But the collapse of the Populists after the election of 1896 and Western Union's enormous political power
kept this reform movement at bay. Not until 1910 did Congress clearly define both the telephone and telegraph
as common carriers. By then many newspapers had glommed onto a new service: Marconi's wireless telegraph.
One has to wonder: did the desire to be rid of the Western Union monopoly influence the creation of the radio? Would there have been less pressure to develop alternative methods of communication if WU had been broken up? Or would there have been more, since each competitor would presumably be racing to generate some kind of advantage over the others?
Yeah that's a good question. Wireless was popular for maritime use even in the very early days when it was dreadfully expensive and unreliable.
I think it would have continued to develop if only as specialized shipborne equipment until it was cheap and reliable enough to compete with wires on the basis that the network is so much cheaper.
This raises a thought in my mind though: If the battle is lost over network neutrality for the wired internet, I wonder if that will spur the development of more practical satellite-based wireless internet.
PS: I think the "Victorian internet" analogy is hugely overstated. The telegraph network was an electromechanical system that used large amounts of manual labor for very little channel capacity. There were technological limitations that guaranteed it would remain expensive and exclusive.
From a strictly technical standpoint, you may be right. But I think name alludes to more than that. Specifically, it encompasses the social impact of sudden, instant, global communication (remember, it wasn't just American - there were trans-Atlantic cables operating at this point too).
It's arguable that the impact of the 'Victorian Internet' was actually greater than that of our actual internet. Of course, it's hard to separate the changes it triggered from the larger cataclysms of the Industrial Revolution, of which it was a deeply embedded part. But this, too, only onderscores the extent to which sudden, massive development in communication technology has a profound effect on nearly every business it touches.
My suspicion is that we'll be another decade into our own communications revolution before we match the scale of the social disruption produced by the onset of the Machine Age.
Well, I don't disagree that the telegraph was a major earth-shrinking development. I just disagree with the analogy with the internet.
The telegraph dramatically reduced the latency of communication (from the maximum travel speed of a courier to that of the speed of electrical impulses). It didn't improve channel capacity at all though. In fact, it had less capacity than paper in a courier's satchel.
This restricted the communication to those who can pay. And even they preferred to write crude, abbreviated messages due to cost.
The internet didn't improve latency over the telex or phone networks (in fact, you're almost certain to see more latency on the packet-switched internet than on the circuit-based PSTN). What it did do is dramatically increase channel capacity, driving the cost of communication down to the point where anyone can communicate across the planet for nominal cost -- and can even send information-rich messages in data-hungry formats like video.
The telegraph was the invention of instantaneous global communication. The internet was the democratization of it.
If you're interested in this, Tim Wu wrote a more general book about the history of information economies from the telegraph/phone through to the internet that's a pretty engaging read:
He does a great job explaining the interaction of technology, industry titans, markets, and government and how they've influenced media over the past century (and right through to the modern net neutrality debate.)
It sounds more like a case of political corruption, rather than unregulated market failure. I'm not saying market failure does not exist, just that this article doesn't seem to prove it.
