The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line PioneersA new edition of the first book by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses-the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first "Internet," which revolutionized the nineteenth century even more than the Internet has the twentieth and twenty first. The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways. |
Contents
The Mother of All Networks | 1 |
Strange Fierce Fire | 22 |
Electric Skeptics | 41 |
The Thrill Electric | 57 |
Wiring the World | 74 |
SteamPowered Messages | 92 |
Information Overload | 164 |
Decline and Fall | 181 |
The Legacy of the Telegraph | 201 |
Afterword | 214 |
Other editions - View all
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the ... Tom Standage Limited preview - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
able apparatus asked Atlantic Telegraph Atlantic Telegraph Company Baltimore battery became Britain British carrier Chappe Chappe’s cipher Claude Chappe clock codebook devised distance dots and dashes Dreyfus Edison electric telegraph Electric Telegraph Company electromagnet Europe eventually France French global Gold graph companies gutta-percha hand hundred Internet invention inventor John Tawell known letter London machine meant messenger boys mirror galvanometer Morse code Morse’s needles newspapers o’clock on-line optical telegraph Panizzardi Paris patent pneumatic tube railway Reuter Samuel F. B. Morse Samuel Morse scheme send messages sent ship signals soon started station Stock Exchange stock ticker story submarine telegram Telegraph Company telegraph network telegraph office telegraph operators telegraph system telegraph wires telephone Thomas Edison tion took towers traffic transmission transmit turned Vail Victorian weeks Western Union Wheatstone’s Whitehouse words wrote York