TCBH Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2018 Financing the Information Age: London TeleCity, the Legacy of IT-82, and the Selling of British Telecom.

This article is a history of the privatization of British Telecom. BT's privatization occupies a central position in histories of Thatcherism as a pivotal moment in Thatcherism's ideological focus on popular capitalism. These histories, however, overlook the important intersection of financial institutions and information technology policy in shaping BT's privatization. Financial institutions in the City of London formed a lobbying group, the City Telecommunications Committee, that pressured for BT's privatization and secured preferential treatment for the City from BT, ending a decades-long policy of uniform telecommunications services across Britain. Margaret Thatcher's government positioned BT's privatization as central to the success of two of Britain's information industries, electronics manufacturing and the City of London. Her government also cast BT's privatization as essential to an 'information revolution' that, through personal, networked computing, would further personal freedom and free markets. BT's privatization thus performed two important and related functions. First, it oriented Britain's telecommunications network to the City of London's needs, and secondly, it enacted an 'information revolution' that was portrayed as essential to the success of the City of London and British electronics. I label this fusion of City finance, neoliberal politics, and British telecommunications the 'London ideology', and this ideology shaped the broadly-held assumption that privatizing telecommunications was essential to reaching the 'information age'.

Sir William Brooke O'Shaughnessy (1808-1889), MD, FRS, LRCS Ed: Chemical pathologist, pharmacologist and pioneer in electric telegraphy.

This article reviews the life and work of Sir William O'Shaughnessy Brooke (formerly Sir William Brooke O'Shaughnessy), an Edinburgh doctor of medicine and Fellow of the Royal Society who as a young doctor in London analysed the blood and excreta of cholera victims, an action which led to the first successful use of intravenous replacement therapy. His career in India was distinguished in several spheres: chemistry, pharmacology in which he introduced cannabis indica to Europe, and in the field of electric telegraphy where he became the superintendent of telegraphs for India.

How Effective Is Telecommuting? Assessing the Status of Our Scientific Findings.

Telecommuting has become an increasingly popular work mode that has generated significant interest from scholars and practitioners alike. With recent advances in technology that enable mobile connections at ever-affordable rates, working away from the office as a telecommuter has become increasingly available to many workers around the world. Since the term telecommuting was first coined in the 1970s, scholars and practitioners have debated the merits of working away from the office, as it represents a fundamental shift in how organizations have historically done business. Complicating efforts to truly understand the implications of telecommuting have been the widely varying definitions and conceptualizations of telecommuting and the diverse fields in which research has taken place.Our objective in this article is to review existing research on telecommuting in an effort to better understand what we as a scientific community know about telecommuting and its implications. In so doing, we aim to bring to the surface some of the intricacies associated with telecommuting research so that we may shed insights into the debate regarding telecommuting's benefits and drawbacks. We attempt to sift through the divergent and at times conflicting literature to develop an overall sense of the status of our scientific findings, in an effort to identify not only what we know and what we think we know about telecommuting, but also what we must yet learn to fully understand this increasingly important work mode.After a brief review of the history of telecommuting and its prevalence, we begin by discussing the definitional challenges inherent within existing literature and offer a comprehensive definition of telecommuting rooted in existing research. Our review starts by highlighting the need to interpret existing findings with an understanding of how the extent of telecommuting practiced by participants in a study is likely to alter conclusions that may be drawn. We then review telecommuting's implications for employees' work-family issues, attitudes, and work outcomes, including job satisfaction, organizational commitment and identification, stress, performance, wages, withdrawal behaviors, and firm-level metrics. Our article continues by discussing research findings concerning salient contextual issues that might influence or alter the impact of telecommuting, including the nature of the work performed while telecommuting, interpersonal processes such as knowledge sharing and innovation, and additional considerations that include motives for telecommuting such as family responsibilities. We also cover organizational culture and support that may shape the telecommuting experience, after which we discuss the community and societal effects of telecommuting, including its effects on traffic and emissions, business continuity, and work opportunities, as well as the potential impact on societal ties. Selected examples of telecommuting legislation and policies are also provided in an effort to inform readers regarding the status of the national debate and its legislative implications. Our synthesis concludes by offering recommendations for telecommuting research and practice that aim to improve the quality of data on telecommuting as well as identify areas of research in need of development.

The Media of Relativity: Einstein and Telecommunications Technologies.

