Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers
    Unavailable
    The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers
    Unavailable
    The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers
    Ebook214 pages2 hours

    The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers

    By Tom Standage

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    A new edition of the first book by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses-the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first "Internet," which revolutionized the nineteenth century even more than the Internet has the twentieth and twenty first.

    The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMay 26, 2009
    ISBN9780802718792
    Author

    Tom Standage

    Tom Standage is Deputy Editor of The Economist. He is the author of several books, including Uncommon Knowledge, Seriously Curious, Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years and The Victorian Internet. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and Wired.

    Read more from Tom Standage

    Related to The Victorian Internet

    Related ebooks

    Technology & Engineering For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Big Idea Behind Big Data

      Nov 17, 2017

      As we find our way in a world shaped by Big Data, it's not the reams of information we gather but the networks they illuminate that's the newest addition to science's index of things, says Adam Frank.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Cømputer Freaks

      May 9, 2023

      Cømputer Freaks
      6 min read

    • Article

      Math’s Notes

      Dec 1, 2020

      Two decades ago, in 1999, I wrote a column predicting what I thought the future would be like in the coming 20 years and, as strange as it seems to me, it’s finally here. As it appears that the COVID-19 situation is still not well under control by th

      6 min read

    • Article

      Math’s Notes

      Dec 1, 2021

      Math’s Notes
      6 min read

    • Article

      All About The Internet

      Feb 17, 2022

      All About The Internet
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Internet Of Things

      May 18, 2019

      The Internet Of Things
      4 min read

    • Article

      Cable Ties

      May 29, 2019

      Cable Ties
      3 min read

    • Article

      Emergency Communications

      Dec 1, 2022

      Emergency Communications
      5 min read

    • Article

      Wired For Weird

      Apr 24, 2022

      Wired For Weird
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble With Tech

      Dec 11, 2019

      The Trouble With Tech
      7 min read

    • Article

      Third Data Server From the Sun: The Earth is becoming a computer visible across galactic distance.

      May 29, 2014

      Chicago-bound motorists passing mile marker 121 on Interstate-88 through Aurora, Illinois, on Sept. 30, 2011, at 3:00 p.m. likely noticed nothing that seemed particularly remarkable. To their right was a scene of humdrum office parks, and to the left

      8 min read

    • Article

      LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT Martin Cooper

      Jun 13, 2023

      Back before a phone was a portable supercomputer with more processing power than all of NASA when it first landed humans on the moon, it was just a phone. And for the first 97 years of its existence, it stayed tethered-mostly to a wall, sometimes, la

      2 min read

    • Article

      What We Know Now

      Jul 16, 2023

      KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW, by Simon Winchester (William Collins, $37.99) Sometimes, a great idea is all you need. Other times, even the best of ideas needs a little help. In the 1890s, Belgian duo Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine had what must have seemed

      3 min read

    • Article

      Ride A Black Swan

      Mar 29, 2020

      From virus-ravaged central London, the rebel Tory MP Sir Oliver Letwin, one-time UK Cabinet member and Minister for Brexit, is breathily talking into his smartphone about a bigger threat to humanity than Covid-19. What if the virus wasn’t targeting h

      10 min read

    • Article

      How Deep-sea Cables Are Laid

      Jun 13, 2019

      How Deep-sea Cables Are Laid
      1 min read

    • Article

      Getting Connected

      Mar 29, 2022

      Getting Connected
      16 min read

    • Article

      Med Ia Law Must Evolve

      Nov 1, 2020

      FROM as far back as humankind can be traced, storytelling has always been a powerful tool to capture history. Whether it was cavemen who depicted their rituals through primitive art or cave drawings, or ancient Greek myths and legends that have been

      1 min read

    Reviews for The Victorian Internet

    4/5

    209 ratings24 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I listened to this book in audio format and loved hearing about the invention of the telegraph, the Victorian Internet, and its impact on society.
    • 5/5
      I was surprised at how fascinating I found this book, the story of the first global communications network. Today's internet closely parallels the growth of the telegraph, at least as it was in Europe, where tariffs were kept low, so it was used much more by the general public than. In the US, higher rates kept it more for business use. The public understanding was sometimes amusing. Some thought the wires were hollow and messages were sucked through them. "It's just tubes!" Sound familiar? Attempts at regulation and the forbidding of code usage all eventually failed.

