I want to start by thanking all of you for joining me here today on this afternoon.
I am sure you have better things to do, but thank you for coming.
And I want to start by saying thanks to a great number of people here who have helped me in my research for the time that I was here for three months.
Chris Fletcher, keeper of the Special Collections, Michele Chu.
She's not here, but she facilitated the process of becoming a fellow at the ball in Michael Hughes,
who catalogued the archive and helped me early on to locate some very crucial records.
Alexandra Franklin, Coordinator of the Modelling Centre for the Study of the book,
who also plays the role of personal rescuer for beleaguered foreign scholars in her free time.
To contact you can hear the story from her later on.
The staff at the Western Library Special Collections Reading Room who smilingly and tirelessly respond to requests for records and offer advice.
And most importantly, I would like to convey my gratitude to Douglas Byrne and Gordon Barzee and his family
for protecting the archive and making it accessible to scholars from around the world.
Having said all of that as just a minor correction, I'm currently not working at Jonathan College anymore.
I'm pursuing this fellowship, and I also received another fellowship from the Society for the History of Technology earlier, late last year.
So I've been pursuing that as well. Okay.
Now, to just begin with the presentation, I'd like to say that.
The context needed to be provided for what kind of work I was trying to do here.
And for that reason,
I have tried to lay down the interventions that capitalist concerns were trying to make in the colonial market in late 19th and early 20th centuries.
That would form a bigger chunk of this presentation.
And towards the end, I will be able to give you a peek into the kind of archives that exist for specifically South Asia.
Although my work when I actually did it here was not just limited to that.
I looked at the archives as a whole and how the colonies are implicit in it, and what place then in subcontinent holds in it.
But that more than that.
Towards the end I just became at the turn of the 20th century, colonial empires were heavily engaged in redrawing and fortifying their borders.
Communication technology had been crucial to the enactment of state power for close to half a century,
with railways and telegraphs slowly forming vast global imperial networks.
Indeed, to be an empire was to be a formidable network of information, people and goods,
and it remained the linchpin for the development of newer systems of communication.
This paper will look at the inception and growth of wireless networks with a particular focus on colonial South Asia.
The British Indian domains proved to be an important space for experimentation and installation of wireless.
The colonial space, especially the vast waterbody surrounding it,
generated fears and anxieties for the state that it sought to mitigate through a more powerful information system.
Although each emergent communication technology could potentially add to imperial power,
the technology itself had to be regulated through legislation and its usage closely monitored and controlled.
Imperial and commercial ambitions worked in tandem to create modern colonies.
But in the field of communication, the relationship was more complicated.
The enterprise was considered so critical to the functioning of a highly secretive,
bureaucratic, imperial state that it led to several struggles for monopolisation.
In this phase of global capitalism, a new kind of multifaceted,
legally empowered international cooperation was trying to intervene in the colonial state.
The presentation would explore the role of various agents of state like the Indian Telegraph Department,
the British Post Office and capital concerns like the Marconi International Marine Communication Company and Lloyd's,
and their mutual life rivalries in attempting to create a viable wireless network.
The paper will also touch upon the ways in which the Marconi Archive at the Bodleian
Library can illuminate new aspects of wireless usage in colonial South Asia.
The archive throws light on how the Marconi wireless company promoted itself in this region,
revealing how it was eventually successful in establishing beam wireless stations in western India.
Right. In 1909.
Captain Ed Gardner from the Indian Service in his report for the Indian government,
said in no uncertain terms that the political condition in India warranted a wireless system under the conditions at present prevailing in India.
The early establishment of wireless telegraphy appears to be of crying importance.
The telegraph via did much to save India in 1857, but it cannot be expected to save India today.
The thousands of miles of wire with which India has now been covered cannot hope to survive the first few hours of any modern outbreak,
while their length renders them utterly indefensible in wireless,
with its easily defended stations that could be erected in the heart of defences both with which India is studied,
with which and which could laugh at everything.
But can we have a means of communicating over hundreds of miles with which no catalogue of wireless can interfere?
It's a fantastic court because it tells you a great deal about what the people were thinking at that moment with
respect to the wireless and how they were envisaging a new modern imperial state and how it would protect itself.
Wireless was airborne. Unlike the telephone and telegraph, and that rendered it both vulnerable and secure.
It was perceived to have the ability to access points beyond land,
which was prohibitively expensive with ocean cables and moving points of contact like ships and armies and so on,
making it potentially more significant than the existing international network created by telegraph and cable.
Since, as you just mentioned, it's safe from cable cutting as part of the colonial bid to establish wireless networks.
The oceans were chosen as the field of experimentation.
However, its messages could be intercepted by any receivers in its radius.
Broadcasting and an innate property of radio today was exactly what was considered its most debilitating feature.
Interference from outside elements could also not be completely controlled.
This interference could be of a malicious nature. During war, those are his would be malicious.
Wireless could play a role of centralising information and resources for the colonial state.
But it could be equally responsible for creating alarm and disruption.
Information nodes spread across dispersed colonial territories could be used to
direct power to the metropolis or often obtain greater leeway at the periphery.
Hence, like most other forms of technology, wireless was dynamic.
In actual fact, wireless telegraph had not yielded good results in the battlefield.
