An interesting book on the subject of telegraph networks is The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage [1]. As well as the technical and commercial drivers, it also describes how the telegraph forced people to confront concepts like simultaneity, information being distinct from its physical medium, privacy, early approaches to encryption, etc. A fascinating book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet

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retrac 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The GBP/USD currency pair is still known just as "the cable".

Aside from all its other uses: the telegraph gave a way to synchronize clocks. And accurate time is accurate measurement of distance.

> [...] The latest determination in 1892 is due to the cooperation of the McGill College Observatory at Montreal, Canada, with the Greenwich Observatory. [...] The final value for the longitude of the Harvard Observatory at Cambridge, as adjusted in June, 1897, is 4h 44m 31s.046 ±0s.048.

-- https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1897AJ.....18...25S

71.12936 W; give or take about 2 metres: https://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=42.38148%7E-71.12936&style...

	▲	tor825gl 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One of the major uses for the telegraph was the first funds transfers that could happen quicker than moving paper (or bullion) from one location to another. London banks would telegraph correspondent banks in India, Australia, etc. This essentially doubled the capital intensity of international trade since the goods had to move in one direction but the money could be sent instantaneously in the other.

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zoeysmithe 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That book led me to Gutta Percha, the plastic-like coating on the wires used in these cables which was quite the innovation and made this all possible. Vulcanized rubber was the other option but performed poorly in cables and was harder to work with.

https://atlantic-cable.com/Article/GuttaPercha/

The above is a fascinating and depressing history of the Gutta Percha factory that made all these cables, after joining with the cable company that supplied the actual wires. There's an 1853 travelogue piece embedded here of an author visiting the factory, where he notes in the worst parts of the factory where boiling and heat are applied, it was staffed with boys who barely made more than a dollar a week. By boys I thought it was slang for young men then I realized 1850s England was heavily using child labor.

Those cables are the product of child labor, like much of the Victorian age's industrial and textile output. Children often made up significant portions of factory workforces, sometimes 25-50% in certain textile sectors, with many under 14. I wish the stories of child labor were better told and more prominent. This abuse and exploitation of children gets quite whitewashed during this age and its nice to see it acknowledged, albeit briefly.

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ninalanyon 13 hours ago | parent [-]

At least in the UK the fact that the Victorians and others used a lot of child labour is well and widely known.

Blake wrote the poem The Chimney Sweeper about boys sold into the trade long before the 1850s and Elizabeth Barrett Browning published The Cry of the Children in Blackwood's magazine in 1843. Charles Kingsley used his The Water Babies to question child labour and England's treatment of the poor in general in 1862-3.

No one with any pretensions to knowledge of those times can claim not to know about child labour.

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zoeysmithe 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I imagine the percent of people who know these telegram cables were made by children is a very low percentage.

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Xss3 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think their point is that most peoole aware of the time period know child labour in factories was prominent, especially thanks to Dickens and other authors, so most would guess or be unsurprised to find these cable factories employed children.

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fastball 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What difference does 10 years make when you are working in a shitty factory for peanuts?

	▲	testdelacc1 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Is this a serious question? Then here’s a serious answer - the difference between employing a 9 year old and a 19 year old for a dangerous job is All the difference in the world.

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kogasa240p 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh wow will definitely give that book a read, very interesting.

	▲	eszed 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've recommended that book on this board before. If you read it, I'd be curious about how you think it hits now, because part of its interest - I'd say insightfulness, at the time, but it now might risk anachronistic "charm" - was noting similar emergent behaviors between telegraph operators and early internet adopters. The technical content won't have dated, but the social parts may have.

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jgalt212 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I came here to recommend this fine book as well.