Some telegraphers in remote outposts even preferred online contact with other telegraphers to socializing with the locals. Thomas Stevens, a British telegraph operator stationed in Persia, shunned the local community in favor of telegraphic interaction with other Britons. "How companionable it was, that bit of civilization in a barbarous country," he wrote of his telegraphic friends, some of whom were thousands of miles away.Measurement of time facilitated the use of credit, the rise of exchanges and calculations of the predictable future essential to the spread of insurance. With these developments the church lost control over time to the new nationalist state though its interest in time is evident in its control over feast days. Introduction of paper, and invention of the printing press hastened the decline of Latin and the rise of the vernaculars.