documented in his 2000 bestseller, Bowling Alone, the era of television adoption precisely coincides with a severe drop-off in civic engagement among the American public. Could there be a relation? If so, what could it be?
One intriguing possibility comes from research conducted by Herbert Krugman in 1969. Krugman—who would go on to become manager of public opinion research at General Electric in the 1970s—was interested to discover what happens physiologically in the brain of a person watching TV. He taped a single electrode to the back of his test subject’s head and ran the wire to a Grass Model 7 Polygraph, which in turn interfaced with a Honeywell 7600 computer and a CAT 400B computer. He turned on the TV and began monitoring the brain waves of his subject. He found through repeated testing that «within about thirty seconds, the brain-waves switched from predominantly beta waves, indicating alert and conscious attention, to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention: the state of aimless fantasy and daydreaming below the threshold of consciousness.»
Krugman’s initial findings were confirmed by more extensive and accurate testing: TV rapidly induces an alpha-state consciousness in its viewers, putting them in a daydream state that leaves them less actively focused on their activities and more receptive to suggestion. This dream state combines with the nature of the medium itself to create a perfect tool for disengaging the viewers intellectually, removing them from active participation in their environment and substituting real experience with the simulacrum of experience.
In a word, TV hypnotizes its viewers.
NEIL POSTMAN: To begin with, television is essentially non-linguistic. It presents information mostly in visual images. Although human speech is heard on television and sometimes assumes importance, people mostly watch television. And what they watch are rapidly changing visual images, as many as 1200 different shots every hour. The average length of a shot on network television is 3.5 seconds. The average in a commercial is 2.5 seconds.
Now, this requires very little analytic decoding. In America, television watching is almost wholly a matter of what we would call pattern recognition. What I’m saying here is that the symbolic form of television—its form—does not require any special instruction or learning.
In America, television viewing begins at about the age of 18 months and by 36 months, children begin to understand and respond to television’s imagery. They have favorite characters, sing jingles they hear and ask for products they see advertised.
There’s no need for any preparation or prerequisite training for watching television. It needs no analog to the McGuffey Reader. Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills and that is why there is no such thing as remedial television watching.
As we have seen, it was only a matter of years from the advent of commercial radio as a medium of communication until monopolistic financial interests were funding studies to determine how best to use it to mould the public consciousness. And, it seems, the television—with its brain wave-altering, hypnosis-inducing, cognitive impairment abilities—was designed from the very get-go to be a weapon of control deployed against the viewing public.
But if these media are weapons, if they are being used to direct and shape the public’s attention and, ultimately, their thoughts, it begs some questions: Who is wielding these weapons? And for what purpose?
This is no secret conspiracy. The answer is not difficult to find. TimeWarner and Disney and Comcast NBC Universal and News Corp and Sony and Universal Music Group and the handful of other companies that have consolidated control over the «mediaopoly» of the electronic media are the ones wielding the media weapon. Their boards of directors are public information. Their major shareholders are well known. A tight-knit network of wealthy and powerful people control what is broadcast by the corporate media, and, by extension, wield the media weapon to shape society in their interest.
In Part 1 of this series, we noted how technological advancements in the printing press and the development of new business models for the publishing industry had taken Gutenberg’s revolutionary technology out of the hands of the public and put it into the hands of the few rich industrialists with the capital to afford their own newspaper or book publisher. The Gutenberg conspiracy had led, seemingly inevitably, to the Morgan conspiracy. But that process didn’t end with the electrification of the media; it accelerated.
By the end of the twentieth century, a handful of media companies controlled the vast majority of what Americans read, saw and heard. That this situation was used to control what the public thought about important topics is, by now, obvious to all.
NEWSCASTERS: The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories — stories that simply aren’t true — without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, this media oligopoly had cemented its control over the public mind. Combined, newspapers, television, movies and radio had the ability to direct people’s thoughts on any given topic, or even what they thought about. The zenith of that era was reached on September 11, 2001, when billions across the globe watched the dramatic events of 9/11 play out on their television screens like a big-budget Hollywood production.
But the media was not done evolving. Technologies were already being rolled out that would once again change the public’s relationship to the media. Technologies that would once again leave people questioning whether the media was a devil hiding in a box, wondering whether this new media was a tool of empowerment or control, and asking the question: What hath God wrought?
The Media Matrix
Part 2: What Hath God Wrought
Transcript and links: corbettreport.com/media
Next week: Into the Metaverse
What Hath God Wrought
On May 24, 1844, a seismic breakthrough occurred: the first telegraphic message was transmitted between cities. People in two separate and distant geographic locations could instantly communicate with each other!
What was that first message? It was a Bible verse: Numbers 23:23 “What hath God wrought!” Such a message today likely would be met with much criticism, but for most of history–especially most of American history–religion was not seen as a hindrance to scientific thought but rather just the opposite.
This particular scientific breakthrough came at the hands of dedicated Christian inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse (developer of the famous Morse Code) was also a celebrated painter, and while painting a portrait in Washington, D.C. in 1825, he received word that his wife in New England was seriously ill. He quickly returned home but found his wife had not only died but had already been buried.
Frustrated at the length of time it had taken the message to reach him, he sought a better and faster method of long distance communication. Morse initially developed a single strand telegraph which could transmit messages only over a short distance. He continued to perfect his invention until finally developing a means of transmitting magnetic signals over long distances.
Morse demonstrated his invention at the U. S. Capitol, and in 1843 Congress appropriated money to construct a telegraph line between the Capitol and Baltimore. That first telegraphic message (pictured below) from Numbers 23 was sent from the basement of the U.S. Capitol the following year. (That message had been suggested by the daughter of a friend.)
Many years later, looking back over that invention, Morse reflected:
(You can read more about Samuel F. B. Morse’s invention in the Numbers 23 article in The Founders Bible.)
Biblical faith permeated Morse’s life. For example, in an 1830 letter (from WallBuilders’ collection, a page of which is pictured on the right), Samuel included a religious poem he had written earlier in life:
Yield then thy pen to God to draw
On the next leaf His perfect law
So when thy book of life is done
Cleans’d by the blood of God’s own Son.
From sin’s dark blots and folly’s stain
A purer volume shall remain
And rest (to grace a splendid prize)
In Heaven’s alcoves in the skies.
The use of Morse’s telegraphic invention grew rapidly and expanded not only across America but also the globe. (See, for example, an 1858 sermon from WallBuilders’ library, The Atlantic Telegraph: As Illustrating the Providence and Benevolent Designs of God, was preached after the laying of a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable.) Today we enjoy the modern technological blessings that sprang from what Christian inventor Samuel F. B. Morse began on May 24, 1844.