The Victorian Internet

Tom Standage argues that the electric telegraph, not the internet, was the bigger change in communication, because real-time contact across the globe was a new kind of thing while the internet only added more of it. The story begins with Jean-Antoine Nollet's experiment of 1746, when electricity passed along a chain of two hundred monks, and runs through Samuel F. B. Morse, who built the first practical electric telegraph in 1837, and Thomas Edison, who began in the telegraph trade. Standage draws parallels with the internet: operators used coded text and slang, the networks needed security experts, criminals used the wires for fraud, and some couples fell in love and married over the line. It first appeared in 1998.

Cal Newport counts it among his favorite titles on the history of technology and was rereading it in 2020.