The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers | 
 enlarge | Author: Tom Standage
Publisher: Walker & Company
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 25140
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0802716040
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN: 9780802716040
ASIN: 0802716040
Publication Date: September 18, 2007
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Amazon.com
Imagine an almost instantaneous communication system that would allow people and governments all over the world to send and receive messages about politics, war, illness, and family events. The government has tried and failed to control it, and its revolutionary nature is trumpeted loudly by its backers. The Internet? Nope, the humble telegraph fit this bill way back in the 1800s. The parallels between the now-ubiquitous Internet and the telegraph are amazing, offering insight into the ways new technologies can change the very fabric of society within a single generation. In The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage examines the history of the telegraph, beginning with a horrifically funny story of a mile-long line of monks holding a wire and getting simultaneous shocks in the interest of investigating electricity, and ending with the advent of the telephone. All the early "online" pioneers are here: Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison, and a seemingly endless parade of code-makers, entrepreneurs, and spies who helped ensure the success of this communications revolution. Fans of Longitude will enjoy another story of the human side of dramatic technological developments, complete with personal rivalry, vicious competition, and agonizing failures. --Therese Littleton
Product Description
A new paperback 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 41 more reviews...
 An excellent book! December 6, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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... November 6, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 October 21, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
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 September 10, 2007
31 out of 31 found this review helpful
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
History repeats itself January 3, 2007
Again, and again, patterns of human behavior repeat. This easy to read book explains the parallels between early communication methods and our Internet era. Everything old is clearly new again, and once you read this book, you will more easily identify the same thing in other areas. I may make you a bit of a cynic, but I think it is being more realistic.
There are also some really cute stories of individuals and their interactions. Romances over telegraph, some of which led to marriages and other ends for example.
Educational and fun to read, somewhat of a written documentary.
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