The Original Social Network
The Internet is amazing, right?A communication’s revolution that’s brought the world incredibly close?Well, right.We’ve never seen this kind of impact before?Stop right there.Author Tom Standage claims, in “The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers,” that the telegraph was the more significant invention since the ability to communicate globally in real-time was something that took a quantum leap, while the change brought on by the modern Internet was merely a quantitative shift. Samuel F.B. Morse first demonstrated the new technology on this date in 1844 and by the late 1850s President Buchanan was exchanging pleasantries with Queen Victoria. “How’s it going Your Majesty?"By 1861 a transcontinental network was complete and over 50,000 miles of telegraph wire were strung across the country. This almost instantaneous communication system — using electrical pulses to transmit coded messages through a wire to a receiver — allowed people and governments all over the world to send and receive messages about politics, war, how your summer vacation was going and will you marry me.Soon, content from the Associated Press in their “telegraphic news” department, was the most compelling and timely part of the paper.The telegraph taught people how to be brief. Fred Astaire’s elegant one word congratulatory/apology telegram to Ginger Rogers upon learning the woman he had a falling out with just won an Academy Award for “Kitty Foyle:”"Ouch!"A new code was introduced when calling your operator to send a message, since words can sound alike."Is that O for Ocean?""No, it's G for George." Telegrams were usually devoid of punctuation, unless requested, but periods were so small you could barely see them.Hence the word Stop, which signaled the end of a thought.(And I'm about to.)Today you can send a Western Union Telegram through the Internet.What goes around comes around.