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"It contains parallels between the reception of the telegraph and the Internet which I knew nothing about."I quite agree -- The Victorian Internet is a real eye-opener. I expected a few cute (and probably overstretched) parallels between the nineteenth century's telegraph and today's electronic superhighway; but Standage brings up points in common that are nothing less than astonishing.
Among the most amazing are the invention of what amounted to routing technology -- in the form of telegraph offices, within (and between) which messages moved by pneumatic tubes rather than over the wire. Nineteenth-century telegraph users were as obsessed with security as today's Internet users, inventing commercial codes to protect information from competitors. And nineteenth century governments were as unhappy with those codes as the NSA is with anything more secure than DES.
Incidentally, the expense of sending long messages over slow international links led to the practice of using codes to shorten the length of messages -- just as compression is used on slow links today. There was even an example of pricing by bandwidth, in France: Local messages, which could use the high-bandwidth pneumatic tubes were charged at a single rate for a complete message, vs. long distance messages that were charged per character transmitted.
It also seems there was a special fraternity among telegraph operators, as there is among today's net-heads. Operators invented shorthand codes, including GA for "go ahead" that are very similar to the abbreviations many of us use today, and anyone who's been on the receiving end of a flaming "RTFM, stupid!" will sympathize with some of the hazing new operators were subjected to. Romance even flourished over the wires, and marriages were conducted "online" by telegraph fully a hundred years before the first couple were wed using today's technology.
Businessmen, who initially regarded the telegraph as an expensive toy soon became its most prolific users -- and it led to an information overload as bad in its day as e-mail is now. Standage quotes one user as saying: "The letters and figures used in the language of the tape are very few, but they spell ruin in 99 million ways", an eerie echo in today's world of Internet-based day traders. And there were crooks prepared to use the wire to separate marks from their money back then, just as there are today, some of the first illicit use of telegraphic codes were for transmission of horse-race winners in advance of the slower media of the day.
Victorian newspapermen feared the telegraph would spell their doom. "The mere newspapers must submit to destiny and go out of existence," one newspaper representative wrote -- foreshadowing the fear and loathing with which today's Internet is viewed by print journalists. In fact, one major use of the telegraph was for the rapid transmission of news (the second message transmitted by Samuel F.B. Morse was "Have you any news?"), leading directly to the rise of wire services including Reuters and A.P.
Finally, there was a sense -- unfortunately a premature and overblown one -- of the telegraph eliminating national boundaries and reducing the risk of war. No less than Scientific American magazine, said of the telegraph's influence, "The feeling of universal kinship shall be ... the usual, everyday, abiding feeling of all men." Reality, unfortunately, didn't quite live up to that standard. The telegraph turned out to be an effective instrument of war, first used by the British against the French at Fashoda, and by both sides in the U.S. Civil War. Standage doesn't mention an even more extreme example: In August 1914, the transmission by all sides of preplanned mobilization orders by telegraph led to uncontrollable escalation and resulted in World War I (see Barbera Tuchman's The Guns of August for an eye-opening account).
In his conclusion, Standage sounds a cautionary note, warning that utopian views of today's "wired world" may prove as inaccurate as those of the telegraph a hundred years ago. I agree, and am also struck by his description of how the telephone evolved directly from the telegraph, through attempts to increase its bandwidth. The resulting device, which required no trained operators, turned out to be something very different from the telegraph, and eventually displaced it as the primary communications method for business.
I found myself wondering if something similar may be gestating somewhere in the Silicon Valley today!
PS: Over the past month, I've heard, read, and seen a good many news stories about how Morse Code -- the telegraphic equivalent of ASCII -- is now dead. Not so! As a private pilot, I actually use Morse Code on almost every flight. It remains the international standard method for identifying aviation radio stations, and the dashes-and-dots are printed on aviation charts for identification purposes. Here's the one for my home base in Modesto Calif. -- --- -.. (MOD)
| -- John D. Ruley (jruley@ainet.com ) | From Byte On-Line, September 8, 1999 |