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In just six years, the Internet has gone from being a complicated toy for computer geeks to being the Wild West of the 1990s, and from there to being a part of our everyday lives. E-mailing jokes to one's friends is as commonplace as photocopying them used to be, and it no longer seems like science fiction to watch my ten-year-old niece surf the Web to find pictures for her school report on the rain forest.
But this is not the first time technology has made the world shrink. As Tom Standage describes in his new book, The Victorian Internet, the invention of the electric telegraph had a great effect on the world. By the 1850s, news that had once taken a week to get from Washington to New York traveled in seconds. By 1865, with the laying of the first trans-Atlantic cable, diplomats and businessmen no longer had to wait six weeks to find out what was happening on the ocean's other side.
This revolution had at least as great an impact as the one we are going through now, and was at least as misunderstood. Some of the stories Standage relates are comical. One woman tried to telegraph some food to her son. When told that this was impossible, she insisted that she had heard of soldiers being sent to the front by telegraph. If it could take soldiers, why couldn't it take her sauerkraut?
Less humorously, the editor of the New York Herald worried that "The telegraph may not affect magazine literature, but the mere newspapers must submit to destiny, and go out of existence." Of course, it didn't turn out that way: The telegraph intensified competition between newspapers to get the latest news, but also gave them access to so much information that selecting and organizing content became their most important role.
Standage is at his best when relating anecdotes like these, or when he describes the attitudes of professional telegraphers:
"In a sense, the telegraph community was a meritocracy --- it didn't matter who you were as long as you could send and receive messages quickly --- which was one of the reasons that women and children were readily admitted to the profession."
Replace "telegraph" with "Internet," and typing speed with HTML expertise, and this is a pretty good description of the Web today.
Standage is not as good about explaining the science behind telegraphy, and the technological challenges that inventors had to overcome. Where books like Dava Sobel's Longitude use history to illuminate science, and vice versa, Standage simply states that something worked, or didn't, and then moves on. Despite that, The Victorian Internet is a pleasure to read, and provides some much-needed historical perspective on the hype that surrounds the present revolution.
-- Gregory V. Wilson (gvwilson@interlog.com)