Experts also differed in their views of the subject and could not commit to full knowledge of this domain or of new developments by other inventors.
This paradoxical situation of knowing less by experimenting more has had been commented on by contemporary writers.
For instance. It was difficult to comprehend the nature of electricity.
Writing about ten years before, in 1899, ten years before, Captain Gardener J.J. Fahey quoted Faraday from memory and said,
Had you asked me 40 years ago, I think I would have answered the question.
But now, the more I know about electricity, the less prepared am I to tell you what it is.
The fog and the mystery around working of wireless had to be made intelligible through science and practice.
W.H. Preece, the gentlemen was pictured is you're the injured and chief engineer and chief of British
post office was one of the most credited experts in the field of communication,
and his opinion held a lot of weight within Indian technocratic circles.
The success of Cross Atlantic experiments with wireless in 1902 caused panic among the stockholders of cable companies.
Deep Count Alighieri Chaudry points out that by 1907, the vast cable network,
especially the millions sunk in the ocean in the form of submarine cables, were steadily becoming obsolete.
But in PCs, opinion wireless was a costly substitute with high working costs and less efficiency.
The British post office itself had not started using wireless for commercial communication with any of the smaller islands within the British Isles.
The reports of its success were not sufficiently reliable,
since it could not survive over long distances or for long periods while evaluating the various cases of wireless telegraphy.
Priest reminded that, as is quoted here, in all cases it was a question of bone chilling and fence and it is not even cheap.
The cable companies realised the same. They used violence to supplement their own feeders and fitted several repairing ships to aid operations.
These reported in 1905 that British men of war had been fitted by the Admiralty, who worked separately and secretly over their operations.
From this point, you would see the unfolding of how the steed really works at multiple levels and very,
very many times one arm doesn't know what the other is doing. They had paid £20,000 to the Marconi Company to use its patent.
The system was improved upon by Captain Orin Jackson before being installed on carriers.
The Marconi company had fitted 16 mail steamers and liners of different missions.
Passengers of some of these boats were enlivened, as they said, with news and messages en route across the Atlantic.
There are actually several ocean newspapers available in the Marconi Archive.
Very fascinating newspapers were published on board and news could be received from land stations and passing steamers.
The post office, where Marconi had demonstrated his oldest experiment,
had also entered into an agreement with them for sending messages across the Atlantic from the company's shore station at Beaulieu in Cornwall.
By 1905, many French, Dutch, German and Belgian Belgium steamers were fitted with wireless technology,
spread through complex processes of circulation of information and knowledge.
Even as this knowledge was monopolised and protected, technocrats and scientists visited various countries.
Many big corporations, often associated with specialist inventors, with established interests in various parts of the world,
were vying with each other to send agents and obtain monopoly rights everywhere.
Each imperial power favoured one or another kind of system, preferably one developed within its own territory.
However, this wasn't always applicable. Each of them departments, governments, armies, navies, individuals, colonies,
imperial powers and commercial bodies were all trying to humanise the new technology through patenting,
legislating, regulating and convening international conferences.
However, wireless offered new opportunities and challenges in same measure.
Companies were negotiating with each other, with different countries and their colonies and the local elites,
and meanwhile experimenting and trying to prove that their systems really did work.
Now I'm going to start talking about specifically what was happening in India.
The Bay of Bengal was a prime area of British concern for commercial, administrative, meteorological, strategic and geographic reasons.
The Port of Calcutta itself was extremely significant in this matrix.
It was one of the most important circuits in the bay other than the circuit between Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Burma.
First in January and then again in September 1904.
Shaw, Wallace and Company, the local agents of Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company Ltd in Bengal,
applied to establish wireless telegraph between Chagford Island,
which is pictured here Chagford Island, the southernmost point of Bengal in the bay, and pilot brig at Sandhills.
A pilot brig. Sure. But a little bit later is basically a brig, which is rigged with two mos, two squared masks,
and sometimes they carry the carried guns and usually they they would carry cargoes.
But essentially devastation. A little further away from land and water to help pilot the ships that were coming in from the ocean and from the.
Scarborough Island was already connected to Calcutta by land, by the holy waters that flowed down to the bay before Hooghly is pictured here as well.
Throw down to the bay were understood to be perilously difficult to navigate both upstream and downstream.
This does it. There's a very emotive kind of vocabulary that is always used for waters around Calcutta and in the Bay of Bengal,
which often indicates danger in the parlance of the colonial officials.
A grand example is coming up of Rudyard Kipling in his story.
An unqualified pilot was just published first in 1895 and later collected in land and sea deals for scouts and guides in 1923.
This is the second version that I have brought here. Begins with an evocative description of the risks of piloting on the Hooghly.
Almost any pilot will tell you that his work is much more difficult than you imagine,
but the pilots of the Hooghly know they have 100 miles of the most dangerous river on earth running through their hands.
The who leave between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal and they say nothing.
Their service is picked and sifted as carefully as the bench of the Supreme Court.
For a judge can only hang the wrong man or pass a bad law.
But a careless pilot can lose a 10,000 ton ship and cargo in less time than it takes to reverse her engines.
