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

At some future date, a history of the 'bit' will be written. The title of this books suggests such a story, but the focus is actually on a unique and interesting community of people: those that could 'read and write' in Morse Code at more than 10 words per minute. Thus, the book starts with the formation of the league by Mr. Morse himself, and ends with the device that made such skill superfulous, the telephone. The book is a mix of legal history ('x' patented 'y' and 'z' fought the patent until ...) and culture shock narrative. The legal history is largely drawn from court proceedings surrounding patent lawsuits. The culture shock narrative attempts to map contemporary Internet speculations upon 19th century society. Unfortunately, this latter theme is secondary to the safe and traditional legal history. The various 'invention and patent' stories can be found elsewhere in more detail, but the social history is unique. Standage argues we can anticipate the outcome of various Internet social trends by looking for parallels in the Victorian era. The early telegraph era, like the early Internet era, produced wild popular delusions about universal peace and harmony. The humdrum reality of network crime and loss of privacy was the 19th century reality, will it be so for us? The telegraph produced the earliest examples of 'scientific' utopias. We could learn much by carefully recounting the outcomes of such experiments. My only complaint is that the social commentary was secondary to the legal history.

The title of this book, 'The Victorian Internet,' refers to the 'communications explosion' that took place with the advent and expansion of telegraph wire communications. Prior to this, communication was notoriously slow, particularly as even postal communications were subject to many difficulties and could take months for delivery (and we complain today of the 'allow five days' statements on our credit cards billings!). The parallels between the Victorian Internet and the present computerised internet are remarkable. Information about current events became relatively instantaneous (relative, that is, to the usual weeks or months that it once took to receive such information). There were skeptics who were convinced that this new mode of communication was a passing phase that would never take on (and, in a strict sense, they were right, not of course realising that the demise of the telegraph system was not due to the reinvigoration of written correspondence but due to that new invention, the telephone). There were hackers, people who tried to disrupt communications, those who tried to get on-line free illegally, and, near the end of the high age of telegraphing, a noticeable slow-down in information due to information overload (how long is this page going to take to download?? isn't such a new feeling after all). The most interesting chapter to me is that entitled 'Love over the Wires' which begins with an account of an on-line wedding, with the bride in Boston and the groom in New York. This event was reported in a small book, Anecdotes of the Telegraph, published in London in 1848, which stated that this was 'a story which throws into the shade all the feats that have been performed by our British telegraph.' This story is really one of love and adventure, as the bride's father had sent the young groom away for being unworthy to marry his daughter, but on a stop-over on his way to England, he managed to get a magistrate and telegraph operator to arrange the wedding. The marriage was deemed to be legally binding. A very interesting and remarkable story that perhaps would have been forgotten by history had history not set out to repeat itself with our modern internet.

The title of this book, 'The Victorian Internet,' refers to the 'communications explosion' that took place with the advent and expansion of telegraph wire communications. Prior to this, communication was notoriously slow, particularly as even postal communications were subject to many difficulties and could take months for delivery (and we complain today of the 'allow five days' statements on our credit cards billings!).The parallels between the Victorian Internet and the present computerised internet are remarkable. Information about current events became relatively instantaneous (relative, that is, to the usual weeks or months that it once took to receive such information). There were skeptics who were convinced that this new mode of communication was a passing phase that would never take on (and, in a strict sense, they were right, not of course realising that the demise of the telegraph system was not due to the reinvigoration of written correspondence but due to that new invention, the telephone). There were hackers, people who tried to disrupt communications, those who tried to get on-line free illegally, and, near the end of the high age of telegraphing, a noticeable slow-down in information due to information overload (how long is this page going to take to download?? isn't such a new feeling after all).The most interesting chapter to me is that entitled 'Love over the Wires' which begins with an account of an on-line wedding, with the bride in Boston and the groom in New York. This event was reported in a small book, Anecdotes of the Telegraph, published in London in 1848, which stated that this was 'a story which throws into the shade all the feats that have been performed by our British telegraph.' This story is really one of love and adventure, as the bride's father had sent the young groom away for being unworthy to marry his daughter, but on a stop-over on his way to England, he managed to get a magistrate and telegraph operator to arrange the wedding. The marriage was deemed to be legally binding.A very interesting and remarkable story that perhaps would have been forgotten by history had history not set out to repeat itself with our modern internet.

In the story of the world-wide telegraph system, built from the 1840s until 1900 when the telephone rose to supplant it, Standage develops fascinating parallels with the rise of the Internet. Western Union "insisted that its monopoly [on US telegraphy] was in everyone's interest, even if it was unpopular, because it would encourage standardization." Today's high-pressure startups have nothing on Thomas Edison who "locked his workforce in the workshop until they had finished building a large order of stock tickers." As with the Web, the true inventor, Samuel Morse, made "a respectable sum, though less than the fortunes amassed by the entrepreneurs who built empires on the back of his invention." Standage pairs modern pundits such as Nicholas Negroponte predicting that the Internet will bring about world peace with their 19th century equivalents predicting that the telegraph will enable a perfect understanding between governments and peoples and bring an end to wars. If you made big bucks in the dotcom world of the 1990s, page 205 may cause you a moment's reflection:"The heyday of the telegrapher as a highly paid, highly skilled information worker was over; telegraphers' brief tenure as members of an elite community with master over a miraculous, cutting-edge technology had come to an end. As the twentieth century dawned, the telegraph's inventors had died, its community had crumbled, and its golden age had ended."

Review of "The Victorian Internet" A terrific melding of the effects of the Telegraph and the Internet on the societies they served. A Comparison of the Telegraph and the Internet is not a subject one is normally prompted to consider and this is one reason that makes Tom Standage's account of the far reaching effects of these two medium of communication on their times is all the more enjoyable. On first consideration one is prompted to ask"how can two technical achievements so far removed in time and technology possibly be compared".? But Standage answers the question superbly ,and gives the reader damn good read in the process. Not only are the Telegraph and the Internet compared but we gat a good history of man's struggle to improve the speed by which information is Transmitted. From the Foot Messenger to the Telegraph and the Internet , including all the weird and wonderful attempts in between , the reader is taken, painlessly, on a trip through the history of Information Transmission This is a great book and should be read both for enjoyment and for a close look at how history seems to, at times anyway, repeat itself.