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UCC researcher to investigate Georgian-era surveillance communications that pre-date the telegraph
- Dr Joanna Wharton receives prestigious €590,262 Taighde Éireann - Research Ireland Pathway Programme award.
- LINC project offers new perspectives on pre-electrical telegraphic cultures, during the period 1794-1850.
- The project contributes to a historically informed debate on the legacies of surveillance, secrecy, and technological acceleration.
The secrets of a Georgian-era spy network are to be uncovered by a research project that will examine a long-distance communications network that pre-dates the telegram.
A University College Cork (UCC) early-career researcher will explore the development of infrastructures of secret and high-speed intelligence in Ireland and across the British Empire, during the period 1794-1850.
From the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, human-powered machines with large wooden arms, pointers, or shutters transmitted messages across vast distances.
This was the optical (or semaphore) telegraph, a visual signalling system that promised to revolutionise long-distance communication for government and military purposes. Using telescopes, operators at each telegraph station picked up signals from the previous station and relayed them onward, enabling the rapid transmission of coded information.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary studies, cultural and social history, and history of science and technology, LINC - Lines of Communication: Telegraphy, Literature, and Security in Ireland and the British Empire, 1794–1850, - offers new perspectives on pre-electrical telegraphic cultures, and Ireland plays a significant role in this narrative.
Led by Dr Joanna Wharton from the School of English & Digital Humanities, LINC explores the development of these infrastructures of secret and high-speed intelligence in Ireland and across the British Empire, emphasising the optical telegraph’s connection to evolving concepts of state security and insecurity. The project traces how this system was implemented and adapted across an expanding anglophone world, focusing on its use in Ireland, India, Van Diemen’s Land (lutruwita/Tasmania), and the Cape Colony in southern Africa.
A key focus of the project is the work of Maria Edgeworth, a prominent Irish writer, and the telegraph invented by her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Maria Edgeworth not only fictionalised the technology in her tales but also helped to produce the telegraph’s codebook or 'vocabulary'. Though operational for only a brief period in Ireland in 1804, the Edgeworth telegraph was later adapted for use by the British East India Company in Bengal.
Photo: Charles D’Oyly, ‘View of the Village and Hill of Silwar with a Telegraph Tower’, 1830. Yale Centre for British Art.
Dr Joanna Wharton said: "For the first time, LINC will provide a critical survey of optical telegraphs in Ireland and the British Empire, connecting and comparing telegraph schemes in diverse colonial settings. This work will examine how innovators imagined the telegraph’s possibilities, marketed their plans to colonial administrations, and adapted the technology to different regional dynamics. It also highlights the crises, challenges, and failures that accompanied the telegraph’s use as a technology of colonial surveillance."
Through its comparative study, LINC sheds light on the broader significance of communication technologies in shaping modern concepts of security. It recontextualises the optical telegraph not just as a machine but as an idea that influenced political and literary discourses of the time. The project explores how both elite and subaltern agents responded to the telegraph, revealing how the rapid transmission of information affected perceptions of social, temporal, and spatial separation.
By integrating literary, historical, and technological analyses, LINC opens new ways of understanding the cultural and political impact of the optical telegraph. In doing so, the project contributes to a historically informed debate on the legacies of surveillance, secrecy, and technological acceleration.
Dr Wharton has received a funding award of €590,262 from the Research Ireland Pathway Programme Awards that support early career research across Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and to encourage interdisciplinary approaches. These awards enable postdoctoral researchers to conduct independent research for a four–year period and will provide funding for a postgraduate student who will be primarily supervised by the awardee.
Professor Cathal O'Connell, Head of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at UCC, said: "As a college committed to innovative and interdisciplinary research, we are delighted to welcome Dr Joanna Wharton and the LINC project team to the College of Arts Celtic Studies and Social Sciences. The LINC project, with its focus on communications infrastructure and telegraphic technologies in the colonial era promises, to reveal new insights and perspectives into the political, social, literary, and technological aspects of this profoundly important topic."
Dr James Kapalo, Vice Head for Research and Innovation in the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at UCC, said: "Dr Joanna Wharton's innovative project will shed light on the early entanglement of communication technology with imperialism, power, and the mechanisms of state security. Cutting-edge projects such as this are helping to shape the future of the Humanities at University College Cork as a space for cutting-edge, impactful research that matters."
Congratulating Dr Joanna Wharton on this award, Professor John F. Cryan, UCC Vice President for Research and Innovation said: "Congratulations to Dr Wharton on receiving a Research Ireland Pathway award. As an emerging early career researcher, this award will provide important support to enable her to progress her excellent track record and transition to become an independent research leader."