No one better than Rudyard Kipling to say so. So this is a Victorian ization of what the pilot Brook may have looked like.
I don't know where the Royal Museums of Greenwich has found this, but this is the only picture I could look at.
Very odd Kipling. I won't read this. Rudyard Kipling goes on to say that of course there is.
Once the Hooghly has got you in its current, you are going down.
And every season the Hooghly makes new, new channels.
And it is so hard to fathom how to find your way through that.
Men have fought the Hooghly for 200 years, he says, and now there is a building.
And that battle of which which is which is necessarily located for protecting the shipping that is coming in.
It has its own telegraph department as well and it has its own port commissioners, etc., etc.
He he that is a long description of what a great life the port officer has and how he's paid so well.
And he only talks to who to his brothers. And there is information coming in to the Telegraph.
But he he is the man who decides how how the shipping will be carried on will come back to regard
Kipling a little later after we've discussed what happens with one of the agents for Marconi Company
stating that before long steamers running towards the east will adopt wireless and the local time
community and the mercantile community only need be shown that such a system could work satisfactorily.
And then ships that traded regularly with the Port of Calcutta would be fitted soon enough.
These steamers would likely adopt the Marconi Marconi system because they had to communicate with
already existing European show stations and future stations to be established east of the cities,
which would include stations in India. They already had agreements with shore stations of British and Italian Admiralty and Lloyd's,
specifying that they correspond only with ships using Marconi equipment.
That is absolutely in no uncertain terms. Marconi is a man who believes in cancelling it.
It looks to monopolise the imperial market in one way or the other.
And there is there is, in fact, lot of evidence to that fact.
The representatives of Marconi company lobbied hard and gave the impression that they
dominated the usage of wireless sets in mercantile marine ships of all countries,
while in fact a variety of systems were in use and being experimented with across the world.
The lieutenant governor for Bengal was keen to have at least an experimental
system set up between the aforementioned locations by the Marconi Company.
He believed that it was a worthwhile expenditure if in the end it meant a reliable form of communication that
worked during monsoon months in the trying atmospheric conditions that prevailed at the head of the pier.
So he's he's echoing the the sentiment of Kipling here.
However, the pWt was not very impressed with these achievements and denied permission for establishment of even an experimental system.
The beta reduced, the public works department befuddled.
The Marconi company wondered why the government of British India refused to support a British company,
especially since it had no financial large financial backing from London in January 1905.
Says Schroeder, Smith and Company. The representatives of another company called the Wireless Telegraph Company,
also wrote to the Electrical Engineer of Government of Bengal to establish a system between Schlegel Island and Calcutta.
They also promoted what they called Systems Lab Arco as one of the as one of the principal systems and very largely in use in the United States,
in Russia, Germany, Spain, etc. And the portable type for military purposes has been supplied to most of the European powers, including the UK.
They were keen to send an engineer from Sindh for the express purpose of demonstration and were willing to bear all expenses.
They also wanted to establish another link between of Fort William and Diamond Harbour in Calcutta.
They pointed out that the most European countries and United States wanted the
social stations to have more than one system to work efficiently with all ships,
with diverse range of systems crossing their waters so that they are putting forward their
case and saying that there are so many different types of systems you must have as well.
Lloyd's, a shipping news and insurance giant,
also approached the Indian Telegraph Department in August 1904 for putting up
stations in outlying points of intelligence for shipping and commercial community.
Eden, Bombay. Malabar Hill in Bombay.
Cape Cameroon, which is the southernmost point of of India.
Madras Meridian Point, which is a place in short order and Point de Gaulle, which is in Sri Lanka, where the peace is under discussion.
Lloyd's wanted exclusive license in India and elsewhere to establish Maritime Sigma station
because they believe that any other such stations could impede or intercept their messages,
that signals would be nullified and rendered practically useless.
That is in what I am trying to say today. I am only presenting a political and commercial discourse around wireless,
but interspersed in that you will hear echoes of a scientific discourse also.
But in 1901 lords so things are not as simple as they seem on the surface.
In 1901, Lloyd's had entered into an agreement with the Marconi International Marine Communication Ltd,
which had been authorised by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company Ltd, to install systems on its behalf.
Now I'm going to call the Murray International Company.
What am I am C now am I? And C wanted to establish Marconi installations wherever Lloyd's had stations in colonies.
Obviously, the rivalry between Lloyd's and Marconi International had emerged over the classification of wireless messages into two types,
which I have indicated to, and that is maritime signalling, which is basically news,
which is concerned with shipping, with cargo, with their comings and goings,
etc. and c deliberately another term that they were using for basically private messages that were sent via the wireless.
And the former was supposed to be the preserve of lawyers and the latter was supposed to be with Marconi.
They accused each other of incompetence and obstruction and prevented the British Admiralty
from taking a decision in favour of one or the other due to the legal quandary involved,
because they were already in contract with each other.
But always remember that British Admiralty would also look for excuses to not give the contract to anyone.
Lloyd's and Marconi seemed in dispute everywhere.
There are several places Cyprus, Malta, Gibraltar, where Lloyd's and Marconi were all fighting with each other.
The Colonial Office, India office and war office were intimated by the Admiralty in August 1901.
