The Victorian Internet
Read The Victorian Internet Online
Authors: Tom Standage
"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
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Typeset by Coghill Composition Company
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
To
Dr.
K
I
N 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.
telegraph,
n.—
a system of or instrument for sending messages or information to a distant place;
v.—
to signal (from French
TELEGRAPHE)
O
N 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?
S
INCE 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.
C
LOCKS 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.
To send a message, Claude Chappe and his brother Rene, stationed a few hundred yards apart behind their parents' house, would
begin by synchronizing their clocks. Claude would make a "clang" as the second hand on his clock reached the twelve o'clock
position, so that his brother could synchronize his clock accordingly. Claude could then transmit numbers by going "clang"
as the second hand passed over the number on the clock face that he wished to send. Using a numbered dictionary as a codebook,
the Chappe brothers translated these numbers into letters, words, and phrases, and thus sent simple messages. It is uncertain
how their original code worked, but the brothers probably transmitted digits in twos or threes and looked up the resulting
two- or three-digit number in the codebook to see what word or phrase it corresponded to.
In other words, a complicated message could be sent using simple signals. However, the problem with this design (apart from
the incessant clanging noise) was that the person receiving the message had to be within earshot of the sender and, depending
on the direction of the wind, this was a few hundred yards away at most. Rather than replacing the copper pans with something
louder, Chappe realized that it would be simpler to replace the audible signal with a visible one.
So out went the casserole dishes, and in their place was substituted a pivoting wooden panel, five feet tall, painted black
on one side and white on the other. By flipping it from one color to the other as the second hand passed over a particular
number, Chappe could transmit that number. This improved design had the obvious advantage that it allowed messages to be sent
over very great distances very quickly—particularly if a telescope was used to observe the panel.
At 11 A.M. on March 2, 1791, Chappe and his brother used their black-and-white panels, clocks, telescopes, and codebooks to
send a message between a castle in their hometown of Brulon, in northern France, and a house in Parce, ten miles away. In
the presence of local officials, it took them about four minutes to transmit a phrase chosen by the local doctor—"si vous
REUSSISSEZ, vous SEREZ BIEN-TOT COUVERT DE GLOIRE" (IF YOU SUCCEED, YOU WILL SOON BASK IN GLORY)—from one location to the
other.
Chappe wanted to call his invention the
tachygraphe—
from the Greek for "fast writer"—to signify the unprecedented speed with which it transmitted information. However, he was
talked out of it by his friend Miot de Mélito, a government official and classical scholar, who suggested the name
t
é
l
é
graphe,
or "far writer," instead.
Et voilá: The telegraph was born.
Having shown that his invention worked, Chappe started to galvanize support for it in Paris with the help of another of his
brothers, Ignace, who had been elected to the ruling Legislative Assembly. But the turmoil of revolutionary France was a difficult
environment in which to start promoting a new invention, and Ignace didn't get very far. When the Chappe brothers staged another
test in the town of Belleville, near Paris, in 1792, their apparatus was destroyed by a mob who suspected that they were trying
to communicate with royalist prisoners being held in Temple Prison. The Chappes were lucky to escape with their lives.
By this time Claude Chappe had found a way to do without the synchronized clocks: He devised a completely new design that
consisted of two small rotating arms on the end of a longer rotating bar. This bar, called the regulator, could be aligned
horizontally or vertically, and each of the small arms, called indicators, could be rotated into one of seven positions in
forty-five-degree increments. The design allowed for a total of 98 different combinations, 6 of which were reserved for "special
use," leaving 92 codes to represent numbers, letters, and common syllables. A special codebook with 92 numbered pages, each
of which listed 92 numbered meanings, meant that an additional 92 times 92, or 8,464, words and phrases could be represented
by transmitting two codes in succession. The first indicated the page number in the codebook, and the second indicated the
intended word or phrase on that page.
Abraham-Louis Breguet, the noted clock maker, built Chappe a clever control mechanism for his new design: Through a system
of pulleys, a scaled-down model of the rotating arms could be used to control the positions of a much bigger set of arms.
The big arms could then be mounted on the roof of a tower and controlled from the inside by an operator. Chappe believed it
would be possible to send messages quickly over great distances by constructing several such towers a few miles apart in a
long line, each within sight of the next.
In 1793, Chappe sent details of this new design to the National Convention, the ruling body that had replaced the Legislative
Assembly. His proposal was picked up by Charles-Gilbert Romme, president of the Committee of Public Instruction, who grasped
its potential and suggested that the convention fund an experiment to evaluate its military applications.
