Opening the Red Box: The Fire Alarm Telegraph and Politics of Risk Response in Imperial Germany, 1873–1900 (July 2021)
Historian of technology Gabrielle Hecht once described technopolitics as the strategic pursuit of political goals through technology's design and use. The fire alarm telegraph, hailed by contemporaries as revolutionary technology in the nineteenth century, offers detailed insight into the technopolitics of risk, a yet uncharted territory. Unlike most histories of risk that do not analyze the design and use of risk technologies, this study unpacks how such technologies embody norms and structure governance. Virtually unknown to historians—yet central to urban risk management—fire-alarm technology emerged as a material contract between authoritarianism and liberalism in the nineteenth century. This article demonstrates how the design of the fire alarm telegraph allowed Prussian authorities and urban liberals to propagate their concept of risk in the German city of Frankfurt. The technology facilitated their cooperation in urban governance and thereby helped to solve conflict between competing national and local interests.
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