It says that,
though departments should take a concerted and considered decision with regard to Lloyd's since they were stuck in litigation with Marconi.
Also, the Navy warned that it needed the whole system to work in tandem during war.
So you can see all these forces, they are all advising each other and there is a lot of confusion going on.
In December 1905, Lloyd's stated that matters had been settled between Marconi and themselves, but the terms of the settlement were not clear.
Also, the government of India was not clear whether it could legally grant licences.
Hence, no action was taken. Initially, wireless telegraphy did not fall within the communication monopoly of British postmaster general.
The postmaster did not have power over communication with foreign countries or ships beyond territorial waters.
They needed to approach the parliament for legislative powers. An act was brought out in 1904.
The Parliament was in a doubly complicated situation as awarding exclusive rights
to postmaster general would deprive patent holding companies of their profit.
This decade that I am dealing with, the one at the turn of the century, up until 1910, is a very interesting day because nothing is clear.
Nothing is written in stone. The rules are not clear. The technology itself is not clear.
The attitude of the government and the departments is not very clear.
So this year in these shifting sands, these are the are the most fundamental precepts of how a technology is incorporated into a state.
So even in this situation, the legal aspects of of of using the technology are absolutely unclear.
And. The companies are making certain very important criteria clear in their proposals.
Now, the companies in the respective proposals touched upon certain crucial aspects of wireless enterprise,
the capitalist technological narrative stressed on the revolutionary potential of their product.
The political and scientific discourse around wireless considered it best suited for shipping purposes,
which of course, is not the way in which we look at wireless today.
Their usefulness for mercantile, administrative,
social and strategic purposes was premised on connecting across vast distances with all varieties of installations.
But these networks were developed and maintained with much difficulty, as rival systems could be incomprehensible to each other.
So by with wireless, there was no need to physically safeguard lines of communication.
Another type of international imperial cooperation was required to facilitate transport, mercantilist activities and emergency warnings.
So you want to keep it closed and isolated, but you have to cooperate to use it.
Large corporations large corporations span the globe as multifaceted and multi-functional entities that
could use the legal privileges obtained in one global area to make claims of monopoly in another.
Remember, the Indian subcontinent does not need to follow the dictates of the American court or the British court for that matter.
The government of India is on its own trying to deal with these technologies, with these monopolies.
It also showed how, while in the metropolis, the state may or may not contest these claims within colonies such as India, it did.
The modern imperial state formed the other big stakeholder in the technological enterprise.
Since the BWT did not encourage private efforts in this decision, in this direction.
It is important to understand what alternatives were being explored by them.
The story of the Indian Telegraph Department is very interesting and I'm going to take you forward with that.
But before that I just wanted to share with you that this is a very recent map of the Kolkata.
For example, it's the it's the most, you know, comprehensive map I could find.
The only way to make all of you understand. You see those those violent stations you see towards many a red one and a black one in agreement.
And the Shovel Island Tower is on the left corner of of the know of the island.
And there is also another tower, Fraser Island, at the bottom, if you see in the in the pink circle.
So later on, whatever was built in chocolate island, another dollar was also meditating.
Fraser mentioned this. This actually this map is very useful.
So that's why I put it in that. Right.
But look. In the case of colonial India, the Indian Telegraph Department offered a counter-narrative to capitalist rhetoric.
It continued to press the government to not favour one company or system.
Bureaucratic experts, mainly from the British post office, were consulted,
but the Indian Telegraph Department maintained its own authority on the subject.
Drawing on the tradition established by William O'Shaughnessy, the first director general of India Telegraph Department.
They performed extant, extensive local experiments to test instruments delivered from Britain to combat peculiar
Indian conditions using Indian label and indigenously manufactured parts in Calcutta workshops.
They also sent their own representatives to learn the newest international techniques.
The technocracy often gave an argument about the majority of the new form of communication.
The narrative also flowed unmistakeably towards progress.
But there was an understanding that there was a pinnacle to be achieved before
it became viable as an alternative to existing systems of communication.
In India, the Governor-General and Council alone had the right to work and establish or grant or like a licence for a telegraph.
Legal regulation identified various forms of leak of information and prescribed a heavy list of fines and punishments.
So the control over means of communication is very strong.
Rules would be laid down for rates, interception or disclosure of messages, the conditions of reservation of telegrams and so on.
In March 1905, the director general of Telegraphs at just as at Sea Hutchinson proposed a wireless connection between
Short Island at the mouth of his Hooghly River and two stations pilot Brigg and Eastern Channel Lightship.
Eastern Bailiwick. I've already told you Eastern Channel Lightship is basically a ship which has these
beacons of light which would show the way to the ships when they turned over.
If Department first made attempts in 1899 to obtain wireless instruments for use in India.
They were of the Marconi type, and even though the Government of India agreed to the read the agreed,
the Secretary of State barred them from employing the Marconi system.
In December 1900, the BWT allowed the Telegraph Department to purchase the Duke Credit Wireless Telegraph at the cost of Rupees thousand,
but the instruments did not arrive until March 1902. The experiments in June 1902 showed that communication could be successfully maintained over
a distance of nine miles in Calcutta and somewhat partially for 18 miles over Hooghly.
