Henry Ford famously said of life before the car “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses“. This sentiment could be equally applied to the telegraph, a communications technology that came about 400 years after the printing press.
Before the telegraph, the speed of communication was dependent on the speed of the physical object doing the transporting – the horse, or the ship. Societies were thus organized around the speed of communication available to them, from the way business was conducted and wars were fought to the way interpersonal communication was conducted.
Let’s consider, for example, the way the telegraph changed the conduct of war.
Prior to the telegraph, countries shared detailed knowledge of their plans with their citizens in order to boost morale, knowing that their plans would arrive at the enemy the same time their ships did. Post-telegraph, communications could arrive far faster than soldiers: This was something to consider!
In addition, as Tom Standage considers in his book The Victorian Internet, the telegraph altered the command structure in battle. “For who was better placed to make strategic decisions: the commander at the scene or his distant superiors?”
The telegraph brought changes similar in many ways to the printing press: It allowed for an accumulation of knowledge and increased the availability of this knowledge; more people had access to more information.
And society was forever altered as the new speed of communication made it fundamentally impossible to not use the telegraph, just as it is near impossible not to use a mobile phone or the Internet today.
Once the telegraph was widespread, there was no longer a way to do business without using it. Having up to the minute stock quotes changed the way businesses evaluated their holdings. Being able to communicate with various offices across the country created centralization and middle management. These elements became part of doing business so that it became nonsensical to talk about developing any aspect of business independent of the effect of electronic communication.
https://fs.blog/printing-press-telegraph-matter/
One worldwide web, spreading news, messages and information faster and more freely than ever before. Fortunes made in trading start-up company stocks, and lost in the next market crash. A global community, linked by rapidly evolving electronic wizardry managed by highly paid electronic magicians. Incompatible systems, online romances, and vociferous debates about government control and the impact of the new technology. The title of Tom Standage's richly detailed and immensely entertaining social history reminds us that, as revolutionary as the Internet may seem, it has all happened before.
In fact, the advent of telegraphic communication in the mid-19th century did more to change society, argues Standage, than the development of today's Internet. We were getting up-to-the-minute news by television and radio before the emerging online services opened a pipeline to personal computers. We could talk to friends and families with a telephone and get stock prices by calling a broker before e-mail was invented. But in the America of the 1840s, messages moved by boat, train or horseback.
Over the course of the 19th century this primitive network of flapping, clanking machines evolved into a global communication system. Independently invented in England and the United States, the electric telegraph soon crisscrossed continents with copper wire and linked them with underwater cables. Nimble-fingered operators sent, received and retransmitted messages day and night. Webs of pneumatic tubes moved printed copies of messages between nearby stations and, in Paris and other major cities, throughout the urban center. And cadres of messengers ran telegrams from the end of the transmission line directly to the recipient's home or office. "By the early 1870s," Standage writes, "the Victorian Internet had taken shape...."
The Victorian Internet: Outlines the establishment of the world-wide telegraph system in the late 19th century and draws parallels between its use and cultural impact with the rise of the modern-day Internet.
Standage begins with an overview of the development of the telegraph as a technology, noting that early experiments with distance communication involved visual systems like Claude Chappe’s 'visual telegraph.' These systems required good weather, daylight, and relatively short distances in order to work and were in fact quite slow. Experiments with electricity, however, resulted in several breakthroughs that demonstrated that electrical impulses could be carried over wires across vast distances and took only seconds to transmit. This led to the first telegraph networks.
Telegraphs also had the advantage of being relatively easy and cheap to construct, but early attempts to create a universal network failed. Rival systems emerged in Europe and the United States, with William Cooke developing a system in England while Samuel Morse developed his own system in the United States. The Morse Code system ultimately became the de facto standard because it was simple and easy to use. While telegraph pioneers dreamed of running wires under the ocean to link North America with Europe, they found governments disinterested in spending money to establish these networks.
Another challenge to the telegraph was skepticism; electricity was not well understood at the time and many refused to believe that something they could not see could be real. Morse and Cooke built large-scale telegraph networks as proofs of concept by partnering with railways to build telegraph systems along their tracks. Once these systems were built, their ability to transmit news quickly, as on the occasion of Prince Albert’s birth or the apprehension of a fugitive from justice, captured the public imagination and established the telegraph’s benefits in the popular imagination. However, this still didn’t translate into government support, and so Morse and Cook took on private investors and launched telegraph companies in order to take matters into their own hands.
The telegraph became popular, but was very expensive as the companies charged by the word and by distance. As a result, the telegraph was used sparingly by all but the rich. Similar to modern-day chat rooms and text messages, the telegraph soon developed its own shorthand and abbreviations. The first underwater telegraph line was laid across the English channel in 1851. Although the first cable connecting Europe and North America was laid in 1858, it quickly ceased to work properly. At this time a system using vacuum tubes to transmit hard copy message also rose up and became quite popular for short-distance communication, and the telegraph enjoyed improved performance thanks to ongoing technological improvements. The telegraph seemed to harken a new age of peace and prosperity because empires would no longer have to push through territory to move information, but this proved to be more of a pipe dream than a reality.