      Quick read
    • 2/5
      So, this is a fairly dull and easy to read history of the telegraph. The earlier chapters are certainly the most interesting, but it very much glosses over electric theory of the time, and how inventors found out more about electricity.

      This was heading to a solid 3 stars. And then I got to the last chapter--The Legacy of the Telegraph. He tries to force the "Victorian Internet" a little too hard. Sure codes were used on the telegraph and on the internet. But weren't they used by homing pigeon as well? The telegraph was not the beginning of industrialization or long-distance or wartime communication, and that gets shoved to back burner by the time the last chapter rolls around. He was doing just fine up to that point.

    • 4/5
      The Victorian Internet was published in 1998 at the height of the Internet's new popularity. At the time I thought an analogy with telegraphy seemed like a cheap gimmick and so I didn't read it - anyway I was too busy working at an Internet company. Now many editions later, including an introduction by the father of the Internet Vince Cerf, I discovered it's real strength is not to dwell on telegraphy versus the Internet, rather to use the context of the Internet as a gateway for understanding telegraphy. It allows for understanding an aspect of the Industrial Revolution from about 1840 to 1870 in a personal way because it was so similar to the Internet revolution of our own time. Standage doesn't tell us they are similar, he doesn't need to. Although the technologies are different, the cultural impacts are nearly identical, people don't change. Indeed the telegraph probably had a more profound change on culture in the 19th century then the Internet in the 21st (although the Internet story is not over). This is fun, well written and interesting narrative history. It is also a lesson how disruptive technology can be, yet also how fleeting and soon forgotten. Telegraphy was a central part of everyone's life but with the telephone it was gone (though not overnight). How long will the Internet last? The telegraph was dominate for about 40 years. The Internet has been a part of mass culture since about 1992 (invention of the web browser and deregulation of the backbone for commercial use) or only about 20 years.
    • 4/5
      While the term ‘Victorian Internet’ conjures up visions of a steampunk alternate history, the invention and spread of the telegraph system in the 19th century had much the same effect on society then as the internet has had in our own time. It turned a world where messages took weeks to cross the Atlantic to one where it took mere minutes. It changed the speed of business and of war. New forms of crime sprang up to take advantage of the new technology and encryption was developed to deal with this. A new class of people sprang up- the telegraph operators, the only people who knew the knack of sending and receiving messages. They could go anywhere and be assured of a job. Suddenly, anyone who could afford the price of the telegram could talk to people across the globe. The telegraph system was hyped by some as the technology that would bring world peace- after all, if you could talk to someone instantly, you wouldn’t want to make war on them, would you? Sadly, that last wasn’t true. And the telegraph operators soon found their economic boom over and them selves obsolete as a new, voice over protocol was invented- the telephone. But the world was permanently changed by the technology that, for a lot of purposes, made distance immaterial. Standage tells us not just about the invention of the technology of the telegraph system, but about the personalities of the people who created it, and the consequences that it had in business, government, romance (yes, love did bloom across the wires) and newspapers. He gives a complete picture but keeps it light. And interesting read about a part of history that changed the world as much as the printing press did before it and the internet after it. A quick read for non-fiction.
    • 5/5
      A wonderfully written popular history of the telegraph. The approach is "in light of the internet" rather than hitting you over the head with comparisons to the internet. Very well done.
    • 4/5
      The Victorian Internet tells the story of the telegraph. When the telegraph was invented and popularized it opened up the world to such an extent that its influence was comparable to the internet, changing the way information is received and distributed, the way business and governments operated, and even the way individuals carried on relations. It was a new kind of communication and, at least for its operators, it allowed the kind of open conversing that appears in chat rooms, in which every individual can speak up in democratic manner. Operators even found themselves naming people across the country, whom they've never met, as closer friends than the living breathing people in their lives (sounds familiar). This book was a fun, quick read that made me reassess my assumptions about telegraphic communication.
    • 4/5