The system was unable to survive the distance from Sherwood Island to pilot trick in May Day in May 1902.
The teenager who was on furlough in England.
Recommended, though, recommended the government of India to requisition six Marconi sets of the Royal Navy pattern.
Remember, the Royal Navy had ordered them. The order was telegraphed within five days.
However, it was November before the DG stores replied that none could be provided.
They tried their luck a third time in February 1904, with a large more ahead system as recommended by M.G. Samson,
the electrician in the Indian Telegraph Department on special duty in England.
Experiments conducted in March,
April and May of the same year at the mouth of Irrawaddy River yielded negative results due to what was dubbed atmospherics since the large moon had
systems were not sufficiently strong to use between Burma ananda when it was
decided that they would try and use it or work over the chaparral and circuit.
Now, J.C. Shields, who was an assistant superintendent in the telegraph department,
represented India at the International Electrical Congress in the St Louis exhibition in 1904.
He found a DEFOREST system. You can see pictures of this. This is the these are pictures from the exhibition.
So he saw this and he was very impressed.
He found that they work 290 miles from St Louis to Chicago with the power of 20 horsepower, and as against the large monad system,
which was only using half a horsepower day, he believed that they would be able to override atmospherics or whatever they understood as atmospherics.
So they thought DeForest was the answer to the problems.
So the D.A. decided that it should be ordered for the Andaman Circuit, which was 300 miles, but first it should be used in Scarborough Island.
Meanwhile, more and more practical experience was being gained with the launch.
More had instruments in tandem. And so again, in many ways there was a global cooperation for collectivisation of knowledge.
The officials were introducing better techniques through their own initiative and on advice from Dr. Moorehead himself.
This new understanding, coupled with new alternators, fitted into all large more.
What had sense was giving improve results,
but communication was liable to be interrupted at the close and beginning of monsoon with the same atmospherics.
The director general observed that no matter what system was adopted, this installation, like all of the wireless installations,
will be subject to periodic interruption due to climatic causes and no system at present.
Noone would entirely eliminate this trouble.
Hence there was no way to know whether DeForest is actually going to work.
And he goes on to say that they can only hope that unavoidable climatic interferences will prove of infrequent occurrence and decreasing duration.
Notice that in the narrative that I have just related officials are taking making great effort to learn from what is going on internationally.
They officially send representatives everywhere. They learn all these techniques they are trying to implementing them.
Says this stems from how William O'Shaughnessy actually anglicised the telegraph department.
He himself, apart from Wheatstone and others, was experimenting with the telegraph line.
He successfully was able to deliver messages in Calcutta over a few miles, and he actually believed that his system was very good.
He did not use in solution on his voice, but he believed that his system was very effective and that is what was used
in India for a very long time and did come through in his analysis says that,
well, it was William Marshall and he did a great work, but he was so arrogant,
used his own system, you know, which was detrimental to the health of that network, etc., etc.
So David, system in India was not as effective as it is thought to be.
However, the tradition continued in the telegraph department and that is what I am trying to lay down over here,
that they are very crucial decision makers, although they are somewhat at the bottom of this global game that is going on.
However, the Marconi company was not so easily refused.
The newspaper pioneer of May 14th, 1905,
reported that the US court had given its decision in favour of Marconi patent in a suit brought against owners of
DeForest patents for infringement by American Wireless telegraph company American Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company.
It was a legal question whether this would preclude using the apparatus in India of note was also the fact that the US
Navy had chosen to go ahead with the German telephone system in spite of the impressive St Louis exhibit by DeForest.
There is really no there is no the the logic of the capital doesn't always work.
That is, there is a lot that is going on in this in this area.
Why technical departments policy maintained clear opposition to capitalists funds.
Their superiors were more ambivalent informed by several experts legal, technical and by merchant commercial bodies.
Their opinions swayed very often in the case of wireless matters were made more complicated,
as seaborne communications meant that it was no more merely a domestic matter.
The commander in Chief of naval forces in India and SEAL on Commerce and Industry Department
and military department were intermittently busy discussing that the systems at Port Blair,
Diamond Island and Slipper Island, popular dominance on Diamond and Slipper Islands are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Circuit.
Andaman and Nicobar, unfortunately, in the map I showed you, is not a feature there, but it is.
It is at the bottom of the bay. It is closer to the Indonesian archipelago than than the other than towards than the Indian landmass.
But it was very, very crucial. There's a whole story related to that.
But I have another part of my thesis anyway. They pointed out that no telegrams could be exchanged between various systems.
The same quality was not maintained. Plus regulations and instructions laid down for one station may not be applicable in another.
Signalling from any station would interfere with other wireless telegraph instruments in the same area.
Therefore, all installations needed to be under the Government of India during war or mobilisation.
These stations, it was discussed, were part of a general scheme to erect stations at strategic locations.
Marconi system was being favoured for the German scheme.
The British Admiralty and Shipping were using Marconi's apparatus and so new systems shouldn't be incompatible to them.
The local scheme was in great demand with the port authorities of Calcutta, Bengal, the Chamber of Commerce and Bengal government.
But the larger scheme could get stopped, for it required several levels of authorisation.
So they were saying, well, let's let's just decide on some system right now.
