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Those little glimpse of technical details was what made the book interesting.

Long messages could be punched by several operators in parallel, each punching a different paragraph, and then spliced together. The Wheatstone Automatic telegraph was widely compared with the Jacquard loom, which wove cloth into a pattern determined by holes punched in cards
The duplex, a means of sending messages in both directions over a single wire simultaneously. The search for a means of making the local receiver insensitive to signals sent by the transmitter
At each end of the wire, synchronized rotating distributor arms switched the use of a single telegraph line between four or six sets of apparatus. In conjunction with duplex equipment, this enabled a single line to carry up to twelve lines' worth of traffic.
This was achieved by using one set of apparatus that was sensitive to changes in the direction of electrical current, and another sensitive to large steps in the magnitude of the current.

Thanks to the relentless pace of technological change, telegraphy was changing from a high-skill to a low-skill occupation;
Another inventor working on a harmonic telegraph was Alexander Graham Bell.
Gray's lawyers advised him that the telephone was merely an unimportant by-product in the far more important race to build a harmonic telegraph, so, initially at least, he did not contest Bell's right to the telephone patent.
When Queen Victoria's reign ended in 1901, the telegraph's greatest days were behind it. There was a telephone in one in ten homes in the United States, and it was being swiftly adopted all over the country.
The protocols used by modems are decided on by the ITU, the organization founded in 1865 to regulate international telegraphy. The initials now stand for International Telecommunication Union
the right to claim that it bore the full bewildering, world-shrinking brunt of such a revolution, it is not us—it is our nineteenth-century forebears.
telegraph service in the United States was discontinued in 2006
teletype machines, and early forms of a fax machine capable of sending pictures by telegraph.

"The Victorian Internet" [.] (Reply)