OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/3/2021, SPi STUDIES IN GERMAN HISTORY Series Editors Neil Gregor (Southampton) Len Scales (Durham) Editorial Board Simon MacLean (St Andrews) Frank Rexroth (Göttingen) Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge) Joel Harrington (Vanderbilt) Yair Mintzker (Princeton) Svenja Goltermann (Zürich) Maiken Umbach (Nottingham) Paul Betts (Oxford) OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/3/2021, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/3/2021, SPi Networks of Modernity Germany in the Age of the Telegraph, 1830–1880 JEAN-MICHEL JOHNSTON 1 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/3/2021, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jean-Michel Johnston 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The pre-press of this publication was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935781 ISBN 978–0–19–885688–7 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856887.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. ‘The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement Number 340121. For more information about this ERC project, visit www.diseasesofmodernlife.org.’ OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/3/2021, SPi Acknowledgements This book began life as a doctoral research project at the University of Oxford, where I had the privilege of being supervised by Oliver Zimmer. He has been an unwavering source of support and an inspiration over the years, and I am very grateful for his countless insightful comments on my work, for his eagerness to discuss and develop new ideas, and for the many enjoyable and productive conversations through which he helped shape this project. Abigail Green guided me through many stages of my research at Oxford, always giving liberally of her time and encouraging me to pursue my own interests while maintaining a clear focus. Her remarks and suggestions were invaluable in writing this book. James Brophy was immensely generous with his advice in developing my thesis into a monograph, highlighting important avenues that required more research and giving me the confidence to strengthen its core argument. I am very grateful to all my colleagues on the ‘Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives’ project at Oxford for broadening my intellectual horizons, for sharing their work with me, and for discussing mine. I should especially like to thank Sally Shuttleworth for her support during my time on the project, for her feedback on portions of this book, and for enabling me to discover the wonderful benefits of truly interdisciplinary research. Neil Gregor also gave much time to reading my work and has been a great source of guidance in bringing this project to fruition. I was fortunate enough to research and write this book amongst historians at a number of institutions. At Oxford, Christina de Bellaigue has been an incompar- ably kind and supportive tutor and colleague for the past decade, helping me navigate through the choppy waters of academia. Anna Ross’s advice and com- ments on my work were a tremendous help—she has been a wonderful mentor and friend. I benefited greatly from conversations with David Hopkin, Julia Mannherz, and members of the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’ seminar over the years. Joanna Innes and Benjamin Thompson at Somerville College, and Peter Ghosh at St Anne’s College made those places an intellectual home, and it has been a pleasure to complete this manuscript among incredibly supportive and inspiring colleagues and friends at Fitzwilliam College and in the Cambridge History Faculty. I wrote up my original doctoral thesis as a visiting student in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University, where David Blackbourn kindly read and commented on portions of my work and, with Celia Applegate and Helmut Walser Smith, gave me the opportunity to discover one of the most profoundly stimulating, rigorous, yet always open-minded and fundamentally OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/3/2021, SPi vi friendly environments in which to think about German history. Alistair Sponsel and Laura Stark, meanwhile, encouraged me to delve deeper into the history of science and to reflect upon the concepts I employ. Closer to home, I am very grateful to Ulrike Weckel for her faith in me in recent years, for reading and discussing my work, and, along with Greg Sax, for making me feel so welcome during my stay in Giessen. My thanks also to Florian Hannig for helping me think critically about media theory and history, and to all three for the many and varied, but always fruitful, discussions we had. There have been many important encounters and exchanges along the way. The Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar organized by the German Historical Institute in Washington DC provided an exceptional opportunity to share, debate, and develop many of the ideas that went into this book. I am grateful to Nikita Harwich for his warm hospitality every time I visit Saint-Germain, for his comments on some of my writing, and for so many fascinating and wide-ranging discussions. Bernard Clerc first sparked my interest in German language and culture years ago through his energy and devotion to the subject, and it has been a pleasure to continue some of those early conversations more recently in Berlin. Jan Peter, Jürgen Rehberg, and Frédéric Goupil in Germany and France have been inspirational colleagues and friends—through their generosity of spirit, they have influenced me more than they might imagine. The European Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Royal Historical Society, and the Economic History Society, as well as the History Faculty, Somerville College and St Hugh’s College at Oxford, provided financial support without which I would not have been able to complete this book. I would like to thank the numerous individuals at the libraries and archives that I visited across Germany for their assistance: at the Bundesarchiv and Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin; the Staatsarchiv Bremen and Handelskammer Bremen Archiv; the Landesarchiv NRW in Duisburg; the Stadtarchiv, Siemens Corporate Archives, Deutsches Museum Archiv, and Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Munich; the Staatsarchiv and Stadtarchiv in Nuremberg; and the Stadtarchiv Wuppertal. I am grateful to Edeltraud Weber at the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in particular for her help in exploring uncatalogued sections of the archive, and to the Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt am Main for providing material in digital form. There is, of course, a broader social context to academic work, and I could not have completed this project without the support of my friends. Ben Lambert, Jeannie Sellick, Joanna Raisbeck, and Fergus Cooper have been founts of advice (wisdom even, perhaps) and good humour from the very beginning. Sarah Green, Jeff Martin, Hazel Tubman, Kira Allmann, Michael Purvis, Patrick Anthony, Jessica Lowe, Carolyn Taratko, and Ian Beacock, at different stages, made this a thoroughly enriching experience, both intellectually and socially. Though they may not have had a hand in this work, I should also like to thank all those who OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/3/2021, SPi vii have accompanied me through many formative moments, in many places, at the Lycée International, in Reaphe, and at Exeter College—you know who you are. I have been blessed with a family upon which I have always been able to rely. Ian, Mark, Emilio, Jean-Patrick, and Marie-Louise, each in their own way, have taught me much more than they perhaps realize. They have encouraged me in difficult times and made the happier moments all the brighter. I could not have wished for better companions on this journey—thank you. A sentence or two could not begin to describe the countless ways in which my parents, Chantal and Robert, have supported me throughout my life. In the hope that it can express at least a modicum of my immense gratitude for their unfailing affection, guidance, and inspiration, I dedicate this book to them. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/3/2021, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/3/2021, SPi Contents List of Figures xi Introduction 1 Prologue 20 I. 1830–1849 1. Expectations 33 2. Realities 59 3. Resolution 85 II. 1850–1880 4.