On-line wedding are old news. They were first done via electrical telegraph. This is one of the many parallel between the internet and one of the oldest telecommunications technologies. The changes wrought by the electrical telegraph were greater than those brought about by the internet, because the telegraph was developed in societies that lacked an already existing, near-instantaneous means of communications. In the decades prior to the electrical telegraph, a number of European countries had developed optical telegraphs, basically a network of semaphore stations. France was the first to develop a system in the 1790s and other countries copied the idea if not the exact set up. Optical telegraphs required a large amount of labor to staff semaphore sites, and nobody figured out a satisfactory way of using them at night.Besides discussing Samuel Morse’s work in the 1830s and 1840s to develop an electrical telegraph, Standage also describes the near simultaneous development of an electrical telegraph in Great Britain. William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone developed a telegraph that indicated letters by means of rotating needles. The Morse system won out, because it required only one wire. Morse, Cooke, and Wheatstone were not the first people to think of an electrical telegraph, but they were the first to get systems into common use.After a brief period in which business was slack, owing to the public's lack of imagination about the possible uses of the telegraph, business took off and insufficient capacity became a problem. In general telegraph systems were arranged in a hub and spoke system, like many airlines, with local offices feeding messages into a central office which would transmit messages to distant locations. Only messsages along between two stations on the same wire would be transmitted directly. Messages were written down before transmission; after transmission the message was written down again, and the written message delivered to the recipient. Adding more operators was not an efficient solution, as for most local stations periods of high activity were fitfull. It took several decades for useful technologies for increasing the capacity of the telegraph system itself to be implemented.One work-around to effectively increase capacity was effectively was the use of pneumatic tubes, which sound like they resembled the apparatus used in drive-through bank to transmit your checks to the teller, to connect nearby small telegraph offices to a larger, central office. Several written messages could be sent to the central office at once this way. Pneumatic tubes were especially useful in connecting high traffic sources, such as stock markets, to a central telegraph office.The telegraph had numerous effects on society. News could be delivered long distances quickly, rather than arriving days to months after the event had occurred. This particular development had two important consequences. One consequence was that it was worthwhile for newspapers to have foreign correspondents; previously most newspapers had mostly covered local developments. The wire services developed as a way for newspapers to share the expense of these correspondents. Second, for the first time it became more important to not publicize such military developments as troop movements, because now this interesting information could reach the enemy well before the troops did. The Crimean War, the first major war in which the telegraph was readily available, saw governments struggle with how to deal with the implications of the new technology.The telegraph changed commerce, by making possible transactions that were previously impossible. It also increased the pace of business, from the slow pace that had prevailed when news as well as goods arrived only as fast as a sailing ship. Specialized forms of telegraphic communication, such as the stock ticker, were developed for business needs.Issues of privacy arose, just as with the internet. The solution was the same for both technologies; codes. As with the internet, most governments resisted the use of codes by private individuals (codes for governments were of course quite all right). Codes were also used to compress messages and thus save on communication costs. It took some decades for European governments to concede that private individuals could legally use codes. Western Union, a firm which acquired a near-monopoly on telegraph service in the United States, devised an effective code for money transfers.Also like the internet, the telegraph made possible new forms of crime, generally based on an information asymmetry - information that was known in one place but not another. For example, with some connivance it might be possible to place a bet on a horse race, whose outcome you knew, in a place where the outcome was not yet generally known.The telegraph may also have affected women's job opportunities. Apparently about a third of the telegraph operators in the New York office of Western Union were women. Female telegraphers were also common in Britain. Many of the utopian ideas expressed about newer technologies were first expressed in relation to the telegraph. Like the internet, the telegraph was predicted to bring world peace and understanding among different cultures (the author notes the ironic example of a British telegrapher in Persia who found the telegraph an excellent way to avoid interacting with the locals).De-skilling in the telegraph industry got serious in the 1880s, when ways to automate the process and deliver more than one message at a time along a line became commonly used. Charles Wheatstone (that man again!) developed an automatic sender in 1858 that could send messages in Morse code, messages that had first been punched onto a tape, at the rate of 400 words per minute. As the equipment was compatible with standard Morse telegraph equipment, and as inexpensive workers punching tape could replace expensive skilled telegraph operators, and as means of printing Morse code already existed, these machines were widely used, especially for newspapers. I wish the author had explained how the duplex and multiplex (systems that could send two or multiple messages down a single wire) telegraphs worked. The book was interesting on the social history of the telegraph, but I would have liked to learned a bit more about the technology.
