Earlier than the phone rendered it out of date, the optical telegraph was considerably of a nationwide fixation in Nineteenth-century France. Petrified by the unknown, Parisians smashed an early model in 1792. Politicians had been suspicious of what the writer calls “mechanical monsters, secretive and unusual,” within the aftermath of the French Revolution. And this “angular and winged” system’s aesthetic or grotesque figurative prospects both enchanted or perturbed artists of the period. Even Victor Hugo didn’t maintain again. Of the telegraph that was then mounted atop the Parisian cathedral Saint-Sulpice, the Romantic writer writes in his 1819 anti-Napoleon satirical poem “Le Télégraphe”: “There, earlier than my window! It’s fairly ridiculous / That somebody would place a telegraph outdoors my room!”
The brief and illustrious lifetime of the optical telegraph — and the creative illustration it impressed — is the topic of Richard Taws’s in depth educational e-book Time Machines: Telegraphic Photos in Nineteenth Century France. Typically troublesome to learn however full of photos throughout six chapters, the e-book unravels intersections between political, scientific, and visible histories, as artists and inventors encountered the telegraph in European cities like Paris and Vienna.
Taws forefronts three lesser studied style painters: Jacques François Joseph Swebach-Desfontaines, Étienne Bouhot, and Georges Michel. Particularly fascinating are Michel’s later Nineteenth-century works like “View of the Butte Montmartre with the Church of Saint Pierre and Vue de Montmartre,” the place the artist merges the iconography of hazy telegraphs with bleak cloudy skies — a well timed illustration of France’s evolving panorama affected by environmental and technological change. The telegraph has additionally been visually represented in numerous kinds of artwork, together with Honoré Daumier’s lithographs, J. J. Grandville and Charles Norry’s drawings, Louis Pierre Baltard’s etchings, and several other caricatures.
Taws’s main goal is to disclose the forgotten historical past of the telegraph in French artwork, however the scrupulous analysis retains getting misplaced inside its personal lexical complexity. The e-book’s chronicle-like type is as overwhelming to comply with because the sophisticated community of photos and cultural forces it goals to demystify. However the abstruse writing shouldn’t deter or discourage readers investigating junctures between histories of artwork, science, and society. Time Machines intrigues pursuits in different applied sciences which have outlived the defunct telegraph — windmills, telescopes, and sizzling air balloons, as an example. How a lot of this artwork historic illustration remains to be misplaced in time, ready to be uncovered?
Time Machines: Telegraphic Photos in Nineteenth-Century France (2025) by Richard Taws is printed by MIT Press and is accessible on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
