The Victorian Internet (17 page)

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.

EPILOGUE

T
HE HYPC SKEPTICISM, and bewilderment associated with the Internet—concerns about new forms of crime, adjustments in social
mores, and redefinition of business practices—mirror the hopes, fears, and misunderstandings inspired by the telegraph. Indeed,
they are only to be expected. They are the direct consequences of human nature, rather than technology.

Given a new invention, there will always be some people who see only its potential to do good, while others see new opportunities
to commit crime or make money. We can expect exactly the same reactions to whatever new inventions appear in the twenty-first
century.

Such reactions are amplified by what might be termed chronocentricity—the egotism that one's own generation is poised on the
very cusp of history. Today, we are repeatedly told that we are in the midst of a communications revolution. But the electric
telegraph was, in many ways, far more disconcerting for the inhabitants of the time than today's advances are for us. If any
generation has the right to claim that it bore the full bewildering, world-shrinking brunt of such a revolution, it is not
us—it is our nineteenth-century forebears.

Time-traveling Victorians arriving in the late twentieth century would, no doubt, be unimpressed by the Internet. They would
surely find space flight and routine intercontinental air travel far more impressive technological achievements than our much-trumpeted
global communications network. Heavier-than-air flying machines were, after all, thought by the Victorians to be totally impossible.
But as for the Internet—well, they had one of their own.

AFTERWORD

O
ne OF THE AOVANRAGES of writing an Internet book in which everything is already 150 years out of date is that the story is
in less danger of being overtaken, or rendered irrelevant, by subsequent developments.
The Victorian Internet
was mostly written in 1997, and is published here in its original form. Much has changed on the Internet since then, of course;
the utopianism of the late 1990s evaporated in the dot­com crash of 2000, though the spread of broadband connections and the
growth of new Internet business models built around online commerce and advertising have since helped many firms to bounce
back. And despite everything that has happened in the past ten years, the analogy between the Internet and the telegraph still
holds.

That the Internet has continued to evolve is not surprising. But oddly enough the telegraph has been in the news, too. Having
been inaugurated with Samuel Morse's first official telegram, "What hath God wrought!" in 1844, telegraph service in the United
States was discontinued in 2006 with a rather more prosaic message: "Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue
all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your
loyal patronage." Like many people I was saddened to hear of its demise—yet I was also surprised to learn that the telegram
had survived as long as it had, given the availability of so many faster, cheaper, and more convenient forms of electronic
messaging.

Ten years ago electronic messaging would have meant e-mail in particular, but another striking development of the past decade
has been the curious rebirth of the telegram in the form of text messages sent between mobile phones. Initially adopted by
European teenagers as a cheap alternative to expensive mobile-phone calls, text messages have become a new communications
medium in their own right, all over the world. Around i.3 trillion text messages were sent during 2006; Americans, who were
relatively late adopters of the technology, sent 158 billion text messages that year. (The volume of e-mails is still higher,
however; around 9 trillion non-"spam" e-mails were sent in 2006.)

Like telegrams before them, text messages force people to be brief and to the point, and they have spawned their own vocabulary
of space-saving abbreviations, such as "c u 18r." This is not the only echo from the age of the telegram. A Nokia handset
can be programmed to announce incoming text messages with three short beeps, two long ones, and three short ones—Morse code
for "SMS" or "short message service," the technical term for text messaging. Samuel Morse would be proud. A defunct nineteenth-century
technology has, in effect, been reincarnated in the twenty-first century. The telegram is dead; long live the telegram.

Yet the mobile phone is not just the heir to the telegraph's tradition. It could also prove to be the most important heir
to the personal computer, as Internet-enabled mobile devices proliferate. Indeed, mobile phones could do for the Internet
what the telephone did for the tele­graph: make it easier to use and far more widely available.

It was the telegraph's fate to be overshadowed by several of its offspring, by the telephone in particular, which was first
regarded as a minor variation of the technology (a "speaking telegraph") but ended up being far more popular. The telegraph
also spawned the stock ticker, teletype machines, and early forms of a fax machine capable of sending pictures by telegraph.
All of these dedicated devices used variations of the original telegraph technology for particular purposes. The same thing
is now happening to the Internet, as it becomes embedded into other devices, rather than being something accessed only through
a personal computer. Task-specific devices such as Internet-capable music players, games consoles, television set-top boxes,
and hi-fis are now available.

But access to the Internet through mobile devices, such as phones and BlackBerry handhelds, is the biggest growth area. In
rich countries, personal computers were widespread before mobile phones. In poor countries mobile phones are widespread than
personal computers. As C. K. Prahalad, an Indian management guru, puts it: "Emerging markets will be wireless-centric, not
PC-cen­tric." The number of mobile phones in use is over 2-5 billion and growing fast, even in the poorest parts of the world.
Mobile phones will complete the democratization of telecommunications started by the telegraph.

