Earlier than the phone rendered it out of date, the optical telegraph was considerably of a nationwide fixation in Nineteenth-century France.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 have been suspicious of what the creator calls “mechanical monsters, secretive and strange,” within the aftermath of the French Revolution. And this “angular and winged” machine’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 creator writes in his 1819 anti-Napoleon satirical poem “Le Télégraphe”: “There, before my window! It is quite ridiculous / That someone would place a telegraph outside my room!”
The quick and illustrious lifetime of the optical telegraph — and the creative illustration it impressed — is the topic of Richard Taws’s intensive educational e-book Time Machines: Telegraphic Photos in Nineteenth Century France. Typically tough to learn however full of photographs 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.
Charles Norry, “View of the interior of the Louvre from nature in the 4th year” (1799), pen and India ink drawing with watercolor (picture public area through Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris)
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 types of artwork, together with Honoré Daumier’s lithographs, J. J. Grandville and Charles Norry’s drawings, Louis Pierre Baltard’s etchings, and a number of 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 model is as overwhelming to comply with because the sophisticated community of photographs and cultural forces it goals to demystify. However the abstruse writing mustn’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 scorching air balloons, for example. How a lot of this artwork historic illustration continues to be misplaced in time, ready to be uncovered?
Unrecorded artist, “Old church and the telegraph tower in Montmartre” (c. 1815), watercolor (picture public area through Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris)
Unrecorded artist, “View of Montmartre, quarry and telegraph tower” (1826), watercolor with pencil (public area through Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris)
Time Machines: Telegraphic Photos in Nineteenth-Century France (2025) by Richard Taws is revealed by MIT Press and is accessible on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
