hlab@milton.ogi.edu (05/04/91)
[Taken from a personal communique on The WELL. Please reply to
the author.]
I'm not sure what to call this sort of communication. It's not exactly
a personal letter, but I was thinking about past conversations or
email exchanges I have had with each of you, or I thought you might be
interested in the subject because of what you had written in a paper.
In any case, I'm sharing this with you because I think it provides a
different framework by which to understand what is happening with NREN
and federal involvement. I may use it in a more formal paper with a
different audience.
Steve Cisler
Apple Library
sac@apple.com
---
May 1, 1991
Notes on a historical context for NREN
Today the FCC is having a full hearing on the network of the future.
This is a good time to look at information about networks of the past
and what it took to develop parts of the infrastructure in America and
American society. I am a beginner when it comes to studying the
history of technology; I have not read deeply; so much of what
influences my thinking has been email messages, computer conference
conversation, presentations at conferences, and reading more formal
papers and hearing reports from journals, proceedings, and a few
books.
It took a week's vacation on a quiet island in Hawaii to provide the
environment where I could concentrate on two different books, Thomas
Hughes AMERICAN GENESIS (Viking 1989) and Louis Hacker's THE COURSE OF
AMERICAN ECONOMIC GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT (John Wiley 1970).
I borrowed them from my local public library in Saratoga, California. Judging
from the grocery date stamps affixed to the back covers, I was the
second person to check out AMERICAN GENESIS, and the first in many
years to read the one by Hacker.
In paper after paper writers refer to the highway system as a
precursor to and metaphor for the NREN. David Hughes worries about
"toll roads between castles" and Albert Gore looks back to the support
his father gave to the construction of the Interstate highway system.
Roger Karraker uses the term "Highways for the Mind" as the title of
his survey of the NREN. The image of a data superhighway is firmly
fixed in the minds of anyone who has been following this topic over
the past few years.
Alexander Hamilton's economic policies have greatly influenced the
course of our economic history. In Hacker's words it was to "innovate,
invigorate, and in limited measure it was to assist and participate."
Hamilton called it "incitement and patronage of government." He also
believed in "implied powers" to give government the means to carry out
some of its plans. To stimulate the economy he wanted to promote
manufacturing, and to do this a national infrastructure had to be
created. Hamilton quoted but did not name Adam Smith when he wrote,
"Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing
the expense of carriage, put the remote arts of a country
more nearly upon a level with those in the neighborhood of
the town."
This view of the need for infrastructure prevailed after the
establishment of the Republic; there was a great deal of development
of turnpikes, financed by private companies. However, most of this
took place in developed areas and it took the federal government in
1806 to step in and authorize the construction of a national turnpike,
with no tolls. The National Road pushed westward; it was the first
over the Appalachian mountains, the prairies, and finally in the
middle of the 19th century, reached Vandalia, Illinois. As Hacker
says, "It was the first and the cheapest way by which the rich prairie
states were settled and brought under the plow." Later, however, the
state took over parts and instituted tolls to pay for upkeep.
Generally, it took federal, state, and city governments to develop the
early infrastructure of roads, canals and antebellum railroads,
partly because there was not a great deal of private capital but also
because much of the development was, in the words of Carter Goodrich
(GOVERNMENT PROMOTION OF AMERICAN CANALS AND RAILROADS
1800-1890), "premature"; these were risky investments in unsettled country and
private investors could not be guaranteed a decent return or be safe
from huge losses.
Albert Gallatin, who was Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury,
advocated full federal support and intervention in 1808. From his
master plan for the Senate:
"Good roads and canals will shorten distances,facilitate
commercial and personal intercourse, and unite, by a still
more intimate community of interests, the most remote
quarters of the United States. No other single
operation, within the power of government, can more
effectively tend to strengthen and perpetuate the Union
which secures independence, domestic peace, and internal
liberty..."