If the general scheme adopts a different system, we can move this, we can enlarge it, we can put it somewhere else, etc., etc.
So in some ways vital messages were unclear between different systems.
They were still they could be delivered and they may not always be comprehensible.
And from the Berlin Conference of 1903 onwards, they were trying to make regulations.
Those regulations were not binding.
They would go out and these conferences say that, okay, we should have this law, we should always pass on emergency messages and so on.
But they were not always following it, but they were trying to make rules.
Meanwhile, in August 1905, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company again tendered an estimate of 20 £300 for the Shagari Island Circuit,
including three months of working if the department was willing to do the same with £1,066.
Now, again, again and again, there is this there's this tussle going on between the two.
Marconi would propose one amount. The department would say, I can do it.
We can do it for less.
The break up of the costs of the DBA, DeForest Instruments showed a bigger budget than proposed C actually, they are going to use up more resources.
But the DTT clarified that while DeForest Instruments would have a range of 300 miles, Shaw Volts was limited to 50 miles.
So in fact, for the same said that the Marconi were giving, they would in fact only cost £600.
The DeForest Company, by the way, flopped a little like it was a big flop.
So so I mean, all of this is going on without realising.
I mean, in hindsight, that is the situation. There is no clear understanding of how what is more interesting from from my perspective and for my
work is that we don't know how they were using instruments from the early workshops in Calcutta,
but they were being used and they would cause infringement of dissent patterns.
But what they would do to circumvent that is that they would ask Oliver Lodge and
Moorehead for their patterns and they would say that please cover up for us for this,
for this much usage. So it was decided that before us instruments would be used and Marconi Company would be paid an indemnity.
So they said that, look, we can do it for cheaper, we will take our own instruments, will fit in around with them.
They are all tinkerers by excellence, so they want to do their own thing.
And that's what they tried to do. In March 1907,
it was agreed by the Government of India that wireless would not be entrusted
to any corporation because the state was accruing no tangible advantages.
Even though the case between Marconi and Lloyd's seemed somewhat settled in practice, Lloyd's would be hampered by Marconi.
Importantly, at this point,
they did not consider inter communication necessary between different stations because information could always be sent by telegraph lines.
On mainline two things are happening. One is the constantly think of wireless as an appendage to the main telegraph lines.
So they are not really trying to circulate vast amounts of information through wireless networks too.
They are very scared. Whatever. I'm listening to that information and somebody else will be able to intercept that.
So now they're not even willing to send sensitive information. So so security is what is being envisaged as the first sort of usage of wireless.
However, it is compromised in certain ways in the colonial mind.
And so it is also what prevents them from using it now.
Right. So I don't want to get into or there is a small section on I was going to talk about this isn't enough time that there's a small section on.
I was going to talk about how the military is also experimenting at another level.
So Captain Gardner that I spoke about earlier, he.
Several experiments with several different systems.
He did an extensive survey of these systems in UK and elsewhere and he surmised that a sufficiently mobile system has not been invented yet.
And every time the military will have to use it, they will have to take a system, pull it apart, take it somewhere else, put it back together.
And every time they do that, it's going to have damages.
And when it is damaged, it could be night, it could be day, and they wouldn't know how to detect those damages.
So actually, wireless was not workable in the battlefield as yet. That is what he says.
However, he feels that so much anxiety that that Indian government has associated with disturbance,
interference, that what they are imagining is basically 1857.
For those who don't know already, 1857 was the great rebellion where the British were almost nearly taken out of the colony,
but they succeeded in pushing back the Indian rebels.
And one of the reasons why, traditionally considered to be extremely important in that pushback and that repression was the telegraph,
the fact that it conveyed news so fast and had the telegraph not been there, India would not have been saved, is what they see.
However, the it is arguable whether that was really the final determining factor.
But he says here we are unnecessarily worried about historians, unnecessarily worried about interference,
because actually the trans frontier Indian tribes or the instigators of an internal rebellion may just not know how to interfere with the lessons.
They never not how to know how to jam them or they will not know how to create disturbances in it.
What he believed they needed to keep in mind was that if Germany gets it, if other powers get it,
get violence before us, then they will have an advantage for we need to have it.
So there is that you that whole thing with arms and ammunition.
Same logic is applied here. Some military men like Captain Gardiner,
they they were painstakingly serving installations and they were forming another level of
analysis while they were trying to be cognisant of the strategic needs of the colony.
And while they were testing all these things, they were also saying certain, very important things in the context of India,
like we should keep it in the hands or hands of Europeans only, and this would free us from malicious scientific interference.
After 1857, of course, apart from the you see Labour and those who are helping in the construction, the many labour that is and peons,
there are very few people who are used for that as actual officials who in the new telegraph department, native officials who will do the work.
So yeah, so this is one of the things that is going on. The colonial state.
The colonial state was extremely busy getting all kinds of systems inspected and tested, but could not reach any reliable conclusion.
The state was getting itself involved in the scientific discourse, but could not imagine the better informed for it.
But its involvement was giving and was given an urgency by political upheaval in the period following the partition of Bengal,
Bengal, the partition in 1905 and the constant memory of 1857.
The constantly tormented by what happened in 1857, and they do not want a repeat of that.