      A well-explained and coherent account of an unsuspected community of practice, and another welcome rehabilitation of the energy, dynamism and inventiveness of the Victorian era from the assumptions of it as an era of stifling, dour conformity. The story of the telegraph's viral spread and impact is a rebuke to our own culture for assuming itself so uniquely innovative and changing.
    • 4/5
      The most effective way to demonstrate a parallelism is to describe the unfamiliar in such a way that its similarity to the familiar is obvious. Standage's short but effective history of the telegraph's initial period of rapid growth resonates with today's reader. Only in his concluding two-page epilogue does he feel the need to explicitly draw a parallel between the telegraph and the Internet. Outside of the current fascination with the Internet economy, this is still a fascinating and thought-provoking book. The quantum change in human communication capabilities was the first utilization of electricity and wire--everything since then has been a refinement. Learning that a young Tom Edison lived on huge amounts of weak coffee and apple pie, its easy for the reader to envision him as an early hacker, endangering his health with the 19th century equivalent of Jolt Cola and Twinkies. This book is equally enjoyable to anyone who enjoys the history of technology, and those who have a more specific interest in the Internet and want to learn what lessons a historical high-tech boom can offer. A quick & enjoyable read. I accept the author's contention that 1) the Internet today parallels the 19th c. telegraph network, 2) the telegraph represented a significantly more dramatic change.
    • 5/5
      I finished this little book in three days. An intriguing look at the history of the telegraph, from it's beginnings in Europe until it's ultimate demise at the arrival of the teletype. The author also draws comparisons with the telegraph and the internet, with it's changes in how people communicate, it's sub-cultures and it's hackers and crackers. Nothing new in the world.
    • 4/5
      In the middle of the 19th century, the Victorians didn't have the telephone, the TV, the radio or the iPod. But they did have an internet. The Victorian Internet is the fascinating story of the development, growth, and decline of the telegraph, and how it parallels the development of the internet in the 20th and 21st centuries in many ways. If you think socializing online is new, think again. Those bewhiskered and corseted Victorians were already at it in the 1860s!
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite books. Draws some very interesting parallels between the development of the Internet in the late20th and early 21st centuries and the development of the telegraph in the mid-19th century.
    • 4/5
      A fun little book. He draws some cute parallels between the Internet and 19th Century telegraph-geek culture; I'd have loved to hear more about the latter. In fact, a novel about the telegraph geeks would be a hoot.
    • 5/5
      Dinged a half a star only because I think the author is being too conservative when he compares the effect of the telegraph on the 19th century to the impact of the Internet today. In my mind, the telegraph was even more disruptive in its day than the Internet has been.Think about it - the Internet debuted in an age when we already had telephones, radio, TV, and many other tools of instant mass communication. When the telegraph came into use, it was new, and all by itself. Suddenly information was instantaneous. It was a hugely disruptive technology.Tom Standage does a great job of laying out the history of the telegraph's development and implementation, and exploring just how disruptive it was. (Did you know that people even got married over the telegraph?)An excellent book, and well worth reading.By the way, my father and grandfather were both railroad telegraphers, and card-carrying members of the ORT (Order of Railroad Telegraphers). Today I proudly own and display my father's telegraph 'bug'.
    • 3/5
      Finished reading this on July 6, 2006.I read this to get some background in the history of telegraph technology and it served well in that role. It is very much a popular history insofar as there is a heavy biographical focus on some of the inventors involved (Morse etc). Seeing as I read it as a background reading for a historical project, I found it lacking that regard. There are no footnotes for the any of the primary sources Standage uses, which is quite frustrating.A small flaw which will become more glaring as time passes is Standage's effort, at times blatant, to draw parallels between the Internet and 19th century's telegraph network. At times, this works (e.g. the sub culture of telegraph operators and today's computer nerds) but it does not always work so well.
    • 4/5
      I've certainly read worse books. This provides a nice, general, history of the telegraph. Standage does a fine job of providing a brief context but the real strength is looking at the boarder impact of the technology (and the offshoots from those early successes). This book successeds in conveying the idea of invention as a team or compounding practice, and Standage provides those steps along the way. It would, however, have been nice to see a more clear context and credit provided for the development of the telegraph - Alfred Vail's contributions were glossed over, in turn presenting him as simply an assistant or part-time helper. Further context would always have been welcomed, but given the scope and audience of the book the lack thereof is acceptable.Overall, a fine and easy read to provide a refresher on the topic.