The end date being only two days after the start date is indicative of something. This book is a light read, not terribly long and very engaging. Once started, I had a difficult time putting it down.The book is ostensibly, about the telegraph, a technology of a bygone age. Is it fair to call it an "internet" of a previous era?Yes. It is.The Internet has spawned a large variety of spinoff technologies. As did the telegraph. For example, when the London Stock Exchange had a difficult time getting messages from the exchange to other points nearby, someone else invented the pneumatic tube system. And cities like Paris used that system to get messages across the city at high speed. Think of the tubes as your LAN and the telegraph as your WAN. And the telegraph offices, with their people sorting messages according to how local they were, shipping messages out through different means, as routers. From the description in the book, it is quite easy to spot the similarities.When you consider that it went from taking 10 months to get a message from London to India, via ship, and telegraphs could get a message there, and get a response back, in about 4 minutes, yeah, that's an earth-shattering change.Yes, the telephone has overshadowed the telegraph. But the story of the telegraph and its kin provides an interesting set of precedents for much of what we see with the modern internet. People were slow to trust the new technology. Businesses, in particular, were slow to embrace it. And yet, the telegraph companies were the "tech sector" of the day, complete with patent wars, monopolies, anti-competitive behavior and risky investments that, sometimes, paid off big. And, apparently, the one constant in humanity is technological cluelessness. Like the person wanting to know why she couldn't telegraph a bowl of sauerkraut to her son, in the Army, on the front after hearing that the army had been dispatched to the front by telegraph. If the telegraph could send the soldiers there, why couldn't it send food, too?Did I mention that the book is "engaging?"Early telegraph offices were meritocracies. They needed skilled operators, regardless of race, gender, age or appearance. Indeed, Thomas Edison, hard of hearing and frequently dressed like a "country bumpkin," was a top notch operator. He even proposed to his second wife via Morse code. And she accepted, also in Morse code. As such, there were quite a few female operators. And quite few online romances, and marriages, long before Alexander Graham Bell got around to, initially, trying to squeeze more telegraph signals onto a telegraph wire and discovering that the wire could carry more complex sounds, resulting his well-known invention.The telegraph was all about sending text to a remote location. Encryption, authentication, compression, all of these technologies were invented, in some fashion, long before Bell. And the telegraph, bringing in news from around the globe, was killing traditional newspapers, with their local focus and weeks-old news, long before the advent of Craigslist.At the dawn of my career, an office in which I was working had a Telex machine. It was the modern evolution of the old telegraph, a mechanism for sending text to a distant location. It didn't have a modem. It used a special, wired connection, multiple wires, using a modern variation on Baudot code, to carry the text. That tech didn't finally disappear until the 1990s. In the 1970s, that was THE way for a business to communicate with an overseas location. Email, as we know it today, didn't exist. Here I sit, keying text into a device. Text that will be read by people, potentially, all over the world. Is it appropriate to call the device used for this a "phone?" The ones and zeros it will send bear a closer resemblance to Morse code than to speech.Interesting that, while the phone has largely supplanted the telegraph, in this age, far more of us would rather "text" or email someone than talk. Which tech is getting the last laugh?
What do You think about The Victorian Internet (1999)?
I'm not the type of person that is drawn to treatises on machines, but when I came across this book, my curiosity won out and I was shocked to find I couldn't put it down. Rather than focusing on the mechanics of the telegraph too strongly, Tom Standage instead focuses on the people that created the telegraph and its effects on society. For instance, he notes that prior to the telegraph, news took 10 weeks to get from Britain to certain outposts in India, but once the telegraph was installed there, it took just 4 minutes! Merchants were also affected because deals with suppliers across the states in the U.S. used to involve weeks of letters and negotiations back and forth. However, with the telegraph, negotiations could be done in one day causing everything to speed up and, Standage argues, resulting in the more fast paced business that we are so familiar with today. Standage also points out that operators of the telegraph could communicate much like in internet chat rooms today, so the internet today, while an advance, was not the huge life shattering change that the telegraph was. From describing the various scientists and laymen responsible for the telegraph, including the original optical telegraph used in France before electricity was harnessed for it, Standage traces the gradual evolution of the telegraph which then finally led into the telephone that destroyed the telegraph business. Though it may sound naive to some, I had no idea that they actually laid out over 2000 miles of telegraph cable at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean (some 2 miles deep) in order to connect Europe to Newfoundland and Newfoundland then to the U.S. I didn't know such things could be done - especially in the 1860's! Tom Standage writes a riveting account of a forgotten time and the legacy of the telegraph which can still be in seen in the internet and phones today.