As with the current Internet, the telegraph offered criminals various ways of breaking the law, and the government found itself struggling to adapt. For example, an early stock market fraud relied on getting information about the markets before anyone else could. In order to hide their activities, criminals began developing complex codes and ciphers in order to protect their criminal communications from prying eyes. Codes were also developed to make communication more efficient and cheaper; for example, the ABC codes. However, as industries and organizations all developed their own codes, things were very confusing and fractured until the development of an official vocabulary for telegraphic messages.
People used the telegraphs to find love and even to get married, just as people use the Internet today for dating. Also like the Internet of today, the telegraph changed how business and industry was done, because of the speed of communication and the lack of physical barriers. At the same time the telegraph intensified the carnage in warfare as countries were able to direct their armies in near real-time using the technology. Also similar to today, the telegraph allowed news from all over the world to flood into newspapers, overwhelming them with information.
Standage then notes that the financial markets required even faster and more efficient, specialized communications, and so the stock ticker was invented. It was later perfected by Thomas Edison, and the profits from his improved ticker allowed him to go on to invent things that largely made the telegraph obsolete, including improvements to the telephone which allowed for instant voice communication between vast distances.
In the end, it’s common to imagine the past as a vastly different, alien place, but Standage makes the point that while the technology and its capability was very different, our reaction to the telegraph and the unexpected consequences it delivered is very similar to the Internet of the late 20th century.
https://www.supersummary.com/the-victorian-internet/summary/
The prototype of an electric network appeared when monks held iron wires in their hands in 1746 (p. 1). At that time, the technical possibilities of people were significantly limited, and the notion of transmitting electricity over a distance was an essential discovery. The importance of that event is even higher when it becomes clear that the monks and their experiment gave rise to further technological developments, including various signaling systems, telegraph, and telephone. This information can allow us to suppose that explaining when and how the telegraph appeared is the only theme of the book, but closer analysis reveals that it draws attention to many significant issues.
https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-victorian-internet-the-book-by-tom-standage/
The ability to communicate globally at all in real-time was a qualitative shift, while the change brought on by the modern Internet was merely a quantitative shift according to Standage, though, by the same token, global communication was just a quantitative shift from long-distance communication.
Some of the uses of telegraph in commercial, military, and social communication were, in a sense, analogous to modern uses of the internet. A few rather unusual stories are related, about couples who fell in love and even married over the wires, criminals who were caught through the telegraph, and so on.
The culture which developed between telegraph operators also had some rather unexpected affinities with the modern Internet. Both cultures made or make use of complex text coding and abbreviated language slang, both required network security experts, and both attracted criminals who used the networks to commit fraud, hack private communications, and send unwanted messages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
Although it has now faded from view, the telegraph lives on within the communications technologies that have subsequently built upon its foundations: the telephone, the fax machine, and, more recently, the Internet. And, ironically, it is the Internet - despite being regarded as a quintessentially modern means of communication - that has the most in common with its telegraphic ancestor.
Like the telegraph network, the Internet allows people to communicate across great distances using interconnected networks. (Indeed, the generic term internet simply means a group of interconnected networks.) Common rules and protocols enable any sort of computer to exchange messages with any other - just as messages could easily be passed from one kind of telegraph apparatus (a Morse printer, say) to another (a pneumatic tube). The journey of an e-mail message, as it hops from mail server to mail server toward its destination, mirrors the passage of a telegram from one telegraph office to the next.
There are even echoes of the earliest, most primitive telegraphs - such as the optical system invented by Chappe - in today's modems and network hardware. Every time two computers exchange an eight-digit binary number, or byte, they are going through the same motions as an eight-panel shutter telegraph would have done two hundred years ago. Instead of using a codebook to relate each combination to a different word, today's computers use another agreed-upon protocol to transmit individual letters. This scheme, called ASCII (for American Standard Code for Information Interchange), says, for example, that a capital "A" should be represented by the pattern 01000001; but in essence the principles are unchanged since the late eighteenth century. Similarly, Chappe's system had special codes to increase or reduce the rate of transmission, or to request that garbled information be sent again - all of which are features of modems today. The protocols used by modems are decided on by the ITU, the organization founded in 1865 to regulate international telegraphy. The initials now stand for International Telecommunication Union, rather than International Telegraph Union.
More striking still are the parallels between the social impact of the telegraph and that of the Internet. Public reaction to the new technologies was, in both cases, a confused mixture of hype and skepticism. Just as many Victorians believed the telegraph would eliminate misunderstanding between nations and usher in a new era of world peace, an avalanche of media coverage has lauded the Internet as a powerful new medium that will transform and improve our lives.
