In the nineteenth century there were no televisions, aeroplanes, computers, or spacecraft; neither were there antibiotics, credit cards, microwave ovens, compact discs, or mobile phones.
There was, however, an Internet.
During Queen Victoria’s reign, a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. A world-wide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionised business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates, and dismissed by the sceptics. Governments and regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes to everything from newsgathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile, out on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself.
Does all this sound familiar?
Today the Internet is often described as an information superhighway; its nineteenth-century precursor, the electric telegraph, was dubbed the “highway of thought.” Modern computers exchange bits and bytes along network cables; telegraph messages were spelled out in the dots and dashes of Morse code and sent along wires by human operators. The equipment may have been different, but the telegraph’s impact on the lives of its users was strikingly similar.
The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the printing press. Modern Internet users are in many ways the heirs of the telegraphic tradition, which means that today we are in a unique position to understand the telegraph — and the telegraph, in turn, can give us a fascinating perspective on the challenges, opportunities and pitfalls of the Internet.
The rise and fall of the telegraph is a tale of scientific discovery, technological cunning, personal rivalry, and cut-throat competition. It is also a parable about how we react to new technologies: for some people, they tap a deep vein of optimism, while others find in them new ways to commit crime, initiate romance or make a fast buck — age-old human tendencies that are all too often blamed on the technologies themselves.
This is the story of the oddballs, eccentrics and visionaries who were the earliest pioneers of the on-line frontier, and the global network they constructed — a network that was, in effect, the Victorian Internet.
