The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers Paperback – February 25, 2014

Tom Standage is onto something. It seems that everything we know about the Internet today, we've already done before. The turn of this century was a lot like the turn of the last century."The Victorian Internet" is all about our world and the invention of the Telegraph. As cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson once pointed out, the telegraph was the world's first global digital network. It's when we started trying to push voice down the copper lines that we mucked things up.In this book, you'll find technological wizardry, geek pioneers, global aspirations, long-distance romances, and online scams. You'll discover what 19th-Century chat was like. There are growing pains. We see fear for the future and fear of moral decline. The Telegraph represented a sudden, massive interconnection of people thousands of miles apart, and the effects of this overnight deluge of information is clear in reading. You have to remember that these were people used to feeling safe in their own homes, blissfully unaware of each other, and only vaguely informed of events going on in other countries.Standage does a nice job of hitting on the hottest topics of our time, without hitting the reader over the head to make a point. Cybergeeks will love his stops at Cryptography, code, and the other programming-like solutions people came up with to solve their problems. Fans of history will be amused by the parallels between life then and now as "old media" learns to stop worrying and embrace "new media".In a narrative style that resembles the British TV series "Connections", Standage shows us what each side of the Atlantic was up to, the race to connect the world, and the sheer determination and boundless optimism that made it all happen. There are also interesting tidbits along the way: we get facts about Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison that most history books ignore. There are anecdotes from 19th-century daily life that we can easily identify with today. All of it combines in a way that is easy to read, decently-paced, and fun to think about and discuss with others.I give this book 5 stars for being clever with presentation and for keeping the various threads together without seeming fragmented. Tom Standage moves us through history without jumping around, and references earlier sections to remind us of where things are going. If you like history, technology, or even the geekier topics of machine logic, programming, and cryptography, this book makes an excellent read.

My father was born in 1908, and grew up engaged in both amateur and professional radio. All his life he tried to bring up his telegraphy speed to that required to get an "Amateur Extra" ham radio license for his home radio facility. He never made it. Then I came along and suggested that he learn ASCII, the code being used for data transmissions in the computer world. He didn't get the joke.This book reminded me of his connection to telegraphy and made me realize both how much of modern life isn't really new--but also how recently the genuinely new stuff happened. In particular, it never occurred to me before reading this book how incredible a step it was in the nineteenth century to be able to send messages over wires. Literally nothing like it had ever occurred before.And here we youngsters think that the internet is such a big deal. It is, of course, but the kinds of "revolutionary" characteristics we apply to it, actually had occurred before. The world seems smaller. Business can be transacted more efficiently. Romance is kindled. Both crime and crime prevention take on new aspects. Maybe world peace will be accomplished.The book is a good narrative of what happened when telegraphy over long distances became possible. Its only shortcoming was that the descriptions of each device were too superficial. I would have liked to understand better how each one worked.I do love the ironic note that ended the book: After the telegraph was replaced by telephones, and they were supplanted by the likes of worldwide Internet visual conferences, the new generation of youngsters are absolutely enamored with--get this!--how cool it is to be able to send text back and forth to each other! (Just this week I was talking to a colleague whose daughter refuses to speak by telephone. Anyone wanting to court her has to send a text message.)After all, AT&T really is the American Telephone and Telegraph company.

I recommend this book to a book club for teenagers. The book reports a great. Nice class room discussion book. Nice learning tool for those who didn’t have a clue for what we came from as far as technology goes. The book cover is beautiful