How are fundamental constants, such as "c" for the speed of light, related to the technological environments that produce them? Relativistic cosmology, developed first by Albert Einstein, depended on military and commercial innovations in telecommunications. Prominent physicists (Hans Reichenbach, Max Born, Paul Langevin, Louis de Broglie, and Léon Brillouin, among others) worked in radio units during WWI and incorporated battlefield lessons into their research. Relativity physicists, working at the intersection of physics and optics by investigating light and electricity, responded to new challenges by developing a novel scientific framework. Ideas about lengths and solid bodies were overhauled because the old Newtonian mechanics assumed the possibility of "instantaneous signaling at a distance." Einstein's universe, where time and space dilated, where the shortest path between two points was often curved and non-Euclidean, followed the rules of electromagnetic "signal" transmission. For these scientists, light's constant speed in the absence of a gravitational field-a fundamental tenet of Einstein's theory-was a lesson derived from communication technologies.

'A thorn in the side of European geodesy': measuring Paris-Greenwich longitude by electric telegraph.

The difference in longitude between the observatories of Paris and Greenwich was long of fundamental importance to geodesy, navigation and timekeeping. Measured many times and by many different means since the seventeenth century, the preferred method of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made use of the electric telegraph. I describe here for the first time the four Paris-Greenwich telegraphic longitude determinations made between 1854 and 1902. Despite contemporary faith in the new technique, the first was soon found to be inaccurate; the second was a failure, ending in Anglo-French dispute over whose result was to be trusted; the third failed in exactly the same way; and when eventually the fourth was presented as a success, the evidence for that success was far from clear-cut. I use this as a case study in precision measurement, showing how mutual grounding between different measurement techniques, in the search for agreement between them, was an important force for change and improvement. I also show that better precision had more to do with the gradually improving methods of astronomical, time determination than with the singular innovation of the telegraph, thus emphasizing the importance of what have been described as 'observatory techniques' to nineteenth-century practices of precision measurement.

The Carrington solar flares of 1859: consequences on life.

The beginning of September 1859 was the occasion of the first and unique observation of a giant solar white light flare, auroral displays were observed at low latitudes and geomagnetic observatories recorded exceptional storms. This paper reviews the impact of the event on the earth system with a special emphasis on living processes using the historical record and current scientific analysis. The data used includes reports from the telegraph operators, mortality and morbidity records, proxies as agricultural production. Comparisons with later solar flare events will be attempted on the basis of the record and the consequences of an event of comparable magnitude to the 1859 set of flares will be discussed.

The telegraph and the beginnings of telemedicine in Australia.

The history of telemedicine is at times presented to commence in the 20th century. Events in Central Australia in 1874 show that the history goes further back, when the newly constructed telegraph played an important telemedicine role not only in enabling care for a wounded person, but also in uniting a dying man with his wife 2000 kilometres away. Innovation with the tools at hand has proven to be effective to bridge the tyranny of distance in the delivery of health care.

Los medios de comunicación y la construcción del territorio en América Latina / Means of communication and the construction of territory in Latin America

En este trabajo se analizan el impacto y las dificultades de la instalación de los medios de comunicación, en particular la telegrafía, a la que se le atribuyó la creación de un espacio comunicado a escala continental. Primero, se hará referencia a Domingo F. Sarmiento, como uno de los protagonistas de los proyectos de telegrafía y ferrocarril propios del Siglo XIX. En segundo lugar, aparecerá la expedición del ingeniero militar Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon quien, algunas décadas más tarde, con la colocación de una línea telegráfica en el sertão brasileño, marca, sin embargo, el fin del siglo de la telegrafía con hilos. Y finalmente, se volverá a la línea Rondon unos veinte años más tarde, cuando en 1938 Claude Lévi-Strauss viaja "sobre la línea" encontrando aquellos sistemas de comunicación precolombinos que pudieron haber existido entre ambas Américas.

The creation of a continental-scale communication space has been attributed to the telegraph in Latin America. The article analyzes the problems encountered in installing means of communication and their subsequent impact, focusing on the telegraph. The study begins by looking at Domingo F. Sarmiento, one of the protagonists of nineteenth-century telegraph and railroad projects. It next examines the expedition by military engineer Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who put telegraph lines in place in the Brazilian sertão some decades later, at the end of the cycle of wired telegraphs. Lastly, it explores Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1938 trip along Rondon's line, where the French anthropologist found pre-Colombian communication systems that may have existed between the Americas.

