Book review/ The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

Through decades of trial and error, a series of inventors, doctors and investors struggled with the amounting difficulties of telegraph. With one mans passion for the telegraph, eventually failed and passed on to the next, the telegraph actually started to hold some weight.  By 1844, a set of wires had carried news of the birth of Victoria’s second son from Windsor to London. Another set had carried the words “What hath God wrought” from Washington to Baltimore. In the decade that followed, wires snaked across Europe and America, and an undersea cable joined continents. Then, as now, culture sprang up around the Net, complete with its own language and etiquette. What then happened was not that the telegraph became the nervous system of the revolutionary underground, but that business men directed their field agents to better opportunities without informing their rivals, and cut their communication costs by sending only key words which stood for agreed sentence.  Claude Chappe, an eighteenth-century Frenchman, devised the electric telegraph’s optical precursor, a series of towers topped with wooden machines bearing huge, movable wooden arms that could be used like semaphore. Alas, Chappe succumbed to depression and paranoia, then killed himself by jumping into a well outside the Paris Telegraph Administration..” Chappe’s competition in America, the hapless portrait painter and amateur inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, held the American patents for the electric telegraph but saw only a small fraction of the royalties due him. His British counterparts, William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, spent decades battling over the rights of the invention. Although Cooke and Wheatstone’s telegraph used a clever arrangement of magnetized needles to spell out messages by pointing to letters, Morse’s system of dots and dashes proved more efficient and reliable.In a chapter titled “Information Overload,” Standage looks at an issue that is still of concern. The radical effects of speedier communication were felt first in business. “Any business that wanted to stay competitive had no choice but to embrace the new technology. The result was an irreversible acceleration in the pace of business life, which has continued to this day.” This pace accelerated further with the invention of the stock ticker, of which it was written, “The letters and figures used in the language of the tape are very few, but they spell ruin in ninety-nine million ways.”The genius of Thomas Edison, the quintessential American inventor, was in a way a by-product of the telegraph system. Edison earned early fame as a star Morse-code reader (which may have been because his partial deafness made it easy for him to ignore other auditory distractions), and fed his ingenious mind with experimentation in various telegraph offices. At 21, he went to New York and, unable to afford a hotel, slept on the floor of the Laws Gold Indicator Company. Edison soon figured out how the Indicator, an early stock-ticker, worked. He invented a better version, sold it to the company, and was hired as an “in-house R&D” department. But, ironically, it was the improvements [Edison] and other inventors devised that would eventually lead to the demise of the telegraph and the community that had grown up around it; for any industry founded on a particular technology faces the danger that a new invention will render it obsolete. Standage declines to speculate what invention might render the Internet obsolete. But he does conclude, with the wisdom of hindsight, that our own awe at the far-reaching changes the Web has made in our society is provincial and nearsighted. “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.”