The Victorian Internet Read online

  "With every new technology, we overestimate how quickly people change their behavior. This dot-com cult classic compares Web fever to the awe of the telegraph."—Wall Street Journal

  "A fascinating walk through a pivotal period in human history."—USA Today

  "A new technology will connect everyone! It's making investors rich! It's the Internet boom—except Samuel Morse is there!"—Fortune

  "[The telegraph's] capacity to convey large amounts of information over vast distances with unprecedented dispatch was an irresistible force, causing what can only be called a global revolution."—Washington Post

  "Richly detailed and immensely entertaining . . . Standage's writing is colorful, smooth and wonderfully engaging . . . a delightful book."—Smithsonian Magazine

  "One of the most fascinating books of the dot-com era." —Financial Times

  "An entertaining primer on a complex subject of increasing interest."—Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

  "Standage tells his fascinating story in an engaging, readable style, from the moment a bunch of Carthusian monks get suckered into a hilarious human electrical-conductivity experiment in 1746 to the telegraph's eventual eclipse by the telephone. If you've ever hankered for a perspective on media Net hype, this book is for you." -Wired

  "Standage has written a lively book on the telegraph and its roles in helping 19th century business and technology grow . . . The Victorian Internet demonstrates engagingly that not even 31st century technology is totally new." —Denver Post

  "This book should be essential reading for those caught up in our own information revolution."—Christian Science Monitor

  "Standage's story is rich with anecdotes, bustling with a cast of idealists and eccentrics."—BookPage

  "An admirably efficient and concise telling of the story of the rise and decline of the telegraph. As with all good case histories, this one excites the mind with parallels to present-day experience."—Henry Petroski, author of The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance

  "[The Victorian Internet] is well worth reading, not only for the fascinating story it offers of early successes in global communication but also for the personal stories it relates. An extraordinary book! "—Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet

  "An inspired and utterly topical rediscovery of the emergence of the earliest modern communications technology."—William Gibson, author of All Tomorrow's Parties

  "A lively, short history of the development and rapid growth a century and a half ago of the first electronic network, the telegraph, Standage's book debut is also a cautionary tale in how new technologies inspire unrealistic hopes for universal understanding and peace, and then are themselves blamed when those hopes are disappointed." —Publishers Weekly

  "A fascinating overview of a once world-shaking invention and its impact on society. Recommended to fans of scientific history."—Kirkus Reviews

  "This lively, anecdote-filled history reveals that the telegraph changed the world forever—from a hand-carried-message world to an instantaneous one . . . Standage has it all here, including the role the telegraph played in war (Crimea), spying (the Dreyfus affair, in which Captain Dreyfus was first betrayed and then saved by a telegram), and even love (sort of the first chat rooms, to use an Internet term)." —Booklist

  THE VICTORIAN INTERNET

  THE VICTORIAN

  INTERNET

  The Remarkable

  Story of the

  Telegraph and

  the Nineteenth

  Century's

  On-line Pioneers

  TOM

  STANDAGE

  Copyright © 1998 by Tom Standage

  Afterword copyright © 2007 by Tom Standage

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.

  Illustrations appear courtesy of the Cable & Wireless Archive, London. Illustrations used by permission of Warwick Leadlay Gallery, Greenwich, London. Illustrations used by permission of the Science and Society Picture Library, London. Illustrations used by permission of Culver Pictures.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

  Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Walker & Company are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Standage, Tom.

  The Victorian Internet: the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century's on-line pioneers/Tom Standage.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Telegraph—History. I. Title.

  HE7631.S677 1998

  384.i'o9—dc21 98-24959

  CIP

  First published in the United States by Walker & Company in 1998

  This paperback edition published 2007

  eISBN: 978-0-802-71879-2

  Visit Walker & Company's Web site at www.walkerbooks.com

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Coghill Composition Company

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  To Dr. K

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. The Mother of All Networks

  2. Strange, Fierce Fire

  3. Electric Skeptics

  4. The Thrill Electric

  5. Wiring the World

  6. Steam-Powered Messages

  7. Codes, Hackers, and Cheats

  8. Love over the Wires

  9. War and Peace in the Global Village

  10. Information Overload

  11. Decline and Fall

  12. The Legacy of the Telegraph

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY there were no televisions, airplanes, computers, or spacecraft; nor were there antibiotics, credit cards, microwave ovens, compact discs, or mobile phones.

