8 ms·

For examples of other books that show how much technology rapidly changed the world, I can't recommend "The Victorian Internet" [0] highly enough. (It describes

For examples of other books that show how much technology rapidly changed the world, I can't recommend "The Victorian Internet" [0] highly enough. (It describes the impact of the telegraph). I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g. - local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately - the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world - financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph. - there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days) I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies. 0 - https://amzn.to/4frEGyC https://amzn.to/4frEGyC (NOTE: the link above takes you to a later edition)

AshamedCaptain 1y ago
If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  Children in general have a very hard time grasping the idea that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For another example, look how every generation of teenagers, without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    I heard an anecdote recently where the kids asked mom what it was like when they were a kid. Mom collected the mobile devices and turned off the internet.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - api 1y ago
    What’s funny is that I hear today’s conservatives moral panicking about kids apparently not having sex or breaking the rules like they used to. The narrative goes that they are too busy just staring at screens and being placated. Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now. I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.
    - titanomachy 1y ago
      Blaming this on cost doesn’t really make sense. Sex and minor delinquency are extremely cheap forms of entertainment (as long as you successfully avoid pregnancy).
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        Both of those generally involve you being in the same physical place as some other kids, which requires some combination of transportation and real estate, both of which cost more than they used to. Meanwhile if they know you can't afford to do anything other than get into trouble somewhere then your parents aren't inclined to give you a ride, so instead you sit at home on your phone.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      > That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now. I suspect that's because what they [0] overtly asked for was not what they actually desired. The true desire was to be obeyed, for their teens to eagerly mold themselves onto stated parental-priorities, disassociating with peers their parents had a bad feeling about, etc. In other words, control, rather than outcomes. [0] Here, I'm treating "conservative parents" as a persistent group identity, even though individual membership changes over the decades. The ocean-wave exists even when it's not the same water molecules, etc.
- villedespommes 1y ago
  Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that. 40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then. All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
  - thomassmith65 1y ago
    It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium. It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
    - kjs3 1y ago
      I guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white. "We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured). And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there. But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
      - owenversteeg 1y ago
        I agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.
- thomassmith65 1y ago
  I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation). One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement. To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public. My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
  - tasuki 1y ago
    I'm 40 and very impressed by smartphones. Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
    - thomassmith65 1y ago
      That's a valid observation, but we both lived through the advent of the modern PC, and the PC eliminated far more tools than that. It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
      - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
        Smart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device. Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
- ics 1y ago
  At what age did you notice that? My daughter is 5 and more often than not assumes that life before her was exactly the same as she experiences. Once in a while though she’ll ask if we had iPads made of wood or something like that which is amusing.
  - bahmboo 1y ago
    Usually when they become teenagers. Smug little know-it-alls!
  - musicale 1y ago
    Maybe you should get a wooden iPad case - they look amazing. ;-)
- GolfPopper 1y ago
  I was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s. From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war). Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
eszed 1y ago
That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels between early-internet culture and the social practices of telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time. I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience that milieu.
- ahazred8ta 1y ago
  The Golden Age of Telegraph Literature - The 19th-century genre showcased technology anxieties - telegraph literature from the 19th century was surprisingly modern https://slate.com/technology/2014/11/telegraph-literature-from-19th-century-was-surprisingly-modern.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/11/telegraph-literature-fr...
dylan604 1y ago
PBS did a special on how TV news came to dominance with coverage of the JFK assassination called "JFK: Breaking the News". https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/ https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/ Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War
basch 1y ago
Two other good books are The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world. The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
mhalle 1y ago
You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which describes about how electricity and communication in the home changed society. For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it. https://a.co/d/fnBimUx https://a.co/d/fnBimUx
- Exoristos 1y ago
  Doesn't make a lot of sense, since the same families that would have had a servant or parent answer the door would answer the telephone the same way. It's not like young misses were carrying phones in their skirt pockets. A more widely-accepted explanation for dating is economic: young women forced into apartment living and jobs in the city as their families lost the farm and couldn't keep their adult children anymore. - Bailey, Beth L. (1988). From Front Porch to Back Seat. Johns Hopkins University Press. - Henry, O. (1906). "The Unfinished Story". The Four Million. McClure, Phillips & Co.
wrp 1y ago
The Penny Post, introduced in England in 1840, may have been an even greater catalyst of social change. Within urban areas, communication latency was surprisingly low. Londoners got five deliveries per day.
bahmboo 1y ago
I would also recommend "The Information" by James Gleick. It covers all of known history so of course the scope is much broader, but there are familiar themes that accompany communication breakthroughs e.g. a train with a fleeing bank robber moves faster than the speed of our communication so we are all going to die.
WalterBright 1y ago
I read that book. It is indeed a wonderful history, especially for people who think digital communications are something new :-)
- EvanAnderson 1y ago
  An interesting thing about communication systems depicted in "The Victorian Internet" is that it was an internet. Messages could be routed between postal services, telegraph, bicycle messengers, pneumatic tube systems, etc.
aspenmayer 1y ago
https://amzn[.]to/4frEGyC https://amzn[.]to/4frEGyC is a referral link, and referral links are not canonical links, which the guidelines implore us to use. The above url resolves to the following (which I have rendered safe/non-clickable by slightly mangling the url with “[.]” in place of “.”): https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the+victorian+internet&crid=TBVXMTNGNMCI&sprefix=the+victorian+intern&linkCode=sl1&tag=aphackernews-20&linkId=68289afd38288e5af0e4012649b537c6&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the... Here is a non-referral link to the same product page: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR The book has its own Wikipedia page, which would have been a non-commercial option, which would lessen any potential conflict of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
wazoox 1y ago
Also people forget that up to the 1830s, going from Paris to Marseille was a 2 week journey (unless you were a royal courier switching horses every 40 km, who could do it in a few days), and that sending a message across the Atlantic and getting a reply a 2 month affair. In the late 1860, going from Paris to Marseille was done in about 15 hours by train; it only got gradually faster since then (nowadays, 3h30, by train or by plane).
fennecfoxy 1y ago
I'd also recommend this book. It's sitting on my shelf - I had to hunt down a copy as I remembered reading it when I was a kid. Couldn't find a digital/kindle copy but I feel like reading the paper version works with the topic of the book, too. Super well written and very cool to read about not just the technology side of telegraphy but the culture as well, and how it still roughly mirrors culture found when the book was written all the way up till now.
anthk 1y ago
In my region 'local' (half province level) newspapers are the most read by a huge margin.

AshamedCaptain 1y ago

If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..

bigstrat2003 1y ago
Children in general have a very hard time grasping the idea that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For another example, look how every generation of teenagers, without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.
- dylan604 1y ago
  I heard an anecdote recently where the kids asked mom what it was like when they were a kid. Mom collected the mobile devices and turned off the internet.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- api 1y ago
  What’s funny is that I hear today’s conservatives moral panicking about kids apparently not having sex or breaking the rules like they used to. The narrative goes that they are too busy just staring at screens and being placated. Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now. I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.
  - titanomachy 1y ago
    Blaming this on cost doesn’t really make sense. Sex and minor delinquency are extremely cheap forms of entertainment (as long as you successfully avoid pregnancy).
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      Both of those generally involve you being in the same physical place as some other kids, which requires some combination of transportation and real estate, both of which cost more than they used to. Meanwhile if they know you can't afford to do anything other than get into trouble somewhere then your parents aren't inclined to give you a ride, so instead you sit at home on your phone.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    > That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now. I suspect that's because what they [0] overtly asked for was not what they actually desired. The true desire was to be obeyed, for their teens to eagerly mold themselves onto stated parental-priorities, disassociating with peers their parents had a bad feeling about, etc. In other words, control, rather than outcomes. [0] Here, I'm treating "conservative parents" as a persistent group identity, even though individual membership changes over the decades. The ocean-wave exists even when it's not the same water molecules, etc.
villedespommes 1y ago
Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that. 40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then. All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
- thomassmith65 1y ago
  It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium. It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
  - kjs3 1y ago
    I guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white. "We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured). And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there. But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
    - owenversteeg 1y ago
      I agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.
thomassmith65 1y ago
I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation). One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement. To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public. My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
- tasuki 1y ago
  I'm 40 and very impressed by smartphones. Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
  - thomassmith65 1y ago
    That's a valid observation, but we both lived through the advent of the modern PC, and the PC eliminated far more tools than that. It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      Smart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device. Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
ics 1y ago
At what age did you notice that? My daughter is 5 and more often than not assumes that life before her was exactly the same as she experiences. Once in a while though she’ll ask if we had iPads made of wood or something like that which is amusing.
- bahmboo 1y ago
  Usually when they become teenagers. Smug little know-it-alls!
- musicale 1y ago
  Maybe you should get a wooden iPad case - they look amazing. ;-)
GolfPopper 1y ago
I was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s. From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war). Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).

eszed 1y ago

That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels between early-internet culture and the social practices of telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time. I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience that milieu.

ahazred8ta 1y ago
The Golden Age of Telegraph Literature - The 19th-century genre showcased technology anxieties - telegraph literature from the 19th century was surprisingly modern https://slate.com/technology/2014/11/telegraph-literature-from-19th-century-was-surprisingly-modern.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/11/telegraph-literature-fr...

dylan604 1y ago

PBS did a special on how TV news came to dominance with coverage of the JFK assassination called "JFK: Breaking the News". https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/ https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/ Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War

basch 1y ago

Two other good books are The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world. The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.

mhalle 1y ago

You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which describes about how electricity and communication in the home changed society. For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it. https://a.co/d/fnBimUx https://a.co/d/fnBimUx

Exoristos 1y ago
Doesn't make a lot of sense, since the same families that would have had a servant or parent answer the door would answer the telephone the same way. It's not like young misses were carrying phones in their skirt pockets. A more widely-accepted explanation for dating is economic: young women forced into apartment living and jobs in the city as their families lost the farm and couldn't keep their adult children anymore. - Bailey, Beth L. (1988). From Front Porch to Back Seat. Johns Hopkins University Press. - Henry, O. (1906). "The Unfinished Story". The Four Million. McClure, Phillips & Co.

wrp 1y ago

The Penny Post, introduced in England in 1840, may have been an even greater catalyst of social change. Within urban areas, communication latency was surprisingly low. Londoners got five deliveries per day.

bahmboo 1y ago

I would also recommend "The Information" by James Gleick. It covers all of known history so of course the scope is much broader, but there are familiar themes that accompany communication breakthroughs e.g. a train with a fleeing bank robber moves faster than the speed of our communication so we are all going to die.

WalterBright 1y ago

I read that book. It is indeed a wonderful history, especially for people who think digital communications are something new :-)

EvanAnderson 1y ago
An interesting thing about communication systems depicted in "The Victorian Internet" is that it was an internet. Messages could be routed between postal services, telegraph, bicycle messengers, pneumatic tube systems, etc.

aspenmayer 1y ago

https://amzn[.]to/4frEGyC https://amzn[.]to/4frEGyC is a referral link, and referral links are not canonical links, which the guidelines implore us to use. The above url resolves to the following (which I have rendered safe/non-clickable by slightly mangling the url with “[.]” in place of “.”): https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the+victorian+internet&crid=TBVXMTNGNMCI&sprefix=the+victorian+intern&linkCode=sl1&tag=aphackernews-20&linkId=68289afd38288e5af0e4012649b537c6&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the... Here is a non-referral link to the same product page: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR The book has its own Wikipedia page, which would have been a non-commercial option, which would lessen any potential conflict of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet

wazoox 1y ago

Also people forget that up to the 1830s, going from Paris to Marseille was a 2 week journey (unless you were a royal courier switching horses every 40 km, who could do it in a few days), and that sending a message across the Atlantic and getting a reply a 2 month affair. In the late 1860, going from Paris to Marseille was done in about 15 hours by train; it only got gradually faster since then (nowadays, 3h30, by train or by plane).

fennecfoxy 1y ago

I'd also recommend this book. It's sitting on my shelf - I had to hunt down a copy as I remembered reading it when I was a kid. Couldn't find a digital/kindle copy but I feel like reading the paper version works with the topic of the book, too. Super well written and very cool to read about not just the technology side of telegraphy but the culture as well, and how it still roughly mirrors culture found when the book was written all the way up till now.

anthk 1y ago

In my region 'local' (half province level) newspapers are the most read by a huge margin.