Popular Science Review - The Victorian Internet

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Review - The Victorian Internet - Tom Standage

It's very tempting to compare past technological breakthroughs with the Internet. In reality, the telegraph network would be more properly called the Victorian ARPANet, after the Internet's predecessor as that too was much more limited and not available directly to the general public - but that would be nit-picking, as there is no doubt that the telegraph transformed world communications in the same way as the telephone and then the Internet would.

Imagine a world where news from a foreign country could take weeks to get through, suddenly transformed to one where news could cross continents in minutes. Standage opens up the fascinating consequences. Old-fashioned bookmakers who assumed the outcome of a race would take at least a day to get from one end of England to the other, caught out by smart punters who got the information on the minute via the telegraph network. We hear of the nightmare attempts to get a cable across the Atlantic and the way that the need to protect the cable transformed the niche Gutta Percha Company, making a strange artificial insulating substance, into the mighty Cable and Wireless.

That last word of the previous paragraph is the only slight oddity - the book sees the telephone as the telegraph's technological heir, where it would seem much more logical for wireless telegraphy (radio) to occupy this position, not only in its initial use of Morse code (still used by many wireless amateurs), but also in a similar technological elitism, where the telephone very quickly became the instrument of the people.

We also learn the story of the development of Morse code and its eventual triumph of the alternative systems and much more. There's plenty here to enjoy, as telegraph fever takes over the land.

Also in hardback:

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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