His plan called for canals and roads and improved waterways all
over the U.S., but Congress did not listen. Later, President Jackson
expressed the opposite view: hostility to federal government
expansion into areas best suited to private industry and state
government.
With the construction of the Erie Canal, one of the few successful
ones, there was a flurry of investment and construction in other
areas. Most of these were financed by state bond issues which were
sold abroad. State indebtedness became a problem; it shot up from $12.8
million in 1820 to over $200 million in 1840. The canals that lost
money did so because they were in areas where the freight could not
bear the costs or where the railroad entered and provided better
and faster service.
In the depression that followed 1837, many states defaulted on
interest payments and some even repudiated their debts. This soured
all public investment in infrastructure until the late 1850's when
money was put into the Illinois Central Railroad. In fact, state
constitutions stopped public outlay of funds for canal construction
or loans to corporations planning such ventures.
Early railroads had received state assistance. The federal government
began talking in 1845 about a railroad that would link the Missouri
and Mississippi Rivers with the west coast. It was not until 1862,
when the obstructionist Southerners had gone back to Dixie, that
Congress aided the states and the railroads with land grants from
the public domain and a loan of $65 million. Another important role
was that the statute fixed the gauge at 4 feet 8.5 inches, and this
became the standard railroad gauge in the U.S. By 1871 some 70
railroads had received over 155 million acres of land from Congress.
This, in turn, was transferred or sold to settlers and investors who
were induced to build and live along the rail lines under
construction. A side benefit was the Homestead Act which accounted
for about one-sixth of the new farms between 1860 and 1900. Most
settlers bought land from the railroads land companies, or the states
themselves. Many of these were immigrants from northern Europe who
already had farming skills.
Federal land grants played another important role that changed
America: it led to the establishment of universities for the training
of "farmers and mechanics". The idea originated in Illinois in 1850
when J.B. Turner, the president of the Illinois State Teacher's
Institute delivered a lecture called "A State University for
Industrial Classes". These schools added to America's technical
superiority which was reflected in the establishment of engineering
schools at West Point (1817) and Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute
(1824).
Thomas Hughes is a professor of the history and sociology of science.
His theories have influenced Bryan Pfaffenberger who wrote THE
DEMOCRATIZATION OF INFORMATION, and his concept of a technological
system helped me to understand the processes that are shaping the NREN
and whatever networks evolve out of it.
His basis thesis is that the century between 1870 and 1970 is the time
when Americans created the modern technological nation. This American
Genesis is comparable to the Italian Renaissance, the era of Louis XIV
in France, or the Victorian period in Great Britain.
Here is how Hughes explains his basic theory:
"In popular accounts of technology, inventions of the
late nineteenth century, such as the incandescent light,
the radio, the airplane, and the gasoline-dirven
automobile, occupy center stage, but these inventions
were embedded within technological systems. Such systems
involve far more than the so-called hardware, devices,
machines and processes, and the transportation,
communication, and information networks that interconnect
them. Such systems consist also of people and
organization. An electric light-and-power system, for
instance, may involve generators, motors, transmission
lines, utility companies, manufacturing enterprises, and
banks. Even a regulatory body may be co-opted into the
system. During the era of technological enthusiasm, the
characteristic endeavor was inventing, developing, and
organizing large technological systems--production,
communication, and military."
He then surveys the recent history of invention, discusses the tension
between the independent inventors like Edison and the industrial
laboratories. His accounts of patent fights between brilliant loners
like Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of the feedback (regenerative)
circuit, a major step in the history of radio, and RCA and AT&T are a
reminder that armies of lawyers have been major forces in technological
change since the early 20th century.