Telégrafos e inventário do território no Brasil: as atividades científicas da Comissão Rondon (1907-1915) / Telegraphs and an inventory of the territory of Brazil: the scientific work of the Rondon Commission (1907-1915)

As atividades de construção de infra-estrutura de comunicações realizadas pela Comissão Rondon (1900-1930) notabilizaram-se por seus contatos com sociedades indígenas. Pouco conhecidas são as pesquisas científicas feitas por seus membros indissociáveis dos objetivos de modernização, ocupação e integração do interior do país por parte do então recém-instaurado regime republicano. Este artigo analisa o impacto das atividades científicas da Comissão em áreas como botânica, geologia e zoologia, assim como o inédito campo de trabalho que elas ofereceram para pesquisadores e naturalistas brasileiros crescentemente incorporados às suas diferentes viagens de exploração.

In its work to build communication infrastructure, the Rondon Commission (1900-30) became well known for its contacts with indigenous societies. Little, however, has been written about the scientific research conducted by its members, that was inseparable from the recently inaugurated republican regime's goals of modernization, settlement, and integration of the interior with the rest of Brazil. The article analyzes the impact of the Commission's scientific work in areas like botany, geology, and zoology, as well as its impact on the new field of work thus opened to Brazilian researchers and naturalists, who took part in these exploratory journeys in ever greater numbers.

[Datanet 1 and the convergence of the computer and telecommunications]. / Datanet 1 en de convergentie van computer en telecommunicatie.

This article describes the efforts of the Dutch national company for telecommunication, PTT, in introducing and developing a public network for data communication in the Netherlands in the last decades of the twentieth century. As early as the 1960s, private companies started to connect their local computers. As a result, small private computer networks started to emerge. As the state company offering general access to public services in telephony, the PTT strove to develop a public data network, accessible to every user and telephone subscriber. This ambition was realized with Datanet 1, the public data network which was officially opened in 1982. In the years that followed, Datanet became the dominant network for data transmission, despite competing efforts by private companies and computer manufacturers. The large-scale application of Datanet in public municipal administration serves as a case study for the development of data communication in practice, that shows that there was a gradual migration from X-25 to TCP/IP protocols. The article concludes by stating that the introduction and development of data transmission transformed the role of the PTT in Dutch society, brought new working practices, new services and new responsibilities, and resulted in a whole new phase in the history of the computer.

Baron Kelvin of Largs: an economical engineer.

William Thomson--honoured as Baron Kelvin of Largs--was Victorian Britain's most famous physicist, especially celebrated for laying the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. As well as profiting financially from his many engineering projects, Kelvin introduced influential theories about energy and electromagnetism, all strongly coloured by his industrial experiences and the thrifty attitudes of Scottish Christians. Never accepting radioactivity as an additional energy source to the sun, he insisted that the Earth's life span was far too short for evolution to have taken place.

Professor Joseph Warren Horton (1889-1967): biological engineer.

Joseph Warren Horton graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1914. He became involved in the early development of electrical measurement devices, televised image transmission, and the detection of underwater sound transmission. In the mid-1930s he was appointed the first leader of the newly created Department of Biological Engineering at MIT and in this position he made major contributions to the application of physics to human physiology, in particular by increasing the safety of explosive inhalational anaesthetic agents.

Telemedicine development: setting the record straight.

When a topic so synonymous with advanced technology as telemedicine needs a written history, perhaps a discipline has come of age. Telemedicine has had an oral history among visionaries and technophiles over the last thirty years or so. Tales of grand projects, technical failures and fabulous successes abound at telemedicine meetings. One is reminded of the film footage of early efforts at flight where extravagant engineering approaches failed time and time again until the elegant solution of the Wright brothers took to the air on the beach at Kitty Hawk in December 1903. It is hard to imagine the frustration and excitement of initial efforts at telemedicine or manned flight when current expectations are for information on demand and on time departures. However, from very early efforts in telemedicine the vision was consistent: overcome the huge liability of distance in patient care by creating an electronic continuum between the site of need and the site of expertise. The vision continues to strive toward technical transparency and clinical results, which assure a patient that no matter who, no matter where, no matter when medicine will care for you with consistent professionalism. Technology took us from the patient home to the technology-rich hospital. Perhaps technology will transfer the majority of patient management back to the comforts of home, convenience of workplace or the exigencies of travel and mobility.