June 26, 2007
170 years of the Telegraph
The birth of the electric telegraph, often referred to as the 'Victorian Internet' is being celebrated this month by BT Heritage. It is 170 years since the first signal was sent by telegraph starting a period of rapid expansion of a communications network in the nineteenth century which can be likened to the twentieth century's internet boom.
The signal was sent on 25 July 1837 by Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke who sent a message to each other via telegraph between Euston and Camden Town in London alongside the line of the recently built London and Birmingham Railway. [via Cellular News]
Read also from the BBC:
-- Wiring up the 'Victorian internet' - The world's first global communications system for exchanging text messages was not the internet nor the mobile phone.
It was the great engineering project undertaken 150 years ago to put wires across the globe.
In an editorial on 20 April, 1857, the New York Herald commented: "The laying of the telegraph around the world is the great work of the age."
For the first time in history, the telegraph made rapid communication possible between Europe and America, and between Britain and her distant colonies such as Australia.
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2007/06/016420.htm