Some of these claims sound oddly familiar. In his 1997 book What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives, Michael Dertouzos of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote of the prospect of "computer-aided peace" made possible by digital networks like the Internet. "A common bond reached through electronic proximity may help stave off future flareups of ethnic hatred and national breakups," he suggested. In a conference speech in November 1997, Nicholas Negroponte, head of the MIT Media Laboratory, explicitly declared that the Internet would break down national borders and lead to world peace. In the future, he claimed, children "are not going to know what nationalism is."
The similarities do not end there. Scam artists found crooked ways to make money by manipulating the transmission of stock prices and the results of horse races using the telegraph; their twentieth-century counterparts have used the Internet to set up fake "shop fronts" purporting to be legitimate providers of financial services, before disappearing with the money handed over by would-be investors; hackers have broken into improperly secured computers and made off with lists of credit card numbers.
People who were worried about inadequate security on the telegraph network, and now on the Internet, turned to the same solution: secret codes. Today software to compress files and encrypt messages before sending them across the Internet is as widely used as the commercial codes that flourished on the telegraph network. And just as the ITU placed restrictions on the use of telegraphic ciphers, many governments today are trying to do the same with computer cryptography, by imposing limits on the complexity of the encryption available to Internet users. (The ITU, it should be noted, proved unable to enforce its rules restricting the types of code words that could be used in telegrams, and eventually abandoned them.)
On a simpler level, both the telegraph and the Internet have given rise to their own jargon and abbreviations. Rather than plugs, boomers, or bonus men. Internet users are variously known as surfers, netheads, or netizens. Personal signatures, used by both telegraphers and Internet users, are known in both cases as sigs.
Another parallel is the eternal enmity between new, inexperienced users and experienced old hands. Highly skilled telegraphers in city offices would lose their temper when forced to deal with hopelessly inept operators in remote villages; the same phenomenon was widespread on the Internet when the masses first surged on-line in the early 1990s, unaware of customs and traditions that had held sway on the Internet for years and capable of what, to experienced users, seemed unbelievable stupidity, gullibility, and impoliteness.
But while conflict and rivalry both seem to come with the on-line territory, so does romance. A general fascination with the romantic possibilities of the new technology has been a feature of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: On-line weddings have taken place over both the telegraph and the Internet. In 1996, Sue Helle and Lynn Bottoms were married on-line by a minister 10 miles away in Seattle, echoing the story of Philip Reade and Clara Choate, who were married by telegraph 120 years earlier by a minister 650 miles away. Both technologies have also been directly blamed for causing romantic problems. In 1996, a New Jersey man filed for divorce when he discovered that his wife had been exchanging explicit e-mail with another man, a case that was widely reported as the first example of "Internet divorce."
After a period of initial skepticism, businesses became the most enthusiastic adopters of the telegraph in the nineteenth century and the Internet in the twentieth. Businesses have always been prepared to pay for premium services like private leased lines and value-added information - provided those services can provide a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Internet sites routinely offer stock prices and news headlines, both of which were available over a hundred years ago via stock tickers and news wires. And just as the telegraph led to a direct increase in the pace and stress of business life, today the complaint of information overload, blamed on the Internet, is commonplace.
The telegraph also made possible new business practices, facilitating the rise of large companies centrally controlled from a head office. Today, the Internet once again promises to redefine the way people work, through emerging trends like teleworking (working from a distant location, with a network connection to one's office) and virtual corporations (where there is no central office, just a distributed group of employees who communicate over a network).
The similarities between the telegraph and the Internet - both in their technical underpinnings and their social impact - are striking. But the story of the telegraph contains a deeper lesson. Because of its ability to link distant peoples, the telegraph was the first technology to be seized upon as a panacea. Given its potential to change the world, the telegraph was soon being hailed as a means of solving the world's problems. It failed to do so, of course - but we have been pinning the same hope on other new technologies ever since.
In the 1890s, advocates of electricity claimed it would eliminate the drudgery of manual work and create a world of abundance and peace. In the first decade of the twentieth century, aircraft inspired similar flights of fancy: Rapid intercontinental travel would, it was claimed, eliminate international differences and misunderstandings. (One commentator suggested that the age of aviation would be an "age of peace" because aircraft would make armies obsolete, since they would be vulnerable to attack from the air.) Similarly, television was expected to improve education, reduce social isolation, and enhance democracy. Nuclear power was supposed to usher in an age of plenty where electricity would be "too cheap to meter." The optimistic claims now being made about the Internet are merely the most recent examples in a tradition of technological utopianism that goes back to the first transatlantic telegraph cables, 150 years ago.
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. The irony is that even though it failed to live up to the Utopian claims made about it, the telegraph really did transform the world. It also redefined forever our attitudes toward new technologies. In both respects, we are still living in the new world it inaugurated.
https://www2.southeastern.edu/Academics/Faculty/scraig/standage.html
