Around the Wire: Telegraphic Infrastructure and Gothic Energies in Late Victorian Britain

Abstract

This article explores a link between gutta-percha, the natural South-East Asian latex used nearly exclusively as an insulation for nineteenth-century British telegraph cables, and the development of electromagnetic field theory. Field theory emerged from the non-traditional methods of physicist Michael Faraday, who demonstrated that the energy in telegraph cables is located around, rather than within, the conducting wire. Eventually, the application of field theory in telegraphy required the knowledge and resources of Indigenous forest produce collectors, as well as contingent networks of Chinese and Malay traders linked into local and global supply chains. Telegraphic infrastructure, therefore, is not simply the cables and signalling systems developed by the British, but also the knowledge, resources, and cultures of South-East Asian Indigenous communities and lifeways that resisted the Western energy project ‘around’ the conducting wire. Britain’s global telegraphy enterprise relied on enormous quantities of gutta-percha, procured only by Indigenous collectors whose methods refused settler colonial agricultural practices like the plantation model. Based on the widespread demand for, and increasing shortage of, gutta-percha by the late nineteenth century, this article argues that Stoker’s Dracula characterizes the Count using language that overlaps with the ambient, uncategorizable energy of field theory, as well as non-Western practices crucial to the gutta-percha supply chain, like animal augury.

Keywords

• telegraphy
• field theory
• infrastructure
• electricity
• magnetism
• imperialism