This article analyses how journalists and businessmen used and perceived the Atlantic cable following the failure of New York banking house Jay Cooke Co. in September 1873, an event which sparked stock markets panics in Vienna and Berlin. It is argued that while bankers successfully used telegraphic cables to communicate intelligence such as price information, letters proved superior as a medium for establishing personal trust, as the case of New York banker George Opdyke shows. Journalists, too, were critical of the telegraph's performance, blaming the paucity of information available on the technology's supposedly inherent deficiencies. This criticism, it is argued, was ultimately based on the 'imagined reception' of cables by their senders, as well as on the persistence of earlier imagined uses of telegraphy. These, I argue, continued to inform contemporary expectations of telegraphy's performance.

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AbstractThe article compares the semantics of economic crises in the second half of the 19th century, focussing on the German-speaking world during the crises of 1857 and 1873. It examines, firstly, religious interpretations of the crises, arguing that these were on the wane. Even during the earlier crisis of 1857 they only played a role in a few instances. Secondly, the article examines the semantics employed by entrepreneurs, as found in annual reports by chambers of commerce. During both crises, the authors of these reports criticized the misdeeds of individual entrepreneurs. In 1857/58, this co-existed with the use of metaphors of physiology and meteorology. In the 1870s, by contrast, such metaphors were less frequent.

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