Wireless telegraphy supplied the metaphor that made language a communication system

Evidence

The breakthrough was made by suddenly considering a language to be in essence not an organism but a means of communication. It was a breakthrough that came with the coming of modern communication. In 1895 Marconi demonstrated for the first time his system of wireless telegraphy; such events made it possible to explain the nature of language in a new way. ‘Words are signs’, it was now declared. ‘They have no other existence than the signals of the wireless telegraph.’ This claim was made in 1897 by Michel Bréal, professor of comparative grammar at the Collège de France. The significance of arguing that words were mere signs, as empty in themselves as telegraph signals, was that a language could now be thought of as something more, existing apart from words themselves. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 442

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how new media technologies reshape intellectual frameworks — parallels the general theme of media shaping thought from the noise/silence reading list. — connects to: Marconi conceived wireless telegraphy as a spectral science for hearing past voices — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 335
• SEED: The insight that Marconi’s telegraphy literally provided the analogy that reshaped linguistics in 1897 is a great angle for an essay on how technology provides the metaphors for intellectual revolutions.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 442