Victorian Internet

The Victorian Internet

By Tom Standage

The title and the cover of the book are intriguing and the book stands up to that promise. The parallels between the current internet, and the victorian one are uncanny. It looks like like we have come far from that age, only to find more or less in the same place.

The central narrative of the book is the origin and evolution of telegraph and its impact on society and businesses.

After some initial trials with optical telegraph not panning out, the industry evolves into electrical signals and competing transmission protocols. Morse code wins out and becomes the industry standard in US and Europe, but not in UK.

Morse code demanded individuals who are proficient in tapping messages, and receiving them. Its meritocracy where people are thrown into a job, hands-on, without an interview. If you succeed doing the job, you are in. This means - women could also become part of this elite work force.

This system needed people who ere stationed at every hop, receiving a message, and then tap it again for the next hop. This means, pairs of telegraphers got to know each other well. Allegedly, many of them could identify, if a woman was on the other end of the wire, based on how lightly they tapped. Many had online romances during downtime, when there were not many messages to be sent.

The book goes into a lot of detail about the pricing structure of messages and its impact. When the telegraph companies charged by the letter, consumers started compiling code books to encode long messages into short codes. (SOS and OK are artifacts of this era). But many governments outside America were very persistent not allowing codes as that meant they could messages incendiary to the state. In spite of it, it was always an arms race between International Telegraph Union guidelines and consumers.

The evolution of early e-commerce with an elaborate Western Union setup is also pretty fascinating. The book recounts a story of a lady who sends $11.73 by wire, but then rounds it up to $12, because she didn't want to lose loose change over the wire.

The book includes stars like Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and early days of Thomas Edison amongst others. But it misses a key story of Abraham Lincoln and role of telegraph in civil war.

The telegraphers who were proficient in morse code, losing their elite status as telegraph gets more useable options like teleprinter, and telephone - sounded very much like the state of current programmers in face of onslaught of LLMs.

The book is a good intersection of technology, society and economics.