The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers (1998/2009) Tom Standage

I somehow failed to realize until just now that I’ve actually read other books by Tom Standage.

Probably because those other books were about food and drink, not technology.

this book gives us the history of the telegraph, and its parallels to the development of the Internet; this version has some revisions/ additions from the original 1998 version. But much of it is about the history and development of the telegraph, which starts out much simpler than you’d think.

The British telegraph was designed by George Murray, a clergyman and amateur scientist, and it consisted of six wooden shutters, each of which could be opened or closed to give sixty-four possible (combinations)

This was NOT an electric telegraph, but instead a series of towers with shutters. For the Terry Pratchett fans, this is essentially the Clacks System.

Although this system allowed messages to be moved rapidly over long distances, there were plenty of limitations, starting with the need to have clear line of sight between towers and continuing through the fact these messages were open for everyone to see (as long as they knew the codes).

But it was still a vast improvement over a man on foot or a horse.

The Paris-Lille line, the first arm of the French State Telegraph, started operation in May 1794, and on August 15 it was used to report the recapture of a town from the Austrians and Prussians within an hour of the battle’s end.

But this book is far more than the technical aspects of developing the electric telegraph. The military and business applications are blindingly obvious in hindsight–even if they weren’t at the time.

During the fifth day the telegraph took twelve and a half cents, and revenues rose slowly to reach $1.04 by the ninth day…

After three months the line had taken in $193.56 but had cost $1,859.05 to run.

And it also tells of some of the more epic failures.

Everything seemed to be going according to plan. There was only one fly in the ointment: Whitehouse was totally incompetent. …

Whitehouse had started out as a surgeon and had taught himself everything he knew about telegraphy—which wasn’t very much. …

In some fields, practical experience is every bit as valuable as theoretical understanding, but Whitehouse had neither.

The book also it has personal bits that show just how much near instant communication changed the world.

Morse’s wife, Lucretia, died suddenly at their home in New Haven, Connecticut, on the afternoon of February 7, 1825…

“I long to hear from you,” he wrote in a letter to his wife on February 10, unaware that she was already dead.

But it’s the history and technical bits that fascinated me most. Like the fact that much of the system actually relied on vacuum tubes.

In 1875, the Central Telegraph Office in London, for example, housed 450 telegraph instruments on three floors, linked by sixty-eight internal pneumatic tubes.

…the Paris network was extensive enough that many local messages could be sent from sender to recipient entirely by tube and messenger, without any need for telegraphic transmission.

For some reason that seems like one of the most surprising facts in the whole book.

It was a fascinating book, and I do think he isn’t wrong about the parallels.

That the telegraph was so widely seen as a panacea is perhaps understandable. The fact that we are still making the same mistake today is less so.

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Rating: 8.5/10

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