I D É E S   F O R T E S    Issue 2.09 - September 1996

The 19th Century Internet

By Tom Standage



The real Internet revolution happened over a hundred years ago. We missed it. Although we often think of the 19th century as the age of steam, it was also the setting for the beginning of the information revolution. In many ways, it was far more disconcerting for the inhabitants of that time than today's advances are for us. We simply have to get used to improvements in communications technology, but our great-great-grandparents had to get used to its invention in the first place. Imagine - they had to get their heads around the idea of being able to send information over great distances instantaneously.

This wasn't just strange - to many, it was completely incomprehensible. When Samuel Morse first demonstrated the telegraph, his audience didn't understand it at all. He sent messages from one end of a desk to another along a huge cable, coiled around on a drum. The cable, he pointed out, could just as easily have been uncoiled, and the sending and receiving stations miles apart. But this cut no ice with the politicians he was hoping to impress. "That doesn't prove anything," said one. "That's what I call pretty thin," said another.

Undaunted, Morse remained convinced of his invention's potential. He had visions of travelling businessmen keeping in touch with their families by telegraph; lovers exchanging illicit messages over the wires; he even referred to his invention as the "great highway of thought". Eventually he proved its worth by telegraphing an election result that was subsequently confirmed by a messenger on horseback.

Newspapers were among the first to appreciate the benefits of the new invention. "We are indebted to the extraordinary power of the electromagnetic telegraph for the rapid communication of this important announcement," read a postscript to the story of the birth of Queen Victoria's second son, Albert, in 1844. The telegraph rapidly became a vital part of the news-gathering process and, by the time of the Crimean War in 1853-56, the telegraph network extended far into Europe. For the first time the newspapers had access to day-by-day reports of the fighting, delivering the latest news to readers and the most up-to-date reports to the enemy. This presented the British government with a dilemma that sounds oddly familiar today: should it try to censor and control the information flowing over the wires? In fact, it ended up taking exactly the same stance as today's government; it advocated self-regulation, pleading with the newspapers and telegraph companies to exercise self-censorship.

Meanwhile, the use of the telegraph was growing at a rate that would impress today's Internet users. Between 1846 and 1868, the number of messages transmitted within Britain increased by an average of 28% a year. By 1868 the network consisted of 112,000 miles of cable, with 3,381 stations open to the public, handling 5.7 million messages per year, or 6.5 million including overseas messages. By 1872 this had risen to 15.5 million messages. And as more and more of the world got wired, the world-shrinking potential of the telegraph became apparent.

Global markets became a possibility: the telegraph was used to send cotton and corn prices between Liverpool, New York and Chicago. The stock exchanges of principal towns were connected with the London Stock Exchange. Commodity trading, insurance and money markets became global businesses. Private wires, similar to today's leased line Internet connections, brought telegraph stations right into businesses and government offices. In 1886, Richard Sears began to sell watches via the telegraph, thus inventing telemarketing. Money could be sent via telegraph, and local deals between telegraph stations and florists made sending flowers possible as well.

Today we can do many of the same things faster, cheaper and better over the Internet, but all we have really done is to improve upon a technology that is over 150 years old. Thanks to the Internet we can get some sense of what it was like at the birth of the new communications technologies - but while discussing the weather with people on the other side of the world via Internet Relay Chat is neat the first time you do it, it is only fractionally as awe-inspiring as the first transatlantic messages must have seemed a hundred years ago. Don't you wish you'd been there?

Tom Standage is deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph's "Connected" section.