"The Victorian Internet"

[fiefoe]

Going trans-Atlantic and congestion control:

• Useful property of gutta-percha is that it is hard at room temperature but softens when immersed in hot water and can be molded into any shape. The Victorians used it much as we use plastic today.
• Using an old-fashioned single-needle telegraph, they were eventually able to send a few messages manually, in much the same way that a preacher in a resonant cathedral must speak slowly and distinctly in order to be understood.
• So it's hardly surprising that Cyrus W. Field, the man who eventually tried to do it, was both ignorant of telegraphy and extremely wealthy.
• Twice the cable snapped, and twice they sailed back to the rendezvous and started again. The Agamemnon also had a close encounter with a whale.
• Pieces of spare cable were also made into commemorative umbrella handles, canes, and watch fobs.
• Indeed, the construction of a global telegraph network was widely expected, by Briggs and Maverick among others, to result in world peace.
• Still, it was so heavy that there was only one ship in the world that would be able to carry it: the Great Eastern, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
• Despite this failure, raising the money for a third cable did not prove too difficult; the Atlantic Telegraph Company now had so much experience in cable laying that it seemed certain to succeed.
• (Thomson went on to become Lord Kelvin, after whom the unit of temperature used by scientists is named.)
• A cheap, efficient way had to be found to transfer large numbers of messages over those branches of the network that were prone to sudden surges in traffic.
• He proposed a steam-powered pneumatic tube system to carry telegraph forms the short distance from the Stock Exchange to the main telegraph office.
• Following this accident, carriers were sent by pushing them along the tubes with compressed air, rather than drawing them along with a partial vacuum.
• And on one occasion a cat was even sent from one post office to another along the tubes.
• In Paris, the distance to the blockage was sometimes calculated by firing a pistol down the tube and noting the time delay before the sound of the bullet's impact with the carrier.
• Each message might have to pass through several sorting stations on the way to its destination; it was date-stamped at each one, so that its route could be determined. (The same is true of today's e-mail messages, whose headers reveal their exact paths across the Internet.)

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