Extra Credit Book Review: The Victorian Internet

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. Tom Standage. New York: Walker and Company 2007. 234 pp.

The internet is far from new, and Tom Standage gives away his position in the title of his book when he uses the words Internet and On-line in reference to the telegraph in the title. However, he pays off these claims beautifully in his book The Victorian Internet. In an era where it is “common knowledge” that we live on the cutting edge of communication, Standage does us all a service by grounding us back in history and revealing that the internet has existed for at least a century and a half before Al Gore “invented” it. Written for a general audience living in modern times, the reader will recognize dozens of similarities to their own experience on the internet from “on-line” romances, to start-up companies, to the demise of the telegraph in a similar fashion to the bubble of 2001. “The heyday of the telegrapher as a highly paid, highly skilled information worker was over; telegraphers’ brief tenure as members of an elite community with master over a miraculous, cutting-edge technology had come to an end. As the twentieth century dawned, the telegraph’s inventors had died, its community had crumbled, and its golden age had ended (205).”

Standage, who is science correspondent at the Economist, has made a living of demystifying the present by revealing the immediacy of the past. His other books on 18th-century chess machines, astronomy, or the history of our favorite beverages, gives him certain authority on bringing us the Victorian Internet. If anything, we get a sense of just how fun it must be to do the research and make the discoveries that he does and his anecdotal style tends towards the popular and away from historiography.

The read is chronological and follows the rise and fall of the internet from its first sparks of life running down a copper wire in 1746, zapping several monks as they held a mile-long piece of wire, to Alexander Graham Bell in 1875 who instead sent down the wire his voice, in effect proclaiming the death knell of the golden age of the telegraph. There can be no mistake, however, as the dots and dashes of Morse code predate the binary 1s and 0s that we rely upon today.

One of the more salient points the book makes among many anecdotal stories is that we continue to believe over and over that technology will bring world peace when it never does. He uses an epigram at the top of Chapter 9, “All the inhabitants of the earth would be brought into one intellectual neighborhood.”  Just as we have come to believe in the early days of the internet that communication would be so fluid it would eliminate the misunderstandings that lead to conflict, so too did the early adopters of the telegraph. Sir John Pender wrote in 1894 nearly 50 years after the telegraph had been invented, “ …telegraphy had prevented diplomatic ruptures and consequent war, and had been instrumental in promoting peace and happiness…no time was allowed for the growth of bad feelings or the nursing of a grievance. The cable nipped the evil of misunderstanding leading to war in the bud (159).” Obviously, those who fought and died in the great wars of the 20th-century missed the message.

The chapter on online romance is equally salient. The first telegraph wedding took place in 1876 between San Diego and Camp Grant, AZ (137). Online telegraphic romances between operators were common and coded message between lovers were as well. This predates internet dating by more than a century. The book covers hackers, online rip-offs, and even information overload; all vocabulary we associate with the late 20th-century.

The book is a fun read and will serve historians as well as the average reader well, even if it lacks end notes or a bibliography. The popularity of the book is a tribute to just how effective the author’s message is: History Repeats Itself!