12/7/2022 0 Comments Ockham communications![]() ![]() He consoled himself in the early years by turning his attention to matters of astronomy. With no immediate official plan to house him in an observatory, Todd needed a great deal of patience and skill to persuade his contemporaries, especially politicians and governors who regularly came and went, that science could be put to practical benefit. Yet there was little in the way of encouragement when he and young Alice Todd stepped off the Irene in 1855 at Adelaide. ![]() In an age where practical science was paramount Todd was well placed to foster an Information Revolution when, in 1855, he arrived in colonial Australia as a young civil servant. Or extend under water to the continent for a range of purposes, scientific as well as commercial. He saw how it could be used to calculate the longitude for navigational purposes, for time distribution to post office clocks and scheduling along the railways. #Ockham communications professional#Todd began his professional career by training as a supernumerary computer in England at the Cambridge and Greenwich Observatories where he was caught up in the excitement and magic of electric telegraphy. But I would have to resist the Australian urge simply to retell a good yarn – what better one than the OTL? The popular literature on Todd offered more intuitive insights from Todd the mystic, communing in the outback with strangers or exhibiting ‘second sight’ to Todd, the magician, performing ‘sound and light’ shows and the latest electrical demonstrations before eager colonial audiences. ![]() ![]() How have scientists communicated with each other and with their publics? What was the nature of these discussions, and did their forays into the public domain engender rational outcomes? How might stepping back in time throw some light on the present and help us to understand the progress and pitfalls of public science? This task represents an ambitious challenge for a communication historian like myself, but is a valuable exercise in linking the technological past with the present. #Ockham communications full#My involvement represents the most recent in a series of hitherto unsuccessful attempts to write a full length biography of Todd, fleshing out the man and his milieu. While his abundant report writing and correspondence have been well preserved in South Australian print collections, his personal artefacts are more scattered, housed in museums and warehouses in Victoria and the Northern Territory as well as in his own home state. This neglect is doubly strange in view of Todd’s activities as a science communicator and educator. If, as I shall argue, Todd is a harbinger of the Information Age, an Australian giant with an almost mystical sense of technological destiny, it seems strange that the centenary of his death in 2010 passed virtually unnoticed and with it, much of the scientific legacy which underpinned a remarkable career over 50 years in Australia, not to mention stints at the Greenwich and Cambridge Observatories. Dubbed the ‘Victorian internet’ these lightening lines, as James Carey described them, and as James Gleick recently reminds us, were not just about copper insulators and iron poles, but a technology of empire and a portent of modern globalisation. Today communication scholars like myself, are also interested in understanding the international networks forged by the telegraph. Livingston, along with Ann Moyal and Peter Putnis have encouraged my own interest in Todd whose persistence ultimately helped lay the groundwork for the unification of the Australian colonies in 1901. It was by any measure a risky and remarkable venture which culminated in the wiring of a continent, to use my former colleague Kevin Livingston’s memorable phrase, for it changed the speed with which we received information, reinforced distant authority while enfranchising local markets and permitted regular exchanges between the imperial centre in London and the periphery. Todd will certainly be remembered next year, the 140 th anniversary of the Overland Telegraph’s construction. Denis.ĭenis Cryle: My chosen subject for this purpose is Sir Charles Todd, already something of an Australian legend as the builder of the Overland Telegraph Line which linked the Australian continent via Adelaide and Darwin to the international telegraph routes. He’s also the subject for Denis Cryle at the University of Central Queensland in Rockhampton, as a perfect exemplar of science communication in days of old. I’ll mention Alice later, but Charles was equivalent to the instigator of the NBN, wiring Australia. Yes, you have heard of them, even if you can’t remember why. Robyn Williams: Think of the names Charles Todd and Alice Todd. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |