The Victorian internet
Long before email, the telegraph gave the 19th century online romance, hackers, slang and information overload.
1 min read
Before the telegraph, information could travel only as fast as a horse, a ship or a pigeon. After it, news crossed oceans in minutes. The first transatlantic cable briefly worked in 1858, and a lasting one opened in 1866. Tom Standage calls it “the Victorian internet”, and the comparison holds up well.
- Slang and shorthand. Operators paid by the word, or just bored, invented abbreviations, much like texting. “OK” was one of their favourites.
- Online romance. Operators chatted over idle lines, flirted, and occasionally married. Novels such as Wired Love (1880) were written about it.
- Hackers and scams. Swindlers intercepted horse-race results or stock prices and placed bets before the news arrived.
- Information overload. Newspapers complained that the flood of instant news made people shallow and anxious.
- Encryption. Businesses bought codebooks that compressed sentences into single words, partly for privacy and partly because telegrams were charged by the word.
Each new communication technology tends to bring back the same social patterns: speed, intimacy, fraud and anxiety. Often only the hardware is new.
Bring it up
“People were having online romances over the telegraph in the 1870s, with operators flirting in Morse code across hundreds of miles.”
Follow the thread
- Leads toWhy do we say “OK”? Telegraph operators needed a short, unambiguous acknowledgement, and “OK” fit perfectly.
- Same patternAn island where people speak Spanish by whistling Both are ways of sending language over distance by reducing it to a simpler signal.
- InfluencedWhy your keyboard says QWERTY Telegraph operators transcribing Morse were among the first heavy users of early typewriters, and may have shaped the keyboard layout.
- RelatedJulius Caesar’s secret code (and why it failed) Businesses sent telegrams in commercial codes and ciphers to save money and keep secrets from operators.
