''The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers'' is a 1998 book by
Tom Standage
Tom Standage (born 1969) is a British journalist, author, and editorial executive currently working as the Deputy Editor of ''The Economist'' newspaper under editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes. As head of the newspaper's digital strategy, Sta ...
. The book was first published in September 1998 through
Walker & Company
Bloomsbury Publishing plc is a British worldwide publishing house of fiction and non-fiction. It is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index. Bloomsbury's head office is located in Bloomsbury, an area of the London Borough of Camden. It has a U ...
and discusses the development and uses of the
electric telegraph
Electrical telegraphs were point-to-point text messaging systems, primarily used from the 1840s until the late 20th century. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems ...
during the second half of the 19th century and some of the similarities the telegraph shared with the Internet of the late 20th century.
The central idea of the book posits that of these two technologies, it was the telegraph that was the more significant, since the ability to communicate globally at all in real-time was a qualitative shift, while the change brought on by the modern Internet was merely a quantitative shift according to Standage, though, by the same token, global communication was just a quantitative shift from long-distance communication.
Contents
The book describes to general readers how some of the uses of telegraph in commercial, military, and social communication were, in a sense, analogous to modern uses of the internet. A few rather unusual stories are related, about couples who fell in love and even married over the wires, criminals who were caught through the telegraph, and so on.
![New York utility lines in 1890](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/New_York_utility_lines_in_1890.jpg)
The culture which developed between telegraph operators also had some rather unexpected affinities with the modern Internet. Both cultures made or make use of complex text
coding and
abbreviated
An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...
language
slang
Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-gro ...
, both required
network security
Network security consists of the policies, policies, processes and practices adopted to prevent, detect and monitor unauthorized access, Abuse, misuse, modification, or denial of a computer network and network-accessible resources. Network securi ...
experts, and both attracted criminals who used the networks to commit
fraud
In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Fraud can violate civil law (e.g., a fraud victim may sue the fraud perpetrator to avoid the fraud or recover monetary compens ...
,
hack
Hack may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Games
* ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game
* ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia franchise ''.hack''
Music
* ''Hack'' (album), a 199 ...
private communications, and send
unwanted messages.
Reception
Critical reception of the book was mostly positive.
''Smithsonian'' magazine gave a positive review for ''The Victorian Internet'', but stated that it was "not the book for readers who want in-depth accounts of the lives of scientist-inventors like Thomas Edison or Charles Wheatstone, detailed financial histories of companies like
Western Union
The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company chang ...
, or technical treatments of subjects like the development of semaphore systems and undersea cables". The ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'' had some criticisms of the book but gave a mostly positive review.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Victorian Internet, The
Technology books
Books about the Internet
1998 non-fiction books
History of the telegraph
Works about the information economy