—Stacy
"In 1844...sending a message from London to Bombay and back took ten weeks. Within 30 years...messages could be telegraphed from London to Bombay and back in as little as four minutes. 'Time itself is telegraphed out of existence,' declared the Daily Telegraph of London. The world had shrunk further and faster than it ever had before.”Each subsequent iteration of remote transpersonal networking creates a feeling, at least in me, that the world has yet again shifted on its axis: telephones to cell phones; AOL instant messaging to Twitter; emails to SMS. I never have to worry about losing someone in a crowd, because I can always text or call them. Ditto for meeting for lunch, running late for a movie, soliciting an opinion on a purchase, or general, pointless chitchat. Time and distance are completely irrelevant for most social interactions. Distance is dead, in an unprecedented manner, but it had been dying slowly over the last century and a half.To jump from The Pony Express to the telegraph? I can only imagine that it would be the current equivalent of someone commercially releasing teleportation: an absolute sea change in the field of communication. Condensing months into minutes to engage someone at nearly any geographical location on the planet highlights the piddling distinction, in technological zeitgeist, of moving from landlines to cell towers. Phonecalls are phonecalls; instant communication in the 19th century was, well, magic. “....[R]eligious leaders in Baltimore expressed their doubts about the new technology, which was too much like black magic for their liking...”Unlike magic, which isn't real, the telegraph absolutely worked. It exploded in popularity and grew exponentially, a study in market penetration of which modern day broadband carriers likely still envy. “[In] the United States...the only working line at the beginning of 1846 was Morse’s experimental line, which ran 40 miles between Washington and Baltimore. Two years later there were approximately 2,000 miles of wire, and by 1850 there were over 12,000 miles...”The telegraph carried with it the same sense of wonder and optimism that has clung to Twitter in recent years:"In 1858, Edward Thornton, the British Ambassador [to the U.S.] proposed a toast, 'What can be more likely to effect [peace] than a constant and complete intercourse between all nations and individuals in the world?'"“The rapid distribution of news was thought to promote universal peace, truthfulness, and mutual understanding.”History seems to show that that is not exactly the case. Those leaning on Twitter and hoping for rapid communication platforms to be the universal foundation and the best hope of international peace might be surprised to hear they are not the first generation to think along those lines. Whether near-instantaneous communications' current ubiquitous pervasiveness positively impacts the "technology-as-panacea" mindshare has yet to be seen.Doomsayers often flourish during the proliferation and social acclimation to unbelievable changes in technology and advances in science. The vagaries of time and translation have often created space in which to attribute prophetic undertones to poetic non-specifics, and the telegraph was never spared that cultural rite of passage: “Suitably telegraphic biblical references were unearthed by preachers, notably 'Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world'(Psalms 19) and 'Canst thou send lightnings that they may go, and say unto Thee, here we are?' (Job 38)"The Victorian Internet was a smooth, quick read that really pushes a contemporary person to acknowledge that there have been times when the world changed more completely, and more quickly, than it does now. It has a breeziness cribbed from a casual lecture bolstered by an easy style and plethora of specific, charming details. Anyone interested in the underpinnings of telecommunications, the 19th century, or technology in flux would be remiss not to pick it up. Modern society--modern communications-- still owe their foundation to the Victorian internet, a wholly unprecedented creation; that fact is surprisingly underrepresented in modern conversations. It was and remains a technological achievement that impacts nearly the entire global community to this day.“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.”
—David Dinaburg
The Victorian Age had its own Internet, with packet switching, domain names, encryption for secure communication, payload compression and error correction. It was called the electrical telegraph. It was invented in the 1830s by several inventors in Europe and the United States, the most important of whom was Samuel F. Morse. Telegraph lines made a world-wide web; laying the lines made a company making insulated cables from copper and gutta-percha, the resin of a tree from the Malay Peninsula, very rich. The skilled telegraph operators had a distinctive subculture with a slang; when the traffic volume was low, they chatted and played chess with each other over the wires. People were married over the telegraph; they committed fraud over the wire; visionaries thought that the new technology would bring world peace. When Alfred Dreyfus was arrested for treason, the Italian military attaché in Paris sent an encrypted telegram to his superiors saying that he was not aware of Dreyfus spying for anybody; the telegram was intercepted and decrypted using a codebook filched from the hotel room of the lover of an Italian count; French cryptanalysts broke the code aided by the fact that the plaintext must contain the word "DREYFUS"; yet the text of the telegram was withheld from the trial. The invention and perfection of the automatic telegraph, which allowed amateurs to punch messages into a paper tape before the transmission, and print them out at the other end, as well as the invention of the telephone by Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, spelled the end of the telegraph operator's profession, though the technology survived well into the 20th century; its story was largely repeated by the Internet a century later.
—Ilya