  There was, however, an Internet.

  During Queen Victoria's reign, a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by the skeptics. Governments and regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes toward everything from news gathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile, out on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself.

  Does all this sound familiar?

  Today the Internet is often described as an information superhighway; its nineteenth-century precursor, the electric telegraph, was dubbed the "highway of thought." Modern computers exchange bits and bytes along network cables-, telegraph messages were spelled out in the dots and dashes of Morse code and sent along wires by human operators. The equipment may
have been different, but the telegraph's impact on the lives of its users was strikingly similar.

  The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the printing press. Modern Internet users are in many ways the heirs of the telegraphic tradition, which means that today we are in a unique position to understand the telegraph. And the telegraph, in turn, can give us a fascinating perspective on the challenges, opportunities, and pitfalls of the Internet.

  The rise and fall of the telegraph is a tale of scientific discovery, technological cunning, personal rivalry, and cutthroat competition. It is also a parable about how we react to new technologies: For some people, they tap a deep vein of optimism, while others find in them new ways to commit crime, initiate romance, or make a fast buck age- old human tendencies that are all too often blamed on the technologies themselves.

  This is the story of the oddballs, eccentrics, and visionaries who were the earliest pioneers of the on-line frontier, and the global network they constructed—a network that was, in effect, the Victorian Internet.

  1.

  THE MOTHER OF ALL NETWOTKS

  telegraph, n.— a system of or instrument for sending messages or information to a distant place;

  v.—to signal (from French TELEGRAPHE)

  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 one 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.

  Once the line was complete, the abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet, a noted French scientist, took a primitive electrical battery and, without warning, connected it to the line of monks—giving all of them a powerful electric shock.

  Nollet did not go around zapping monks with static electricity for fun; his experiment had a serious scientific objective. Like many scientists of the time, he was measuring the properties of electricity to find out how far it could be transmitted along wires and how fast it traveled. The simultaneous exclamations and contortions of a mile-long line of monks revealed that electricity could be transmitted over a great distance; and as far as Nollet could tell, it covered that distance instantly.

  This was a big deal.

  It suggested that in theory, it ought to be possible to harness electricity to build a signaling device capable of sending messages over great distances incomparably faster than a human messenger could carry them.

  At the time, sending a message to someone a hundred miles away took the best part of a day—the time it took a messenger traveling on horseback to cover the distance. This unavoidable delay had remained constant for thousands of years; it was as much a fact of life for George Washington as it was for Henry VIII, Charlemagne, and Julius Caesar.

  As a result, the pace of life was slow. Rulers dispatched armies to distant lands and waited months for news of victory or defeat; ships sailed over the horizon on epic voyages, and those on board were not seen or heard from again for years. News of an event spread outward in a slowly growing circle, like a ripple in a pond, whose edge moved no faster than a galloping horse or a swift-sailing ship.

  To transmit information any more quickly, something that moved faster than a horse or a ship was clearly required. Sound, which travels at a speed of about twelve miles per minute, is one means of speedier communication. If a church bell strikes one o'clock, a monk standing in a field half a mile away knows what time it is about two seconds later. A horse-borne messenger, in contrast, setting out from the church precisely on the hour to deliver the message "It is one o'clock," would take a couple of minutes to cover the same distance.

  Light also offers an expeditious way to communicate. If the monk has keen eyesight and the air is clear, he may be able to make out the hands of the church clock. And since light (which travels at nearly 200,000 miles per second) covers short distances almost instantly, the information that it is a particular time of day effectively travels from the clock face to the monk in what seems to be no time at all.

  Now experiments by Nollet and others showed that electricity also seemed capable of traveling great distances instantaneously. Unlike light, electricity could be transmitted along wires and around corners; a line of sight from one place to another was not needed. This meant that if an electric shock was administered at one o'clock via a half-mile-long wire running from the church to a distant monk, he would know exactly what time it was, even if he was underground or indoors or otherwise out of sight of the clock tower. Electricity held out the promise of high speed signaling from one place to another, at any time of day.