Hughes states that many of the technological systems grew out of the
individual inventions, and he studies the organizers like Henry Ford
whose River Rouge production facility was admired by other capitalists
as well as Communists (Lenin) as a supreme example of engineering and
production. One of the more interesting figures is Samuel Insull, who
emigrated from England, and at 21, became Thomas Edison's personal
secretary. He took part in the formative years of the electric utility
and manufacturing industry. As Hughes say, "He absorbed the creative,
problem-solving, systematizing, and expansionistic approach of the
system builder. He learned from Edison how to solve problems by
weaving a web of ideas, artifacts, and people. Insull pleased Edison,
and would have Ford, because he was no expert, no specialist."
In the late 1890's Insull left the new General Electric Company to
head the Chicago Edison Company and within three decades had absorbed
dozens of other utility companies in the Midwest, and the Commonwealth
Edison Company became the world's leading utility. This was due to his
ability to manipulate technical, economic, and political factors. He
looked for answers in all disciplines. Although he controlled
one-sixth of the gas and electric consumption in America through
enterprises valued at $3 billion in the 1920's his personal worth was
only about $5 million. After his first million, the pleasure in
controlling things, institutions, and people exceeded the drive to
earn more money. In a sense, running a technological system was its own
reward for Insull. Although, in his final days, he was indicted for
embezzlement and larceny, the story of his electric power network is
one that NREN players should study today. See also Hughes book
entitled NETWORKS OF POWER: ELECTRIFICATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY
1880-1930 (Johns Hopkins 1983).
Another fascinating section is the one on Roosevelt and the policies
of his advisors to face the economic and political challenges of the
depression and World War II. In particular the government role in the
development of the TVA and the Manhattan Project are particularly
illuminating. The Tennessee Valley Authority was the dream of an
President Morgan of Antioch College; he did not want the
TVA project to be seen as merely a public power project. He tied it to
agricultural development, water and erosion control, local
cooperatives, social engineering, and population resettlement (and
designed towns). However, once TVA was actually established, the
public/private power issue came to the fore.
The reasons I spent so much time describing these books is that the
issues are relevant to what is happening today. It was hard to turn a
page and not link some statement from years past to an email comment
from a few weeks ago, but so few of us have time to put our present
involvement in any historical context. The issues of tying a nation
together, weak capital markets, state indebtedness, the need for
an intellectual framework to influence change, and the role of
the federal government are timeless themes. Everything is just
moving much faster in this part of our history.
The survival of independent inventors during the early 20th century is
analogous to the survival of small development firms in the computer
hardware and software industry. Will a large, reasonably price
computer network foster creativity and spur market growth as Mitchell
Kapor hopes and as happened with the Teletel network in France? Or
will it lead to increased dominance by large American, Japanese, and
European software firms, publishing houses, and manufacturers. Perhaps
all of that will happen.
And what role should the government play? What is the public good in
the case of the NREN or the public broadband network? The fights
between the southern power utilities and the government are perhaps a
forerunner of what may happen in 1992 when the administration of the
NSFNET changes. But does the government still have to be involved as
it did when it financed the National Road 200 years ago? The capital
markets are here, but will their response serve America's needs for
the 21st century?
And what of education? We looked at the role of the land grants in
spreading industrial education, the 19th century equivalent of
computer/information literacy. How will this happen in the 1990s? A
very few people are convinced that massive infusions of money for
distance learning through narrow or broadband communications will save
our troubled education system. Perhaps Ed Lyell's suggestions and
goals should be a plank in Lamar Alexander's platform.
When we look back in 15 years will we find a personality that combines
the likes of Albert Gore, Al Weiss, and Bob Kahn and will emerge as
the 21st century Samuel Insull, Leslie Groves (Manhattan Project), or
Albert Gallatin? If the history of past networks can be our guide, we
can take such a person, combine him or her with the economic
atmosphere conducive to rapid growth, and incubate the technological
system in a benign regulatory and political environment.
---hlab@milton.u.washington.edu (Human Int. Technology Lab) (05/07/91)
Of course, you can post responses to Steve Cisler's remarks here, too. I'll add him to the mailing list. Bob Jacobson Moderator