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. "It's worth trying to imagine how fantastic it would have been when that cable was finally completed and instead of taking 45 days for a message to get through from Britain to Australia, it took less than 24 hours," says Mary Godwin, director of the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum in Cornwall. ...more