From here on, my presentation is largely about what?
Yeah, what the what I have found in the Marconi archive and how it aids, whatever I have talked about until now.
A reprint of retired Kipling story in 1923 carried an added reference to wireless.
So what I narrated to you in the beginning of of the presentation continues somewhat like this.
Some million tonnes of shipping must find their way to and from Calcutta each 12
month unless the holy world watched as closely as his keeper watches an elephant.
There is a fear that it might silt up as it has silted up around the old Dutch and Portuguese ports 20 and 30 miles behind Calcutta.
So the port office sounds and scours and dredges the river and builds spores and devices for coaxing the currents and labourers,
all the boys with their proper letters and attends to the semaphores and the lights
and the drum ball and corn storm signals and the pilots of the who do the rest.
But in spite of all care and the very best of attention the Huguely swallows her ship or to every year.
Even the coming of the wireless demographic does not spoil hood update so that you know they are complaining.
Somebody who met Marconi. And I don't know what great interest he had intel in wireless, but he wrote a story about that.
There was a science was performed and John Keats's spirit visited the experimenter and he started writing his poetry.
So it's it's a fun story. And I couldn't include it here.
But it's but but it's there are Kipling himself had great interest in the wireless for some reason clearly by 1923 is a little disillusioned.
So what is happening in India by 1922, 23, however, by 1922 or 23,
the Marconi company's attempts at establishing wireless in the Indian subcontinent had become more vigorous than ever.
Promotional literature titled What Wireless Telegraphic Can Do for India, obtained from the Marconi Archive in the Bodleian Library,
carries details of desert demonstrations, photographs and snippets of reports published in Indian newspapers.
Newspapers reported that contact was established with Metcalf House in Delhi from varying distances up until Agra.
Live. Details of a release were transmitted from the Barrack Racecourse to the newspaper.
The Statesman 30 seat mass were established at the Statesman's office, while the reporter conveyed news from Portable Marconi set in a motorcar.
The report also stated, Apart from the undoubted value in the newspaper world, it is claimed for these bought.
It is claimed for these portable stations that they are used for rapid communication between jute mills, big ordnance collieries,
etc. and their headquarter offices is of the greatest service, while the capital outlay is not excessive.
The maintenance of miles of wire is not involved and the station is practically foolproof.
So this is Marconi using a number of things that it is promoting.
I just want to say that news is a very important the news and media at this moment is a very
important domain for the capital firms because they mediate the opinion of the public.
It's very crucial. And previous article has written an article in 2010 about how the British warfare state was engaging with violence.
And she points out how how very often they would take recourse to the newspapers.
So this is this is one of those things and I'm sorry,
I forgot to sort of if you can read the Times of India snippet here, which says that in any disturbed country,
either on the North-West Frontier or the other part of the world and unpredicted, it is an irresistible temptation to the but much.
It's an extremely it's almost sort of inviting attention to like sure there is a naked violence.
You know, the march is going to come in attack with the recorded advance in violence, telegraphy and telephony.
Is there now any need for telegraph wire? I mean, this is this is these are the domains in which the news promotes these ideas.
So it's it's quite fascinating. You can see the two pictures here, one of the motorcar, which is stationed in the racecourse,
and the other one is a showroom of the Marconi Company in Calcutta.
Right. Another paper, the Englishman asked,
is the day near at hand in Calcutta when we shall no longer waste time to get
wrong numbers on the telephone in the context of tests done on the Calcutta Madam,
the same newspaper also reported on 10th February 1923 of a concert being delayed at the Calcutta exhibition grounds from three miles away.
It stated that there was none of the metallic harshness associated with the best of gramophones,
and listeners were treated to a sound quality equal to a live performance.
So such great words for foreign for another experiment was done between the am I and SES officers,
the marine communication company's office in Old Post Office Street at Calcutta and pulled the waterworks to make the proceedings even more dramatic.
A song was sung to the accompaniment of a piano that was heard as distinctly in Calcutta as though they were in the same room.
A concert was also organised for the men of the Calcutta Battalion and the Calcutta Presidency Battalion at a concert opera on the Eastern Bengal.
Really, Major General Cubitt, commanding the presidency and Azzam District, also delivered a speech wirelessly.
You can see the men here lined up and listening to the speech and the music.
Similarly in Bombay, experiments were done between the Esplanade, Maidan and Willingdon Sports Club,
where the Advocate of India reported on 31st March 1922 that there was none of that vexatious.
Hello. Hello. Hello. In times which one gets accustomed to with the local telephone service?
So most importantly, aside from the presidency towns.
But this is my favourite picture as whoever has met me since the time I have seen this picture move.
Most importantly, aside from the presidency towns, the princely states were also great sites for these demonstrations like Hyderabad,
Gwalior, Mysore and Cartier were the maharajas of Jamnagar in mind.
We spoke across a distance of 70 miles in the Gulf of Kutch, lending some celebrity charm to the proceedings.
Once again, music on the gramophone records was conveyed.
Now, this brings me to the last, very last section.
I'm sorry. I have taken up so much time. I will just take. Two more minutes of your time, right?
In 1920 627, the Post Office Beam Services had been established within UK, India and Indian Radio.