Tom Standage

April 2007

SOURCES

In addition to the specific books and journals listed below, I found information on the subject in the following publi­cations:
Electrical World
(New York),
Journal of Commerce
(New York),
Journal of the Telegraph
(New York),
Scientific
American
(New York), and
The Times
(London).

Anecdotes of the Telegraph.
London: David Bogue, 1849.

Babbage, Charles.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.
London: Longman & Co., 1864.

Blondheim, Menahem.
News over the Wires: The Telegraph
and The Flow of Public Information in America, 1844—
1897.
Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Bowers, Brian.
Sir Charles Wheatstone.
London: HMSO, *975

Briggs, Charles, and Augustus Maverick.
The Story of the
Telegraph.
New York, 1858.

Clarke, Arthur C.
How the World Was One.
London: Victor Gollancz, 1992

Clow, D. G. "Pneumatic Tube Communication Systems in London," Newcomen Transactions, pp. 97—115, 1994-95.

Coe, Lewis.
The Telegraph, a History of Morse's Invention and
Its Predecessors in the United States.
London: McFar-land, 1993.

Congdon, Charles.
Reminiscences of a Journalist.
Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1880.

Cooke, Sir William Fothergill.
The Electric Telegraph: Was
It Invented by Professor Wheatstone?
(Mr. Cooke's First Pamphlet; Mr. Wheatstone's Answer; Mr. Cooke's Reply; Arbitration Papers and Drawings.) London: W. H. Smith
& Son, 1857.

Corn, Joseph J., ed.
Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology,
and the American Future.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986.

Dertouzos, Michael.
What Will Be. How the New World of
Information Will Change Our Lives.
London: Piatkus, 1997.

Du Boff, Richard R. "Rusiness Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844—i860,"
Business History Review
vol. 54, pp. 459—79, 1980.

Dyer, Frank Lewis, and Thomas Commerford Martin.
Edi­son:
His Life and Inventions.
New York: Harper and Rrothers, 1910.

Gabler, Edwin.
The American Telegrapher—A Social History.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Headrick, Daniel R.
The Invisible Weapon.
London: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Holzmann, Gerard, and Rjorn Pehrson.
Early History of
Data Networks.
Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995.

Hubbard, G.
Cooke and Wheatstone and the Invention of the
Electric Telegraph.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.

Kahn, David.
The Codebreakers.
New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Kieve, Jeffrey.
The Electric Telegraph: A Social and Economic
History.
Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973.

Lebow, Irwin.
Information Highways and Byways: From the
Telegraph to the vst Century.
New York: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995.

Marland, Edward Allen.
Early Electrical Communication.
London: Abelard-Schumann, 1964.

Marvin, Carolyn.
When Old Technologies Were New-. Thinking
About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth
Century.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Morse, Samuel F. B., and Edward Lind Morse. Samuel
F. B.
Morse: His Letters and Journals, Edited and Supplemented
by His Son Edward Lind Morse.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914.

Prescott, George B.
Electricity and the Electric Telegraph.
London: Spon,1878.

Prescott, George B.
History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric
Telegraph.
Boston, i860.

Prime, Samuel Irenaeus.
The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse.
New York: Appleton, 1875.

Reid, James D.
The Telegraph in America and Morse Memorial.
New York: Derby Rrothers, 1879.

Shaffner, Tal.
The Telegraph Manual.
New York: Pudney and Russell, 1859.

Shiers, George, ed.
The Electric Telegraph—An Historical Anthology.
New York: Arno Press, 1977

Spufford, Francis, and Jenny Uglow, eds.
Cultural Babbage.
London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Thompson, Robert L.
Wiring a Continent. The History of the
Telegraph Industry in the United States, 183?—1866.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

Turnbull, Laurence.
The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph.
Phila­delphia: A. Hart, 1852.

F. H. Webb, ed.
Cooke, Sir William Fothergill: Extracts from
the Private Letters of the Late Sir William Fothergill Cooke,
i836-3g, Relating to the Invention and Development of the
Electric Telegraph.
London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1895.

Wilson, Geoffrey.
The Old Telegraphs.
London: Chichester Phillimore, 1976.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
AM GRATEFUL to many people for helping to make this book possible, including the following (in order of appearance): my
wife, Kirstin, Chester, Azeem Azhar, Ben Rooney and Roger Highfield at the
Daily Telegraph,
Oliver Morton, Virginia Benz and Joe An-derer, Katinka Matson and John Brockman, George Gibson, Jackie Johnson, Mary Godwin
at the Cable & Wireless Archive, Ravi Mirchandani, and Georgia Cameron-Clarke.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

T
om STANDAGE IS BUSINESS EDITOR at the
Economist
and the author of
A History of
the World in 6 Glasses, The Victorian Internet, The Turk,
and
The Neptune File. The Victorian Internet
was made into a documentary, "How the Victorians Wired the World." He has written about science and technology for numerous
magazines and newspapers, including
Wired,
the
Guardian,
the
Daily Telegraph,
and the
New York Times.
He lives in Greenwich, England, with his wife, daughter, and son.