Well Worth My Time and Money
The book discusses the history of the telegraph. The book explains the technologies preceding the telegraph, the battles between the inventors of the telegraph, the telegraph's role in spawning new technological innovations (and creating enormous wealth for some of those folks) and the ways that the telegraph did--and did not--change society.
Its thesis is that many phenomena we associate with a global electronic network first occurred in the 19th century, not the 20th, which has made our celebration of the Internet's novelty (a topic at its zenith in 1998 when the book was published) ahistorical. The book thoroughly delivers on this thesis. One particular anecdote really hammered this point home. The book talks about a telegraph-mediated "online wedding" that first occurred...before 1848. (Indeed, the book "Wired Love" was published in 1879 and an article "The Dangers of Wired Love" ran in 1886). Yet, numerous newspaper articles from the mid-1990s marveled at Internet-mediated weddings as if they were completely unprecedented.
More generally, the book broadly makes the case that some things never change. For example, the book describes the arms race between telegraph companies establishing pricing schemes to curb attempts to send more information at a lower cost, just to have telegraph senders coming up with new gaming strategies. The book discussed the paranoia of major institutions in response to telegraphy, including governments that sought to control the use of cryptography in telegraphy and newspapers that assumed that the telegraph would destroy their business. (In the latter case, the newspapers adapted and thrived in response to telegraphy). The book also described how the telegraph contributed to feelings of information overload.
The book ends on a bittersweet note. It observes that people thought that the borderless telegraph communication network would contribute to world peace by breaking down barriers to communication. It didn't. If anything, the telegraph played an important role in 19th century imperialism and contributed to some of the bloodiest wars in history. Similarly, 150 years later, many romanticize how the Internet can make the world a better place. Perhaps the Internet is truly different from the telegraph in this respect, or perhaps, we are just ahistorically proclaiming the latest technology innovation as our savior. As the book says, "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."
From my perspective, the only thing "missing" from this pithy and efficient book was a more thorough discussion of how lawmakers reacted to the rise of the telegraph. I would like to know more about how 19th century regulators coped with--or, more likely, freaked out about--the technological assumptions changed by the telegraph.
It seems safe to assume that some legislators misunderstood the technological underpinnings of telegraphy. The book gives numerous examples of how people didn't understand that the telegraph sent only electronic signals and wasn't a teleportation technology, such as the story of a woman in 1870 who sought to "telegraph" sauerkraut to her son. Again, some things never change; in 2003, a member of the House of Lords had a similar misunderstanding about spam. [the exact quote: "Will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food can become an unsolicited email, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an email?"]
In this vein, the book offered one possible explanation for Sen. Stevens' explanation that the Internet is a "series of tubes." [the exact quote from Wired: "the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."] Many telegraph operators built out a network of pneumatic tubes to move messages over short distances because this was quicker and more accurate for those messages. So perhaps Sen. Stevens was thinking of the telegraph when he referred to the "series of tubes."
The book was published before Western Union sent its last telegram. At the time I knew this represented the end of an important era, but after reading this book I better understand the significance of that event. Some day, someone will send the very last TCP/IP enabled http message...an event that will also probably pass with a whimper, not a bang.
An excellent book!
The invention of the telegraph, its development and its use in the 19th century as a communication device is discussed in this excellent volume. Real stories of telegraphy, some of them quite surprising, provide background to the story of this technology, a real leap forward in its time. Well organized with good writing this is an excellent book. Whether you are fascinated by telegraphy or have never really thought about it before, this book will keep you entertained.
The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see...
Winston Churchill said, "The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see." It is, perhaps, surprising to learn that much of what has taken place with the Internet could have been predicted by studying events in the past 150 years. The invention, deployment and integration of the telegraph into society and business practices mirror the Internet in a great many ways.
The Internet has shrunk the world (like never before?), enabled business to take place at the speed of light (like never before?), caused information overload (ditto), and even enabled new mechanisms of dating and marriage to take place (again ditto). One wonders if by studying the rise (and fall) of the telegraph and related technologies we can predict the next "big things" and opportunities in this age of the internet?
This is a terrific "gee-whiz" book, an easy read on an airplane. It will likely amuse you; it may evoke an epiphany or two; it may even spark the idea for a new product or business!
