The same utopian leaps of faith recur with each new technological breakthrough. In the 1850s, the telegraph was proclaimed as the great unifier of humanity. ‘It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should any longer exist,’ said an editorial in the New Englander.59 Henry David Thoreau had a more realistic grasp of its potential: ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,’ he wrote, ‘but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.’
