While I was at Pohick Church after the fox chase at Mount Vernon, I realized that I was at the junction of the oft traveled Telegraph Road.
TELEGRAPH ROAD IN VIRGINIA
Curiously, I drove to where I knew another of those markers were, at Potomac Mills in Woodbridge.
Interestingly, these historical markers made news in the March 1933 issue of Popular Mechanics, where the caption reads: Perhaps the only memorial to a telegraph pole line. It stands near Washington, DC.
In the 18th century, Telegraph Road was known as Back Road or Inland Road.
By the mid-19th century the name changed because the back road was to pave the way to a highway of information.
THE VICTORIAN INTERNET BY TOM STANDAGE
Reading all this, I was reminded of a homeschool book my kids and I read, The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, which is an easy and fascinating read into the ‘internet’ world of the Victorian Era.
That is his premise…that the telegraph allowed worldwide instant messaging for the first time.
In this book, the 19th century ‘highway of thought’ interestingly meets the 21st century ‘information superhighway.’
Through the lens of a telescope, parallels were drawn between modern ‘find date/mate’ websites and 19th century telegraph operators who fell in love through the sending of dots and dashes to each other while waiting to send commissioned transmissions.
My favorite section was how espionage took on a new twist as codes were ingeniously cracked with the new technology, but I mustn’t give any of that away. 😉
Likewise, through the lens of a microscope, 19th century dots and dashes were paralleled with 21st century bits and bytes.
Presented as revolutionary were the following eras of communication in the history of the world, which I thought was a great summary view:
- the Gutenberg Printing Press
- the telegraph
- the internet
AUTHOR UPDATE
The author addresses his critics at his website:
A more justified criticism, in my view, was that I failed to give a sense of what it was like to be online in the nineteenth century — what it was like to use a Morse key and sounder. Another criticism is that I could have gone into more detail about the economics, and in particular the speculative bubble that surrounded the telegraph companies in their early days. But this criticism only surfaced after the collapse of the dotcom bubble in 2000, long after the book was published. Besides, it turns out that Andrew Odlyzko, formerly a researcher at AT&T and now a mathematician and economist at the University of Minnesota (and, in my view, one of the greatest telecoms gurus around), has done most of the econometric research and analysis needed to support my arguments in the book. He was motivated to do so partly as a result of reading it.
By and large, the book has aged well. Its deliberately retro subject-matter has given it a much longer shelf-life than most internet books, and it seems to have become, if anything, even more relevant since the dotcom crash. (It was reissued in September 2007, unchanged except for the addition of a new afterword.)-Tom Standage
Initially I presumed this book, like most books about science, would be dry and boring, bogging me down with ‘what do I care about that?’ type of details.
However, this book was sheer delight. I couldn’t put it down.
COMMENTS FROM MY OLD BLOG
JennyM – November 25, 2018 at 6:28AM – The Victorian Internet is one of my favorite books! And if you like Tom Standage’s books, you will probably enjoy his podcast, The Secret History of the Future. I have been listening to it on the treadmill for a while now. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-secret-history-of-the-future/id1422830638?mt=2