The Victorian Internet - a worthy reprise
The title provides us with an anachronistic context to consider the book and The Victorian Internet weaves an engaging tale of the conception, birth, growth, and decline of the telegraph. The book tells a story that is intriguing, entertaining, and compelling. It presents facts and characters that would fail in fiction because they would stretch credibility beyond the breaking point. In other words, you just can't make this stuff up. This book provides a full gallery of oddballs, heroes, villains, victims, and criminals that would make any Victorian wax museum a prime attraction. The author, Tom Standage, artfully stages this cast of characters in the fog of technical discovery. We do not see these characters as people of vision and will who triumph as the best and brightest of their time, although many of them certainly were just that, but rather as authentic people who bring to the story their strengths, weaknesses, and foibles. To that add the fact that people do not know the future. We, as the reader, have the advantage of knowing how the story unfolds but Standage helps us to stand in their shoes, uncertain of what the future might hold. And so it is in our own day with our own cast of characters and set of fantastic facts. Who knows how it will develop? Standage helps us to understand, our experience with the internet of the new millennium is really nothing new.
Standage supports his assertion that our current experiences with the internet are not new to humankind. He does not bludgeon the reader with the analogy between the telegraph and the internet. It is difficult, however, to ignore the many parallels between this 150 year old technology and our current times. We are shown competing inventors, Morse and Cooke, with different approaches to the same problem and this could easily be compared to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in our own day. In the Victorian setting we see skeptical governments, wrongheaded entrepreneurs, visionary investors, explosive growth, boom and bust cycles, demand that exceeds the ability to deliver, criminal opportunism, attempts at security, and disruptive technology. All of these are recognizable in our own day. A couple of developments that I found interesting were the rise of messenger boys and the implementation of pneumatic tubes. We still see these same phenomena in our own day. In a time when it is easier for me to send an instant message to a co-worker who is within range of my voice rather than speak directly to her, we still have our own messenger boys and pneumatic tubes. There are technologies that continue to serve the non-consumers and undershot consumers of the internet. We have bicycle messengers, summons servers, and UPS. When a physical item needs to be delivered or when delivery must be assured, nothing beats hand delivery, even today.
The current edition of The Victorian Internet is a reprise.It was first published in 1997. I think it is with good reason that the book was published again. In his afterword, Standage says the following:
...the utopianism of the late 1990s evaporated in the dot-com 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.
The Internet is now extending it's reach to the mobile user. Like the telegram in the days of the telegraph, the need for short, clipped and economic language has come into play. Phrases like "c u l8r", "lol", or "ttfn" have become common parlance in text messaging. Like the days of telegraph when telegraph operators would signal that they were ready to send they would send three "1s", today Nokia phones can be set to announce an incoming text message with three short beeps, two long ones, and three short ones - Morse code for "short message service". We witness a 19th century technology reincarnated in the 21st. People continue to use seemingly new technologies in old and familiar ways.
According to his personal Web site, http://tomstadage.com, he began his career as a science and technology writer at The Guardian in 1995 and he is currently business editor at The Economist. He is also the author of "A History of the World in Six Glasses", "The Turk", and "The Neptune File". He comes to The Victorian Internet with a decade of impressive experience as a writer, editor, and author and it shows. Not only is he a skilled wordsmith but his love of historical works dealing with the development of technology shines through one more time. I suspect we will see a few more entertaining works from Mr. Standage before his career is through but be sure not to miss this one.
An important book and a fun book
I have written three books on Wireless networking and am about to start writing a fourth. Coming from this perspective, The Victorian Internet was both an excellent read and an enlightening one. It is true that we can get caught up in any new thing and think that it is going to drastically alter the world. Of course, those of use directly implementing the new thing always think it will alter teh world for the better. This book shines a light of reality on this thinking to make you realize that a new technology alone is not likely to save the world, though it can make it an easier place for many to live.
Many reviewers have stated their favorite story, so I will share mine. It's the opening story of the book. It begins, "On an April day in 1746 at the grand convent of the Carthusians in Paris, about two hundred monks arranged themselves in a long, snaking line. Each monk held on end of a twenty-five-foot iron wire in each hand, connecting him to his neighbor on either side. Together, the monks and their connecting wires formed a line over a mile long."
The story goes on to reveal that Jean-Antoine Nollet induced a shock onto the wire to see if the monks would feel the shock at the same moment and indeed they did. This revealed to Nollet that electricity traveled at an extremely rapid speed and began the turning of the gears that led to electrical impulse-based communications (which we still use today in Ethernet and Wireless).
This book is filled with such stories and will certainly both entertain and inform you.
Tom Carpenter, Author: Wireless# Certificiation Official Study Guide
(47 reviews)
