"The Victorian Internet"

[fiefoe]

So much of this mirrors the development of the Internet indeed:

• the bonus men could handle even more without a loss in accuracy, sometimes reaching speeds of forty words per minute or more.
• Edison's ability arose from his partial deafness,
• in the early nineteenth century, newspapers traded on their local coverage, not the timeliness of their news.
• ... rationed the amount of news they printed in a busy week, in case there was a shortage of news the following week.
• In Europe, meanwhile, Paul Julius von Reuter was also establishing a news agency.
• During the ensuing war, with the French and Sardinians on one side, and the Austrians on the other, Reuter's correspondents reported from all three camps—and on one occasion dispatched three separate reports of the same battle from the point of view of each of the armies involved.
• In his history of the Crimean War, the historian A. W. Kinglake referred to the telegraph as "that new and dangerous magic" that played into the hands of meddling officials who were nowhere near the battlefield.
• How easy it was to assume that world peace would inevitably follow from shared experience.
• Suddenly, the price of goods and the speed with which they could be delivered became more important than their geographic location.
• The managers of the telegraph know that their business customers want the quickest and best service, and care more for dispatch than low tariffs.
• "nickname" system could be introduced. Under this scheme, companies and individuals could reserve a special word as their "telegraphic address"
• To lease private lines for internal communication between different sites, since internal messages could then be sent for free, and large organizations could be centrally controlled from a head office. This led to the rise of large, hierarchical companies and financial organizations—big business as we know it today.

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