Globetrotting on a copper thread

Griesemer picks up every dot and dash of this fascinating story, conveying the boggling incongruity of the age. England boasts the greatest scientists in the world, but can't dispose of its sewage. America delights in the free flow of ideas across a web of wires, but keeps millions of inhabitants enslaved in a thicket of legalized rape and servitude. The thin cable that Chester wants to stretch from Ireland to Newfoundland makes a striking contrast to the enormous ship he hopes to use. At 19,000 tons and 692 feet, the Great Eastern is far larger than any ship ever built. In fact, the doomed vessel is so great that it takes a dozen frustrating attempts over several months just to launch it.

But somehow "Signal & Noise" is large enough to contain even more than these oversized wonders and horrors. Griesemer can stir up a terrifying storm at sea or catch the faint waves of loneliness in a sickroom. He can explain the arcane workings of a galvanometer as well as the mysterious affection between brothers. His story never slackens, drawing us through strands of 19th-century technology and timeless romance.

Though Chester is enlisted for his engineering knowledge, he excels at attracting venture capital with the Phantasmagorium, a spectacle somewhere between live theater and television. Unfortunately, he also attracts the affections of the show's pianist, a passionate woman who leads him further and further from his wife.

As Chester begins a fruitless series of wire-laying trips across the Atlantic with his flamboyant pianist, Franny remains at home, desperate to span the gulf between her and their late daughter.

Griesemer has a sympathetic touch that keeps these characters from falling into the natural melodrama of this history. He's particularly good at detecting the pulses of loyalty beneath the static of adultery.

Both husband and wife endure heart-wrenching failures, but their respective journeys provide a fascinating exploration of 19th-century schemes and dreams that sound eerily at home in the Internet Age.

With a Dickensian eye for characters, including cameo appearances from the Lincolns, Isambard Brunel, and Dickens himself, Griesemer winds through the spiritualist movement, the Civil War, the rise of corporate financing, the development of apocalyptic weaponry, the invention of celebrities, the birth of electronics, and of course, "the Age of the Planetary Telegraph." It's an omnivorous vision of the Western world exploding into the modern age.

Griesemer understands the erotic charge of this technological drive, but he also knows that something lies beyond it, something as old as that need to see and hear one another, not through a wire faintly or a glass darkly, but face to face.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. E-mailcharlesr@csmonitor.com

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