  Rut the advantage of a horse-borne message was that it could say anything at all; instead of saying "It is one o'clock," it could just as easily say "Come to lunch" or "Happy birthday." An electrical pulse, on the other hand, was like the strike of a church bell, the simplest of all possible signals. What was needed was a way to transmit a complicated message using simple signals. But how could it be done?

  SINCE THE LATE sixteenth century there had been persistent rumors across Europe of a magical device that allowed people many miles apart to spell out messages to each other letter by letter. There was no truth in these tales, but by Nollet's time the stories had acquired the status of what might today be called an urban myth. Nobody had actually seen one of these devices, which relied on magical "sympathetic" needles that could somehow influence each other over great distances, but they were widely believed to exist. Cardinal Richelieu, for example, the ruthless and widely feared first minister of France, was thought to have a set because he always seemed so well informed about goings-on in distant places. (Then again, he was also thought to be the owner of a magical all-seeing eye.)

  Perhaps the best-known description of the sympathetic needles was published by Famianus Strada, a learned Italian who provided a detailed explanation in his book Prolusiones Academicae, published in 1617. He wrote of "a species of lodestone which possesses such virtue, that if two needles be touched with it, and then balanced on separate pivots, and the one turned in a particular direction, the other will sympathetically move parallel to it." Each needle, he explained, was to be mounted in the center of a dial, with the letters of the alphabet written around its edge. Turning one of the needles to point to the letter "A" on its dial would then supposedly cause the other sympathetic needle to indicate the same letter. And this was all said to work no matter how far apart the two needles were. By indicating several letters in succession, a message could then be sent from one place to another.

  "Hither and thither turn the style and touch the letters, now this one, and now that," wrote Strada. "Wonderful to relate, the far-distant friend sees the voluble iron tremble without the touch of any person, and run now hither, now thither: he bends over it, and marks the teaching of the rod. When he sees the rod stand still, he, in his turn, if he thinks there is anything to be answered, in like manner, by touching the various letters, writes it back to his friend."

  The story of the needles was based on a germ of truth: There are indeed naturally occurring minerals, known as lodestones, which can be used to magnetize needles and other metallic objects. And if two magnets are placed on pivots very close together, moving one will indeed cause the other to move in response, as a result of the interaction of their magnetic fields. But it is not the case that the two magnets will always remain parallel, and the effect is only noticeable when they are right next to each other. The kind of needles described by Strada, which could interact over great distances, simply did not exist.

  But that didn't stop people from talking about them. One wily salesman is even said to have tried to sell a set of needles to Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer and physicist. A firm and early believer in experimental evidence and direct observation, Galileo demanded a demonstration of the needles on the spot. The salesman refused, claiming that they worked only over very great distances. Galileo laughed him out
of town.

  Yet the talk of magic needles continued, along with the research into the properties of electricity. But no progress toward a practical signaling device was made until 1790. When the breakthrough finally came, it didn't involve needles or lodestones or electric wires; in fact, it was surprising that nobody had thought of it sooner.

  CLOCKS AND COOKING pans hardly seem the stuff of which communications revolutions are made. But that was what Claude Chappe ended up using for his first working signaling system.

  Chappe was one of many researchers who had tried and failed to harness electricity for the purpose of sending messages from one place to another. Rom into a well-to-do French family, he planned on a career as a member of the clergy but was derailed by the French Revolution in 1789. He took up scientific research instead, concentrating on physics and, in particular, the problems associated with building an electrical signaling system. Having made no more progress than anyone else, he decided to try a simpler approach. Refore long he had figured out a way to send messages using the deafening "clang" made by striking a casserole dish—a sound that could be heard a quarter of a mile away—in conjunction with two specially modified clocks. They had no hour or minute hands, just a second hand that went twice as fast as usual, completing two revolutions per minute, and a clock face with ten instead of the usual twelve numbers around its edge.