The Victorian Internet

During chapters 8 and 9 of the book The Victorian Internet the author talks broadly about the telegraph and specifically about some stories or anecdotes related to it. In chapter 8, the author focuses on the story of love and telegraph. While most times we hear that telegraph was used mostly for spies and war, love was also an important and interesting piece of it. The author talks about two specific stories related to love and telegraph. The first story talks about how the telegraph, and the operators, were witnesses and fully participants of a wedding happening between a girl in New York and guy in Boston via telegraph. The other story, showing the down side of it, talks about telegraph stations built in the middle of the frontier between Scotland and England, preventing, unintentionally,  runaway couples for marry because of the marriage of declaration differences between both countries. During this chapter the author also makes references to the telegraph operators and how important they were in making this revolution possible. There were, as in any other job, different levels of operators. The really good ones, called "bonus men", would be in main telegraph offices receiving and sending an incredible amount of messages per day. Other operators, with less skills, would be established in rural areas with few or none messages per day. Women were also an important part of telegraph operators. They were known as "admirable manipulators of instruments," and their skills and soft hands were really useful in the offices. The author also refers to Thomas Edison as the fastest operator and a person who always would be trying to find ways to make communication faster. In chapter 9, the author focuses more on how telegraph make people's life easier and was an improvement to what people had seen until that date. Before telegraph, there were a lot of problems in communication. As an example, newspapers could only report local news, and international news would only be reported weeks or months later because of how slow communication was. Telegraph changed life for communication, news, sales, wars... And people were now forced to instant reaction.

As we can see in the book The Victorian Internet, telegraph had a drastic impact in our life. Telegraph was the concept, the word that was used to talk about this revolution; but, the real machines, what made this revolution possible, were the operators. We, humans, were the machines; and, to a certain point, still are nowadays. We are the machines who make improvements in technology possible.

In other words, the telegraph was an invention designed and created by us, as we do nowadays with new Iphones, Laptops, Tablets.... So, aren't we the machines then? we create them and we make the possibility of faster communication become a reality. Our DNA are in those machines, we are the parents of technology. In the case of telegraph, this definition is even more obvious. Telegraphs are just the device in which you send a combination of 'beeps', a code, which doesn't make any sense in our heads. That combination of beeps is sent to to the telegraph operators, the real medium, who transform those beeps into an understandable human message, which is sent to us again later. We are the medium, we are the operators of the telegraph who make possible the communication between point A and point B. I like how the author of this books spends a good amount of her time talking about the operators and what they used to do in their day a day, their routine, and what the differences where between the good and the bad operators. By reading this chapters I understood that the author of the book also thought that the key to the success of the telegraph wasn't the device itself, but the people behind it making sure the message was transformed and delivered.