The First Web.

• Author: Alexander, Bryan
• Position: Review

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers, by Tom Standage, New York: Walker & Co., 240 pages, $22.00/$12.00 paper

Since the World Wide Web's birth in the early 1990s, policy makers, wonks, and writers have tried to understand it through analogies to other media. Policy mavens from President Clinton to the deposed Sen. James Exon, author of the Communications Decency Act, have sought to imitate radio's, film's, and now televisions's train of ratings, prohibitions, and litigation. Despairing bibliophiles invoke the birth of the printing press, usually with a strong sense of martyrdom, while jubilant assassins of latter-day Gutenbergs celebrate their Webified publications as the demise of ancient, unupdatable, and exceedingly bound pages. Theorists like Avital Ronell and films like The Matrix turn to the telephone, with its insinuating intimacy and point-to-point connections. The future's technology, or at least the present's best versions of it, are seemingly best understood by invoking mechanisms of the past.

Tom Standage's trick in The Victorian Internet is to reverse this gaze, using the lived experience of the Internet to illuminate an older medium: the telegraph. Although the book does offer some suggestions about what we might expect from our rewiring world, its real interest and pleasure lie in remembering the first electric network.

Standage's chronological account traces the rise (and occasional fall) of persons, organizations, and inventions working with and around the telegraph. In brief: There are several tantalizing false starts, inventive means of long-distance communication that appear then fade, including versions of the semaphore and cumber-some mechanical signals. Several mid-19th-century inventors fight both each other and their equipment's limitations to establish a working system of transmitting information electrically. Between the American and British inventors William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone, and the more famous Samuel Morse, the telegraph slowly then rapidly takes hold of the Western mind. Governments see it as a way to control armies; business interests use it to get up-to-date economic information. From 1850 to century's end, telegraphic networks link much of the world, especially the parts held by the major colonial powers.

Where The Victorian Internet shines is its descriptions of cultural responses to the device. From on-line (notice the term)...