The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage
One of those books that reminds me that much of my informal intuition about history, and about the history of technology in particular, just happens to be wrong
(Review posted 29 Dec 1998 12:12:12)

(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)

"Wired Love", a novel by Ella Cheever Thayer, tells of a courtship conducted on-line. Well sure, you say, there must be a gazillion novels with that plot published since 1990. But Thayer's novel was published in 1879! The romance was mediated by the telegraph, not by SMTP.

Prior to the Crimean War, say 1854, there was no particular reason to keep military shipping secret: when a ship sailed, you could publish that fact in the newspaper, since there was no way the information could reach the ship's destination faster than the ship itself. Read that again: there was no way the information could reach the ship's destination faster than the ship itself. The notion is utterly absurd to us; of course information travels faster than anything else! But that only became true in the early 1800's, with the advent of the telegraph. It changed the world into what it is now, from the something rather else that it used to be.

In "The Victorian Internet", Tom Standage relays lots of these little mind-bending tidbits, and points out that a Victorian introduced to XXth century technology would most likely be only slightly impressed by the Internet (which is, after all, just a logical extension of the telegraph), but be amazed by the airplane (since heavier-than-air flying machines were widely regarded as impossible). Since we generally regard the Internet as new and shiny, and air travel as old and obvious, this is a bit of a twist! For me at least, this is one of those books that reminds me that much of my informal intuition about history, and about the history of technology in particular, just happens to be wrong.

There are lots of tidbits and obscure-but-important facts in this book. While the jacket and advertising material, and the book's own conclusion, emphasize the parallels with the modern Internet, I found much of the historical stuff just interesting in its own right. Before the electric telegraph, for instance, there were some extensive systems of mechanical telegraphs; in the 1830's, a system of nearly a thousand *mechanical* telegraph towers, where operators with telescopes watched moving arms on the next tower and set the arms on their own towers to pass the message along, criss-crossed Europe, carrying news and government business. As congestion grew on various electric telegraph lines decades later, extensive systems of pneumatic tubes were used to physically carry messages along the shorter and busier routes; a system with much greater bandwidth, but much narrower application.

This book tells a fascinating story in workmanlike prose; don't expect any profound insights or significant humor from the writer himself. But the facts and the history that he presents straightforwardly are important ones; the reader will be able to draw his own conclusions, and find his own bits of humor in the foibles and triumphs of the telegraphers. And after you read this book, I suggest you read, or re-read, Neal Stephenson's long amazing piece in the December 1996 Wired, which covers some of the same ground as The Victorian Internet, and then extends it to the present day, to the running of a fiber-optic cable system around the world.

%A Standage, Tom
%T The Victorian Internet
%I Walker and Company
%C New York
%D 1998
%G ISBN 0-8027-1342-4
%P 227 pp.
%O hardcover, US$22.00