BOOK REVIEW: The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

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Tom Standage, author of The Victorian Internet, image courtesy of Amazon

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As an amateur historian, fascinated by all things Victorian and in anxious search of accurate information about the telegraph in the United States, I found Standage’s book to be informative. Concise, too, and humorous, entertaining, and an easy read. Exactly what I was looking for. Now I understand how the antiquated–and yet highly innovative–Victorian technology functioned.

Standage addressed everything. From the various men working to create the means of sending rapid messages over a great distance, to the consequences on warfare. He addressed the employees of both genders, romances that flourished as a result of time spent together ‘online’, and the challenges eventually conquered in laying the Transatlantic Cable. A legal marriage was contracted over the wires, and more than one elopement to Gretna Green was foiled.

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Telegraph technology was simultaneously developed on both sides of the Atlantic. Standage gave fair and thorough explanations and history to both sides, sharing what felt like an unbiased report of the history.

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The demands for the telegraph have been constantly increasing; they have been spread over every civilized country in the world, and have become, by usage, absolutely necessary for the well-being of society.

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~ New York Times, April 3, 1872. The Victorian Internet, p 92

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I learned:

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How the criminal class committed crimes over the telegraph.
The codes used for business–and their inherent problems and solutions.
How money was wired from one location to another.
How wires were ultimately sent to the addressee.
Cost of telegrams, both domestic and foreign.
How experienced operators “salted” newbies, a gentle form of hazing that put the less-skilled in their place…and how a young Thomas Edison triumphed.
Why so many women were employed by telegraph companies.
I heard, for the first time, about the plastic-like natural substance widely used in Victorian times: gutta-percha.
I was fascinated to learn steam-driven pneumatic tubes— in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Munich, Rio de Janeiro, Dublin, Rome, Naples, Milan, Marsielles, and New York– were historical fact and not merely Steampunk fiction.
Humorous misunderstandings about the newfangled technology and those who couldn’t comprehend its function.

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Kristin Holt | BOOK REVIEW: The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. Vintage illustration showing major telegraph lines across the Earth in 1891. Image: Wikipedia, Public Domain.

Major telegraph lines across the Earth in 1891. Image: Wikipedia, Public Domain

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An electrical telegraph was independently developed and patented in the United States in 1837 by Samuel Morse. His assistant, Alfred Vail, developed the Morse code signalling alphabet with Morse. The first telegram in the United States was sent by Morse on 11 January 1838, across two miles (3 km) of wire at Speedwell Ironworks near Morristown, New Jersey, although it was only later, in 1844, that he sent the message “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT“ from the Capitol in Washington to the old Mt. Clare Depot in Baltimore.

From then on, commercial telegraphy took off in America with lines linking all the major metropolitan centres on the East Coast within the next decade. The overland telegraph connected the west coast of the continent to the east coast by 24 October 1861, bringing an end to the Pony Express.

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[Wikipedia]