Telegraph Company was formed in October 1933, which obtained license in radio telegraphy from both governments in India and UK,
as well as Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of London. They created a connection between quirky near puny transmitting,
which was the transmitting station and Doon which was the receiving station in India and Grimsby and Skegness in UK.
It was part of the scheme to erect direct high speed stations at India, South Africa, Australia and Canada that link with the UK.
It was begun in 1923 and completed by 1927.
The Bodleian possesses a copy of the original contract between the Indian Radio Telegraph Company,
which cites the following names as directors Ibrahim, Raheem Tula and Ed Badia and secretaries and Treasurers as FMG,
Roy and Company and the Postmaster General and a whole range of telegraphs and the Postmaster
General and a whole range of telegrams passed between the various parties between India and UK.
Some of them are displayed here on the commencement of the service.
Whatever is written in this telegrams is not legible. I know. This is the transcript of those telegrams.
The service in India was put through a seven day test by the post office,
wherein the equipment largely exceeded their expectations by sending about one lakh 80,000 words per day in each direction.
It even sustained during Indian Monsoon with the gate better.
The records show that the company predicted for their capacity to deliver voice, printed matter drawings and photographs.
So it's quite fantastic. I have found the records for all seven days of experiments and how they were experimenting,
and it is what I already knew about the establishment of the Beam station a great deal because
it tells me how this was being carried out technically and politically and what it meant.
These photographs I have come across only last week. They're just fantastic for me.
Because they have pictures of the actual people who do the work, uh, in a, in a fine statement made by a thing called Friends in Scotland.
But when he said that sometimes it is written as do the British construct everything themselves, then not really.
So I have found these lovely photographs.
I like to use them. I, I hope the Bodleian gives me permission.
So this is the key station.
You can see the power hose on the right corner. You can see the labour trying to set up masts which are looking towards the west at the bottom.
And you can see the switchboard and electrical machinery at the top and the crooked beam station itself,
those towers at the back with those triangular things at the top of the station towers.
And this is the receiving station and fantastic structures that were built up at that time.
And. Well, yes, very interesting.
On July 23rd, 1912, 1927, the system was inaugurated by the Viceroy, who was accompanied by Sir Leslie Wilson,
the governor of Bombay, and Ibrahim Rahim Tula, on behalf of the Indian Radio Telegraph Company at the Central Telegraph Office.
He dwelt on the potentialities of the new service.
The system was capable of transmitting messages in both directions at a speed in the neighbourhood of 200 words a minute.
A message to King George returned a reply in 38 seconds.
And here's what it said. This intent, this intangible link between Empire and Britain,
was gratuitously praised in this message as remarkable marvel at the speed and certainty with which it was carried on unseen rings,
ignoring all obstacles on sea and land. We feel we have witnessed an arresting exhibition of man's scientific knowledge and achievement,
and we are pleased to think that the first application of this knowledge should
have been to establish so swift a direct personal contact between the King,
Emperor and his Indian subjects. Oh, lovely. So few things happened.
After this event. The Radio Telegraph company went on to purchase other rights for cables in Bombay and nearby areas,
and eventually it was bought out by the Indian government in 1946.
Like all the other telephone companies and so on, the Marconi Company never gave up.
So it also I have found records of it proposing projects to the newly independent Indian government.
So I it's fascinating stuff. I am full of gratitude for the fact that I have found those things and now I can use it to, you know,
create a larger, more a fuller picture of of what was going on and the issues here and manage.
And I had a word about his work, which is also extremely interesting.
And he is talking from the point of view of the Indian businesses in Bombay,
which bought the rights to the to the company's patent and were instrumental in this.
I don't know who they are. And but he's his work is likely to tell you all about that.
So fascinating exchanges were going on.
I would like to conclude this presentation, though. I think I have both of you gave enough this presentation.
Try to unpack the ways in which commerce, politics and geographies are revealed and shaped through technology,
as technology itself is constituted by its historical context.
Communication networks became the circuits of power, capital and imperial prowess, but were also shaped by these same categories.
The proliferation of violence was being prompted by military and strategic interests of imperial states.
But technology often proved to be symbolic capital rather than an actual advantage, as evidenced above.
If anybody wants to know during question answer, I'll tell you more why?
I'm saying that the conversations around usage and acceptance of technology reveal that the colonial enterprise was often contradictory in nature.
The irony is, while wireless was intended to be global in scope, purpose and intent,
the actual experimentation remained within within 3 to 300 miles for a very long time.
Lectures, demonstrations and exhibitions were used to create a space in the imperial market,
where rivalries between colonising nations could be played off to bargain for business.
However, some extremely complex legal negotiations between various capitalist entities plagued the establishment of wireless networks.
The process for collectivisation of knowledge about wireless was a deeply political process
through which certain kinds of use for the wireless were enhanced and others muted.
There was, at this point,
no one wireless but a multiplicity of wireless apparatus that were neither completely technically sound nor financially tenable,
with a high degree of ambivalence then displayed by other forms of communication.
Nevertheless, dominant ideology about technology dictated that it would acquire phenomenal reach and meanwhile perhaps a purpose for usage.
These events directly affected the colonial discourse surrounding installations and stations in British India.
Thank you so much.