Tom Standage,
The Victorian Internet : The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers. Walker Publishing Company. 1998
ISBN 0 8027 1342 4
240pp
US $22.00

Uploaded 1 July 1999

We live in an age where knowledge of the past has all but disappeared from everyday thinking. The managerial ethic which assumes that an MBA is all that is needed to move from managing a hospital to managing a shoe factory takes no account of the history and culture of the industries being managed. The emphasis is on the here and now and the “bottom line”. The exclusion of historical perspectives is most apparent in the areas of new technology. Each new product or service is seen as unconnected from that which went before. And the rapid development of the Internet and networked technologies where the life of products and services are measured in months and not years places the attention on the present and the future and discourages a gaze at the past.

Tom Standage’s book is a modest addition to the literature on the precursors to the Internet. He has produced a well written, journalistic account of the trials, tribulation and successes of the inventors and marketers of the nineteenth century telegraph. His narrative moves with great verve and is enlivened with anecdotes which bring the fascinating story of the telegraph to life. While the title of the book might lead a potential reader to expect a systematic comparison of the nineteenths century telegraph with the contemporary Internet this does not happen. Standage discusses some of the parallels between the two industries in an unremarkable section of the concluding chapter.

For a reader wanting an analytical account of the nineteenth century telegraph and its parallels with the Internet, this is not the book to choose. But for a reader wanting a readily accessible general introduction to the nineteenth century telegraph Standage’s book is an excellent choice.