matter what was written; the fact that it went at the speed of light transformed everything. It caused the Civil War. Hidden ground of the American Civil War was the telegraph. No historian knows this. Read a book by Kenneth Stampp called The Causes of the American Civil War  and you’ll find no mention of the telegraph anywhere. The telegraph is acoustic, not visual. At the speed of light, the ear comes into play. It’s not the eye.

Forsdale: Let me grab onto another point to be sure that we’ve gotten it. What you’re saying is that with the telegraph, the telephone, that the major message is the speed of communication, and that very speed, as contrasted with writing a letter and sending it by horseback, or however we do it these days, it’s a good deal slower than horseback. But the major message is the speed