telegraph. The legacy of literacy and visual fragmentation came home to roost every day on the telegraph wire: In England fury succeeded fury. A great storm of rage, humili- ation, and despair had been gathering through the terrible winter of 1854-1855. For the first time in history, through reading the dispatches of Russell, the public had realized "with what majesty the British soldier fights." And these heroes were dead. The men who had stormed the heights of Alma, charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava ... had perished of hunger and neglect. Even horses which had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade had starved to death. (Lonely Crusader, Cecil wbodham-Smith, McGraw-Hill) The horrors that William Howard Russell relayed by wire to The Times were normal in British military life. He was the first war correspondent, because the telegraph gave that immediate and inclusive dimension of "human interest" to news that does not belong to a "point of view." It is merely a comment on our absentmindedness and general indifference that after more than a century of telegraph news reporting, nobody has seen that "human interest" is the electronic or depth dimension of immediate involvement in news. With telegraph, there ended that separation of interests and division of faculties that are certainly not without their magnificent monuments of toil and ingenuity. But with telegraph, came the integral insistence and wholeness of Dickens, and of Florence Nightingale, and of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The electric gives powerful voices to the weak and suffering, and sweeps aside the bureaucratic specialisms and job descriptions of the mind tied to a manual of instructions. The "human interest" dimension is simply that of immediacy of participation in the experience of others that occurs with instant information. People become instant, too, in their response of pity or of fury when they must share the