The Telegraph

The profusion of websites and applications that characterise the modern Internet may seem a far cry from the primitive telegraph system of the late 1830s. There is, however, a direct link. The invention of the electric telegraph paved the way for telephone networks which, in turn, laid the foundations for today's Internet. In less than 170 years, simple arrangements of magnets, switches and cables evolved to become the largest and most complex machine in the world.

The profusion of websites and applications that characterise the modern Internet may seem a far cry from the primitive telegraph system of the late 1830s. There is, however, a direct link. The invention of the electric telegraph paved the way for telephone networks which, in turn, laid the foundations for today's Internet. In less than 170 years, simple arrangements of magnets, switches and cables evolved to become the largest and most complex machine in the world.

By the end of the nineteenth century the global telegraph network had connected all continents and brought distant people into direct communication 'at the speed of thought' for the first time. Roland Wenzlhuemer here examines the links between the development of the telegraph and the paths of globalization, and the ways in which global spaces were transformed by this technological advance.

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 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.