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

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A remarkable tale of the telegraph, and how it relates to us today.

This is a top-notch tale of the remarkable invention of the telegraph -- and how it blossomed from nascent experimental use in France, to the creation of Samuel Morse's electric telegraph which eventually interconnected the entire planet by the end of the 19th century. In all, "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage is a fascinating review of the history of the telegraph and how it parallels the Internet today.

Even the title of the book indicates that the Victorian era was when the telegraph's use was at its height. People used it then much as they use the Internet today: to communicate with family and friends, expedite commerce, seek romance ... and deceive the unwitting through scams.

We often think of the telecommunications revolution as being a primarily late-20th century innovation, but this book proves this is not so. In fact, if any group can lay claim to having to endure the greatest technological paradigm shift -- it would be our forebears from the mid to late 19th century.

For prior to this point, the fastest way in which information could travel was the speed of a charging horse or fast sailboat. However, with the creation of the first optical, then later electrical telegraph, what once would have taken months to ferry a message across vast distances was cut down to a few seconds.

Moreover, the seeds for many of the inventions and modern conveniences we take for granted now (i.e. the fax, telephone, Internet, etc.) are direct descendants of the telegraph and the pioneering spirit that caused it to undergo many improvements in its design. For example, the operating principle behind the telephones we use everyday was discovered quite accidentally when Alexander Graham Bell sought to improve upon the design and capacity of an existing telegraph. And the very word "network" itself derived from the "net-works" of telegraph cable which crisscrossed the globe. [The term "Internet" itself, comes from the telegraphic idea of "interconnected networks."]

This short book is a fun and fascinating read (which I often found hard to put down), showing that the telegraph and today's Internet have more in common than we know. Thus proving what wise King Solomon had already exclaimed thousands of years ago:

"That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which it may be said,
'See, this is new'?
It has already been in ancient times before us."

History made very interesting

The story of the telegraph starting from the semaphores to the most modern telegram machines is amazing.
This book makes it much easier to read than history text books and uses small anecdotes to tell history as it happened.
The power of the telegraph, how Edison was the fastest, etc., is amazing.

Well Worth My Time and Money

The book discusses the history of the telegraph. The book explains the technologies preceding the telegraph, the battles between the inventors of the telegraph, the telegraph's role in spawning new technological innovations (and creating enormous wealth for some of those folks) and the ways that the telegraph did--and did not--change society.

Its thesis is that many phenomena we associate with a global electronic network first occurred in the 19th century, not the 20th, which has made our celebration of the Internet's novelty (a topic at its zenith in 1998 when the book was published) ahistorical. The book thoroughly delivers on this thesis. One particular anecdote really hammered this point home. The book talks about a telegraph-mediated "online wedding" that first occurred...before 1848. (Indeed, the book "Wired Love" was published in 1879 and an article "The Dangers of Wired Love" ran in 1886). Yet, numerous newspaper articles from the mid-1990s marveled at Internet-mediated weddings as if they were completely unprecedented.

More generally, the book broadly makes the case that some things never change. For example, the book describes the arms race between telegraph companies establishing pricing schemes to curb attempts to send more information at a lower cost, just to have telegraph senders coming up with new gaming strategies. The book discussed the paranoia of major institutions in response to telegraphy, including governments that sought to control the use of cryptography in telegraphy and newspapers that assumed that the telegraph would destroy their business. (In the latter case, the newspapers adapted and thrived in response to telegraphy). The book also described how the telegraph contributed to feelings of information overload.

The book ends on a bittersweet note. It observes that people thought that the borderless telegraph communication network would contribute to world peace by breaking down barriers to communication. It didn't. If anything, the telegraph played an important role in 19th century imperialism and contributed to some of the bloodiest wars in history. Similarly, 150 years later, many romanticize how the Internet can make the world a better place. Perhaps the Internet is truly different from the telegraph in this respect, or perhaps, we are just ahistorically proclaiming the latest technology innovation as our savior. As the book says, "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."

From my perspective, the only thing "missing" from this pithy and efficient book was a more thorough discussion of how lawmakers reacted to the rise of the telegraph. I would like to know more about how 19th century regulators coped with--or, more likely, freaked out about--the technological assumptions changed by the telegraph.

It seems safe to assume that some legislators misunderstood the technological underpinnings of telegraphy. The book gives numerous examples of how people didn't understand that the telegraph sent only electronic signals and wasn't a teleportation technology, such as the story of a woman in 1870 who sought to "telegraph" sauerkraut to her son. Again, some things never change; in 2003, a member of the House of Lords had a similar misunderstanding about spam. [the exact quote: "Will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food can become an unsolicited email, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an email?"]

In this vein, the book offered one possible explanation for Sen. Stevens' explanation that the Internet is a "series of tubes." [the exact quote from Wired: "the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."] Many telegraph operators built out a network of pneumatic tubes to move messages over short distances because this was quicker and more accurate for those messages. So perhaps Sen. Stevens was thinking of the telegraph when he referred to the "series of tubes."

The book was published before Western Union sent its last telegram. At the time I knew this represented the end of an important era, but after reading this book I better understand the significance of that event. Some day, someone will send the very last TCP/IP enabled http message...an event that will also probably pass with a whimper, not a bang.

An excellent book!

The invention of the telegraph, its development and its use in the 19th century as a communication device is discussed in this excellent volume. Real stories of telegraphy, some of them quite surprising, provide background to the story of this technology, a real leap forward in its time. Well organized with good writing this is an excellent book. Whether you are fascinated by telegraphy or have never really thought about it before, this book will keep you entertained.

The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see...

Winston Churchill said, "The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see." It is, perhaps, surprising to learn that much of what has taken place with the Internet could have been predicted by studying events in the past 150 years. The invention, deployment and integration of the telegraph into society and business practices mirror the Internet in a great many ways.

The Internet has shrunk the world (like never before?), enabled business to take place at the speed of light (like never before?), caused information overload (ditto), and even enabled new mechanisms of dating and marriage to take place (again ditto). One wonders if by studying the rise (and fall) of the telegraph and related technologies we can predict the next "big things" and opportunities in this age of the internet?

This is a terrific "gee-whiz" book, an easy read on an airplane. It will likely amuse you; it may evoke an epiphany or two; it may even spark the idea for a new product or business!