Rating:  - History at its best
Looking to the past can sometimes help you understand the present and this little book will open your eyes. Tom Standage takes what could have been a dry subject -- telegraphy-- and makes it interesting by drawing a parallel with the modern internet. While the analogy is not perfect, these pages reveal the tremendous impact the instantaneous sending of messages had on the world. Interestingly, some of the first uses are the same as the early uses of modems -- stock quotes, horse racing results and news.
The book also brings to life the colorful characters who worked the wires, skilled people who were so in damand they could always get a job. Here was a profession that women entered in considerable numbers, giving them freedom at a time when women were just beginning to push for equal rights. Thomas Edison, that curmudgeon of American industry, got started as a telegrapher. These men and women were the geeks of their day, having fun with their messages and even building romances over the wire.
This books helps you see the communications revolution as a series of breakthroughs, with the telegraph as an important part of it. It also is entertaining reading, taking you back to another time when people just like us were making a living sending bits of information all over the world through electronic blips traveling through wire. Sound familiar?
Rating: - two hours of fun, fun, fun
In the story of the world-wide telegraph system, built from the 1840s until 1900 when the telephone rose to supplant it, Standage develops fascinating parallels with the rise of the Internet. Western Union "insisted that its monopoly [on US telegraphy] was in everyone's interest, even if it was unpopular, because it would encourage standardization." Today's high-pressure startups have nothing on Thomas Edison who "locked his workforce in the workshop until they had finished building a large order of stock tickers." As with the Web, the true inventor, Samuel Morse, made "a respectable sum, though less than the fortunes amassed by the entrepreneurs who built empires on the back of his invention." Standage pairs modern pundits such as Nicholas Negroponte predicting that the Internet will bring about world peace with their 19th century equivalents predicting that the telegraph will enable a perfect understanding between governments and peoples and bring an end to wars. If you made big bucks in the dotcom world of the 1990s, page 205 may cause you a moment's reflection:
"The heyday of the telegrapher as a highly paid, highly skilled information worker was over; telegraphers' brief tenure as members of an elite community with master over a miraculous, cutting-edge technology had come to an end. As the twentieth century dawned, the telegraph's inventors had died, its community had crumbled, and its golden age had ended."
Rating: - Outstanding!
As one involved with computer networks beginning in 1966 with UNIVAC and the US Army Signal Corp's AUTODIN network I watched them grow into the Internet. I even added a bit myself building a global network in 1979-81 for one of the largest US banks which switched telex and twx traffic then added email and the ability to exchange *editable* wp documents between bank offices. So reading the Victorian Internet was a revelation and a pleasure. You think lightning doesn't strike twice? Read this remarkable book.
Rating: - Don't miss this one
This is a wonderful, readable books that instructs on many levels.
First, there is the comparison obvious in the name, and the conclusion that we can turn to history for instruction about the present.
Second is the stories of visionaries that took huge risks to make the electric telegraph happen.
Finally, it is tied together with stories of regular people that made it all happen, from crime to romance it reminds us that our Internet is only important to the extent it affects the lives of the people who use it.
Rating:  - The Rise & Fall of the Telegraph
From the late 1840s to the advent of the telephone in the early 1880s, the telegraph provided the first modern means of instant communication to a suddenly shrunken world. Standage's book is easy to read with several interesting anecdotes, including appearances by more than a few eccentric characters. Take for example Dr. Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse, something of a crackpot who, despite a pathetic lack of scientific knowledge, talked his way into becoming the official electrician of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. This organization pioneered the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858. Within a month Whitehouse had fried the wire by mandating the use of excessive voltage to transmit messages. Successful and reliable transatlantic cabling thus had to wait until the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865.
Although we enjoyed the easy to read style in which the book is written, a dearth of footnotes providing source citation is a minor annoyance (thus, we docked Standage a star in Amazon's ranking system). Sometimes quotes appear to be completely unattributable, and it would have been nice to see from where Standage drew them. Regardless, it is an easy and fun read and the book will no doubt open the eyes of the current generation to the fact that "Everything old is new again" holds true today more than ever.
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