Nate Hull’s Weblog

In his epilogue to The Victorian Internet, author Tom Standage offers a different perspective on our current love affair with the Internet and the World Wide Web:

Today, we are repeatedly told that we are in the midst of a communications revolution. But … 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. (p. 213)

Standage argues that the telegraph, more than any technology in the 20th century, helped rocket society into this new “information age.” For many readers this may seem surprising, as the common portrayal of the telegraph is one of a primitive precursor to the telephone. And as Standage explains, the telephone’s emergence did indeed bring about a decline in the telegraph that was nearly as swift as its rise. But The Victorian Internet also successfully details many profound “firsts” that came from the electric telegraph, and many of these “firsts” have been falsely attributed to the Internet of today.

Throughout each chapter covering the early days of the telegraph, Standage captures the excitement, frustrations, and ambition of its inventors. In fact, much of the first half of the book follows the trials of the electric telegraph’s key inventors: Samuel Morse in America, and William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain. While Standage spends little time detailing the inner workings of the telegraph, he does paint a colorful portrait of these key players, their relationships, and their struggles to move the telegraph into the public eye.

While both Morse and Cooke lacked a scientific background, they both recognized the benefits that the telegraph could bring. Morse, in particular, had an ambitious (and prophetic) vision for his invention, as he believed “it would ultimately become a daily instrumentality in domestic as well as public life” (p. 39-40). Standage adds that “He had visions of a wired world, with countries bound together by a global network …”

This vision of a “global network” sounds uncannily familiar to the buzz we hear from business leaders, marketers, and the press. And yet the same language was entering into conversations more than 100 years earlier. As Standage elaborates on the impact of the telegraph during its heyday, he uncovers many parallels to the adoption of the Internet. Standage does not make these links for us (other than some brief observations near the end of the book), but it is not hard to see the similarities.

For example, just as e-commerce helped drive the rise of the World Wide Web, commerce and the telegraph had a similar interdependence. Standage explains: “the price of goods and the speed with which they could be delivered became more important than their geographic location” (p. 166). Businesses suddenly became more efficient and could communicate faster to a larger market. Standage also relates stories of romances found over telegraph. These romances are little different than the popular news stories in the 1990s treating online marriages created through Internet chat rooms as a strange new novelty.

In addition, the hyperbole that surrounds our increasingly “flat” world in which the Internet has eliminated time zones and geographic barriers is really nothing new, as we learn the same hype surrounded the age of the telegraph. Standage refers to one writer who in 1878 declared that the telegraph “gave races of men in various far-separated climes a sense of unity … and elevated the conception of human brotherhood” (p. 163).

Ultimately, these anecdotes make up the bulk of the book. While The Victorian Internet is a quick and entertaining read, it is not the place for a comprehensive history of the telegraph. Standage only glosses over the decline of the Internet in one short chapter, and there is no mention of its place after the early 20th century. He does, however, provide enough background and history to show the profound role that the telegraph played in creating a communication network that was truly revolutionary. The Victorian Internet successfully shows how the electric telegraph provided a much greater jolt to society and the way operated than the rise of the World Wide Web has today. Will the early iterations of the Web evolve into a jolt as shocking as Morse’s telegraph? Only time will tell.