    • 4/5
      Very enlightening! It’s amazing the parallels that exist between the early days of telegraphy and our own internet and cell phones. This very readable book takes you through the early development of the idea of telegraphy. It was a radical in it’s time. In fact I suspect even more radical then our own cell phones of today. I would loved to have seen some discussion or wireless telegraphy being my only suggestion. Recommended!!
    • 4/5
      Enjoyable tale of early ingenuity in sending messages long distances moves into great detail on development and final adoption of the electric telegraph.Though often slow moving, writing picks up when transatlantic cables are attempted.That the telegraph did not develop into the promise of being a major instrument for World Peace,this invention by Frenchman Claude Chappe definitely forever changed world communication.The history would be enhanced by a video showing exactly how his systems of wood panels and clocks really worked.
    • 4/5
      I expected the title to be hype but was pleasantly surprised by this book. The first online dating, marriage all took place over the telegraph. First online crime took place over the telegraph. When it was first built it was expected to usher in a lasting world peace as governments could instantly communicate with each other. This book is well worth the time to read.
    • 4/5
      This is an entertaining history of the telegraph, and comparison of its social impact to that of the rise of the Internet.
    • 4/5
      Very informative about the telegraph and how it transformed the society in which it was invented. Here and there are snippets about how it has affected current society, but most of it is at the end. Overall, I enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it.
    • 4/5
      While the term ‘Victorian Internet’ conjures up visions of a steampunk alternate history, the invention and spread of the telegraph system in the 19th century had much the same effect on society then as the internet has had in our own time. It turned a world where messages took weeks to cross the Atlantic to one where it took mere minutes. It changed the speed of business and of war. New forms of crime sprang up to take advantage of the new technology and encryption was developed to deal with this. A new class of people sprang up- the telegraph operators, the only people who knew the knack of sending and receiving messages. They could go anywhere and be assured of a job. Suddenly, anyone who could afford the price of the telegram could talk to people across the globe. The telegraph system was hyped by some as the technology that would bring world peace- after all, if you could talk to someone instantly, you wouldn’t want to make war on them, would you? Sadly, that last wasn’t true. And the telegraph operators soon found their economic boom over and them selves obsolete as a new, voice over protocol was invented- the telephone. But the world was permanently changed by the technology that, for a lot of purposes, made distance immaterial. Standage tells us not just about the invention of the technology of the telegraph system, but about the personalities of the people who created it, and the consequences that it had in business, government, romance (yes, love did bloom across the wires) and newspapers. He gives a complete picture but keeps it light. And interesting read about a part of history that changed the world as much as the printing press did before it and the internet after it. A quick read for non-fiction.
    • 4/5
      A nice little nugget of popular history, that covers an underappreciated epoch in the making of the modern world. The telegraph was probably on of the first technologies to fulfill Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum of being indistinguishable from magic, and the effect it had on the society that developed it, compared adroitly to the similar effect of the internet in our era, makes for a fascinating read.
    • 4/5
      Imagine a new technology that allows people to communicate instantly over vast distances. It revolutionizes business practices, gives rise to new forms of crime and inundates its users with a deluge of information. Online romances blossom, governments try and fail to regulate its use. The benefits of this new technology are relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by skeptics. Of course we must be talking about the internet, right? Nope, it's the telegraph. Known to the Victorians as the 'Highway of Thought', it shrank their world to a degree that was both bewildering and revolutionary. The author argues convincingly that the rate of change experienced by the Victorians was far more intense and dramatic than are the technological advances we are experiencing today.This book traces the development of the telegraph from early experiments in the mid-1700's, through slow and painful early trials, to its explosive growth in the Victorian era. The story is both fascinating and humbling.