The Victorian Internet [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Imagine an almost instantaneous communication system that would allow people and governments all over the world to send and receive messages about politics, war, illness, and family events. The government has tried and failed to control it, and its revolutionary nature is trumpeted loudly by its backers. The Internet? Nope, the humble telegraph fit this bill way back in the 1800s. The parallels between the now-ubiquitous Internet and the telegraph are amazing, offering insight into the ways new technologies can change the very fabric of society within a single generation. In The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage examines the history of the telegraph, beginning with a horrifically funny story of a mile-long line of monks holding a wire and getting simultaneous shocks in the interest of investigating electricity, and ending with the advent of the telephone. All the early "online" pioneers are here: Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison, and a seemingly endless parade of code-makers, entrepreneurs, and spies who helped ensure the success of this communications revolution. Fans of Longitude will enjoy another story of the human side of dramatic technological developments, complete with personal rivalry, vicious competition, and agonizing failures. --Therese Littleton -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

On the surface, it is a flimsy comparison to make between the Internet of today and the telegraph of its golden age, 1840^-76. But this lively, anecdote-filled history reveals that the telegraph changed the world forever--from a hand-carried-message world to an instantaneous one. And with any groundbreaking system, there are the larger-than-life personalities: the last of the gentlemen amateur scientists, Samuel F. B. Morse, who devised the first truly working telegraph and developed its message code; Charles Wheatstone, perpetually irascible British academic, and his partner, experimenter William Cooke, who were working on the telegraph on the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed, Thomas Edison himself was a crack telegraph operator, and his expertise allowed him to raise the funds to begin his groundbreaking inventions. Standage has it all here, including the role the telegraph played in war (Crimea), spying (the Dreyfus affair, in which Captain Dreyfus was first betrayed and then saved by a telegram), and even love (sort of the first chat rooms, to use an Internet term). Joe Collins -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

The telegraph, which now seems a curious relic, was once cutting-edge technology, every bit as hot, Standage reminds us, as today's Internet. Rapid delivery of messages to distant places was a wild dream for most of history; only on the eve of the French Revolution did a workable system come into existence. That first mechanical telegraph used visual signals relayed along a series of towers; but already scientists had experimented with signaling with electricity, which was thought to travel instantaneously. By the 1830s, Samuel Morse in the US and William Cooke in England had independently developed workable electric telegraphs. Curiously, neither had much initial luck finding backers. Morse's first demonstration of his device to Congress drew no support; even after a second demonstration won him funding, many congressmen believed they had seen a conjuring trick. Despite some dramatic successesas when British police wired ahead of felons escaping by train and had them arrested in a distant cityit was some time before the telegraph was more than a high-tech toy. But by the mid-1840s, both British and American telegraphy companies were showing profits, and by the end of that decade, growth was explosive. And by then, the elaborate culture of the telegraph system was taking shape. Telegraph operators and messenger boys became familiar parts of the social landscape. There was a growth industry in telegraph-based jokes, anecdotes, scams, and even superstitions. The charge per word transmitted made messages terse; the expense made most people use them only to report deaths in the family or other grave news. Technical improvementsnotably in the laying of submarine cableseventually led to a worldwide network. Standage, most recently (and suitably) editor of the London Daily Telegraphs technology section, competently relates all this, and the eventual erosion of the telegraph's power by the telephonewhich was at first seen merely as an improvement in the telegraph. A fascinating overview of a once world-shaking invention and its impact on society. Recommended to fans of scientific history. (b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

In his first book, British science journalist Standage gives an engaging and readable account of the invention, growth, and decline of the telegraph. In the preface and epilog, Standage claims that by understanding the social changes brought about by the telegraph we can better understand the contemporary sociology of the Internet; however, he only seriously addresses their similarities in the final chapter. Instead, most of the book is a historical account, peppered with biographical, sociological, and technological anecdotes. Annteresa Lubrano's The Telegraph: How Technology Innovation Caused Social Change (Garland, 1997) investigates the same subject but takes a much more academic tone. This lay reader's history of telegraphy is recommended for public and academic libraries.?Wade Lee, Univ. of Toledo Libs., OH
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

Why the Internet is old hat
I had a great time researching and writing this book, digging up all the unexpected parallels between the old-fashioned telegraph and today's Internet. We like to think of things like online weddings, hackers, secret codes and information overload as peculiarly modern phenomena, but it turns out that they could all be found on the telegraph networks of the nineteenth century too. So what? Well, I think that tells us something important about our attitudes to technology: that as new inventions come and go, the ways people react to them stay pretty much the same.

Telling the story of the telegraph, an old-fashioned but paradoxically modern technology, is also a fun way to stick a pin in the Internet balloon. Sure, I like the Internet, I use it all the time, but I don't think it's the answer to the world's problems. People said the same about the telegraph in the nineteenth century, and they were wrong. My message, then, is one of historically-informed scepticism. When you're using the Internet, browsing the Web, sending emails -- ordering my book, even -- remember that even though it seems to be cutting edge technology it is, in many ways, old hat. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .