The Victorian Internet tells the story of the telegraph. When the telegraph was invented and popularized it opened up the world to such an extent that its influence was comparable to the internet, changing the way information is received and distributed, the way business and governments operated, and even the way individuals carried on relations.

It was a new kind of communication and, at least for its operators, it allowed the kind of open conversing that appears in chat rooms, in which every individual can speak up in democratic manner. Operators even found themselves naming people across the country, whom they've never met, as closer friends than the living breathing people in their lives (sounds familiar).

This book was a fun, quick read that made me reassess my assumptions about telegraphic communication. ( )

A well-explained and coherent account of an unsuspected community of practice, and another welcome rehabilitation of the energy, dynamism and inventiveness of the Victorian era from the assumptions of it as an era of stifling, dour conformity. The story of the telegraph's viral spread and impact is a rebuke to our own culture for assuming itself so uniquely innovative and changing. ( )

I was loaned this after one of my frequent declarations of interest in technology and science and their impact on society, especially in the Victorian era. As one can tell from the title, this book covers exactly that, discussing the birth and death of the telegraph. The first half of the book is a history of the telegraph, from its origins as an optical French device, to the invention of the electric version, and the laying of the transatlantic cable. It's all information I knew little about, and like all the best scientific developments, it makes for good reading.

The second half of the book discusses the way that contemporary society actually used the telegraph-- as the title implies, there are a lot of comparisons to the Internet, and most of them are apt. (The occasional anachronistic use of "on-line" was rather jarring, though.) The section on love on the wires was particularly good-- Internet dating apparently has a long and venerable heritage! It's also interesting to see how a lot of the rhetoric around the Internet-- such as the creation of a global village-- surrounded the telegraph, too, and was proved false then! The telegraph didn't bring nations together, creating peace; it simply allowed messages to get to the battlefront quicker!

All in all, a nice little book, with a good overview of a fascinating topic.

A journalist in the area of science and technology, Sandage made his history of the telegraph easy to read and interesting. While I already knew many of the pieces I'd never read anything that put it all together and showed just how wide-spread the changes caused by the development of telegraph networks were. The many anecdotes about the people and events he chronicled were great. He also makes a case for the shift in world view and communications being even greater with the advent of the telegraph than with the advent of computers. It should never have languished in the 'to be reads' for so long!

The most effective way to demonstrate a parallelism is to describe the unfamiliar in such a way that its similarity to the familiar is obvious. Standage's short but effective history of the telegraph's initial period of rapid growth resonates with today's reader. Only in his concluding two-page epilogue does he feel the need to explicitly draw a parallel between the telegraph and the Internet. Outside of the current fascination with the Internet economy, this is still a fascinating and thought-provoking book. The quantum change in human communication capabilities was the first utilization of electricity and wire--everything since then has been a refinement. Learning that a young Tom Edison lived on huge amounts of weak coffee and apple pie, its easy for the reader to envision him as an early hacker, endangering his health with the 19th century equivalent of Jolt Cola and Twinkies. This book is equally enjoyable to anyone who enjoys the history of technology, and those who have a more specific interest in the Internet and want to learn what lessons a historical high-tech boom can offer. A quick & enjoyable read. I accept the author's contention that 1) the Internet today parallels the 19th c. telegraph network, 2) the telegraph represented a significantly more dramatic change. ( )

Imagine a new technology that allows people to communicate instantly over vast distances. It revolutionizes business practices, gives rise to new forms of crime and inundates its users with a deluge of information. Online romances blossom, governments try and fail to regulate its use. The benefits of this new technology are relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by skeptics.

Of course we must be talking about the internet, right? Nope, it's the telegraph. Known to the Victorians as the 'Highway of Thought', it shrank their world to a degree that was both bewildering and revolutionary. The author argues convincingly that the rate of change experienced by the Victorians was far more intense and dramatic than are the technological advances we are experiencing today.

This book traces the development of the telegraph from early experiments in the mid-1700's, through slow and painful early trials, to its explosive growth in the Victorian era.

The story is both fascinating and humbling. ( )

I finished this little book in three days. An intriguing look at the history of the telegraph, from it's beginnings in Europe until it's ultimate demise at the arrival of the teletype. The author also draws comparisons with the telegraph and the internet, with it's changes in how people communicate, it's sub-cultures and it's hackers and crackers. Nothing new in the world. ( )

In the middle of the 19th century, the Victorians didn't have the telephone, the TV, the radio or the iPod. But they did have an internet. The Victorian Internet is the fascinating story of the development, growth, and decline of the telegraph, and how it parallels the development of the internet in the 20th and 21st centuries in many ways. If you think socializing online is new, think again. Those bewhiskered and corseted Victorians were already at it in the 1860s! ( )

One of my favorite books. Draws some very interesting parallels between the development of the Internet in the late20th and early 21st centuries and the development of the telegraph in the mid-19th century. ( )

A fun little book. He draws some cute parallels between the Internet and 19th Century telegraph-geek culture; I'd have loved to hear more about the latter. In fact, a novel about the telegraph geeks would be a hoot. ( )

Dinged a half a star only because I think the author is being too conservative when he compares the effect of the telegraph on the 19th century to the impact of the Internet today. In my mind, the telegraph was even more disruptive in its day than the Internet has been.
Think about it - the Internet debuted in an age when we already had telephones, radio, TV, and many other tools of instant mass communication. When the telegraph came into use, it was new, and all by itself. Suddenly information was instantaneous. It was a hugely disruptive technology.
Tom Standage does a great job of laying out the history of the telegraph's development and implementation, and exploring just how disruptive it was. (Did you know that people even got married over the telegraph?)
An excellent book, and well worth reading.
By the way, my father and grandfather were both railroad telegraphers, and card-carrying members of the ORT (Order of Railroad Telegraphers). Today I proudly own and display my father's telegraph 'bug'. ( )

Finished reading this on July 6, 2006.
I read this to get some background in the history of telegraph technology and it served well in that role. It is very much a popular history insofar as there is a heavy biographical focus on some of the inventors involved (Morse etc). Seeing as I read it as a background reading for a historical project, I found it lacking that regard. There are no footnotes for the any of the primary sources Standage uses, which is quite frustrating.

A small flaw which will become more glaring as time passes is Standage's effort, at times blatant, to draw parallels between the Internet and 19th century's telegraph network. At times, this works (e.g. the sub culture of telegraph operators and today's computer nerds) but it does not always work so well. ( )