months after Crippen's arrest, an act was passed in the British Parliament making it compulsory for all passenger ships to carry ireless. The Crippen case illustrates what happens to the best-laid plans of mice and men in any organization when the instant speed of information movement begins. There is a collapse of delegated authority and a dissolution of the pyramid and management structures made familiar in the organization chart. The separation of functions, and the division of stages, spaces, and tasks are characteristic of literate and visual society and of the Western world. These divisions tend to dissolve through the action of the instant and organic interrelations of electricity. Former German Armaments minister Albert Speer, in a speech at the Nuremberg trials, made some bitter remarks about the effects of electric media on German life: "The telephone, the teleprinter and the wireless made it possible for orders from the highest levels to be given direct to the lowest levels, where, on account of the absolute authority behind them, they were carried out uncritically ..." The tendency of electric media is to create a kind of organic interdependence among all the institutions of society, emphasizing de Chardin's view that the discovery of electromagnetism is to be regarded as "a prodigious biological event." If political and commercial institutions take on a biological character by means of electric communications, it is also common now for biologists like Hans Selye to think of the physical organism as a communication network: "Hormone is a specific chemical messenger-substance, made by an endocrine gland and secreted into the blood, to regulate and coordinate the functions of distant organs." This peculiarity about the electric form, that it ends the mechanical age of individual steps and specialist functions, has a direct explanation. Whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself) had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies,