Challenge: Egalitarian Telegraphy

Thande

Donor
Some people have argued, using the phrase "Victorian Internet", that the change from nothing to electric telegraphy in the 19th century was a more significant shift in thinking and the way we perceive the world than the shift from that to the modern Internet, arguing that the whole 'connected global world' idea is not a new thing.

Now aside perhaps from the speed of communication, the chief difference between Victorian-era telegraphy and modern text-based communication by the Internet and mobile phones is that the latter is available to everyone. So the challenge is this: Make telegraphy-related text communication technology cheap and widespread so that anyone can use it as regularly as they would now use a mobile phone.

This need not be privately owned - it could be a broader network of "cybercafe" like telegraphy stations - but the key point is the price and the convenience.

POD after 1789 and results by 1900. Go!
 
Perhaps copper prices drop dramatically, and someone comes up with the idea of a large scale "personal" line of Telegraphs? Maybe they can be put in along with the gas, although that might limit it to large cities. IOr maybe someone invents away to print a copy of what a telegraph says, without having to know morse code, allowing people to print something close to a website (very unlikely)?
 

ninebucks

Banned
I think the problem is that ordinary people in this era have no reason, or desire, to talk to people from far away. Families, by and large, still live relatively close to each other, and, if the nostalgists are to be believed, people had a much stronger sense of community, allowing them to talk more to their friends and neighbours, and not to find refuge in anonymous strangers on the *internet.

So, a lateral way to achieve this would be a much earlier "collapse of society", make people afraid to leave their homes, make local communities disappear,
encourage people to engage in fringe interests, (strange, ultra-specific topics of conversation that one couldn't possibly bring up flippantly at the village pump). Then this could be possible.
 
Interesting idea.

I would note that up until the past few years (say 2003) you could make the same argument about the internet, that it was limited to those who could afford it. However, the always on nature of the connection and the rise of do-it-all mobile devices, particularly in East Asia, presents a model that overcomes previous limitations.

I have vague ideas about making say the US Postal Service pioneer some kind of ultra-cheap telegraphy service, such that you go to any Post Office and send a telegram for the cost of stamp (or less). The post Office then records the message and delivers.

IIRC telegraphy operators OTL were offshoots of the Railroads, since the lines were usually strung along the tracks. The railroads wouldn't like such competition and such interference would be out of character for the US Gov't at the time. In Britain, IIRC, Victorian era mail service came 2 - 3 times a day, such that one could literally send notes around London with a great degree of rapidity. The same meant that soliders on the Western Front in WWI got daily mail from home, sometimes quite quickly.

The obstacle to an egalitarian ubiquity in both countries (and probably in most of Europe as well) comes from three sources, IMHO: wealth, free time, and the amount of people engaged in agricultural labor. All three go together: it's mostly going to be the wealthy who have the free time to write letters and telegrams; it's also likely that it's the wealthy who will have lots of contacts far enough a way to make a telegram perferable to a letter. Plus, IIRC, the great majority of the population was rural in nature. If so, probably everyone they knew lived quite close by.

Two things might present opportunities to overcome these barriers: the industrial revolution and the mass migrations in the late 19th century. By causing internal population shifts, the IR has the potential to create large groups of city-dwellers who might have loved-ones in the country. Certainly it might alleiviate urban tensions if workers could quickly communicate with home rather than scheming socialistically in the alleys of tenenment blocks. The mass migration have the same affect, particularly within the British Empire: even lower class folks would sometimes migrate from Britain to the US to Canada to Australia looking for the best conditions. The problem is likely to be having the infrastructure in place to serve all those people fairly soon after they move.
 

Thande

Donor
Ninebucks: Excellent point. But it is partly addressed by what Nichomaeus says about the Industrial Revolution already beginning the breakdown of society. Perhaps this could be slightly exacerbated (e.g. by economic conditions causing breadwinners to move for work but sending money home to their families) and coupled with the required technical or supply innovations laid down by Atom.
 

HueyLong

Banned
One of my TLs had telegraphs come under the auspices of the US Post Office as a result of their military application during a war early in their development.

Might that be a start?
 
I think the main problem is that just as telegraphy spread, rival, more user-friendly technologies came onstream. There were attempts to market home telegraphy, but the telephone killed them.

Without the telephone, Morse could become an even bigger 'geek culture' phenomenon and young people begin to use it for all kinds of communication. Private telegraphs would take off for business purposes (that actually happened, again, just before the telephone killed it) and lots of professions would require Morse as routinely as they today require Word and Excel. Once you get accessories developed (telegraphic recording systems, automated punchcard switches with pre-recorded messages, out-of-office-replies, forwarding machines, telegraphic onformatiojn services etc.) the marklet would boom. I could see a type-to-tape punchcard-making machine be a killer application - people type out their messages, then feed the resulting punch tape into a telegraphic transmitter and send. It cuts around the need to know Morse just like the graphic user interface cut around the need to know BASIC.
 
Isn't there also a technical problem with 'a telegraph in every house'? Isn't there an obstacle with there only being one cable for every house (for example) that then needs to be routed outside down to a 'relay' station before being sent onto its final destination? Wouldn't a lot more of the common everyday person have to learn Morse Code?
 
There were attempts to market home telegraphy, but the telephone killed them.

Tell me more.

I could see a type-to-tape punchcard-making machine be a killer application - people type out their messages, then feed the resulting punch tape into a telegraphic transmitter and send. It cuts around the need to know Morse just like the graphic user interface cut around the need to know BASIC.

You don't even need punchcards. It shouldn't be too much of a hassle to directly combine a typewriter with a telegraph. Press a character and the machine sends it across the wire in Morse code. The reverse process would be a bit more difficult, but I'm sure a solution can be worked out. I have these babies in my TL, "Has it been more than 3 years since I started working on this monster?".
 
As already mentioned the telephone should have to be butterflied away. Then the invention of the typewriter coupled with a telegraph and an punch strip you'd have an early telex that everybody would be able to use without having to learn morse.

But I think that the early stage as carlton_bach described it would be teenagers or rather students getting the "morse-fever" and this way mail each other. One of the games would be to be the fastest operater outdoing any reciever and then you'd have to rerun the message which would then be "publicised" by the original sender.

How then to get to this happy state?
During the Slesvig Wars the Danish postal service didn't charge soldiers for their letters making for at boom in mail delivery.
This could make for following lowering of prices on mail and telegraph for everyone to take part in this new tech.
 

Thande

Donor
As already mentioned the telephone should have to be butterflied away. Then the invention of the typewriter coupled with a telegraph and an punch strip you'd have an early telex that everybody would be able to use without having to learn morse.

But I think that the early stage as carlton_bach described it would be teenagers or rather students getting the "morse-fever" and this way mail each other. One of the games would be to be the fastest operater outdoing any reciever and then you'd have to rerun the message which would then be "publicised" by the original sender.

How then to get to this happy state?
During the Slesvig Wars the Danish postal service didn't charge soldiers for their letters making for at boom in mail delivery.
This could make for following lowering of prices on mail and telegraph for everyone to take part in this new tech.

Nice ideas there. It provides a pleasing symmetry for the OTL electronic communications revolution if it's propelled by youth adoption.
 
I think a reason you'll never see something like this parallel the OTL internet is because there's no efficient way to store this information without computers, really. So you could never have a telegraph "message board" (or even something more primitive) unless you had some sort of recording setup, or server. Now, perhaps you could make some incredibly complicated mechanical device that would record messages onto whatever format (punchcards, I guess), then would recognize incoming messages (transcribed
to punchcards via a separate machine, then sent into the server) as requesting specific information; then, the automated system would check its library of punchcards and recall the requested information and automatically send it back to the original user.

Now, I'm pretty sure that's all possible with Difference-Engine like technology; but just because it's possible doesn't mean it's practical. Maybe the military could adopt something like this, or a capitalist allow private citizens to use one for incredible costs (the price of operating the thing alone would be ridiculous). Of course, the thing that annoys me most about Steampunk-esque scenarios is when they just completely parallel real life but with steam engines and such. So ignore everything I just said.

Wait, I've just had a sweet idea; some sort of library that works on this principal. It's not a message board or website as we think of it, but you can still recall information from anywhere in the world from its central location in London. Individual users would be given access codes to put at the front of their telegrams to provide authentication that they had actually paid for the service/been allowed to use it by the British Government. Perhaps the thing would go "live" to a series of parties all over the world, with the first book just being a Bible or something suitably Victorian.

Hell, you could also have other polities run one; but, of course, the issue is, why would you want to access a library by telegraph when you could just own a copy of the book? Well, perhaps you could set up something, again, for military commanders or secret agents, that would have sensitive government information, again, with safeguards to prevent enemy countries from getting a hold of it. But for people who would need constant updates on the world's situation, this could be very, very important. They could access it when they needed it, not when their contact could send it to them, and it would always be up to date. Also, if we've already got this library function, you could set up some sort of function so that people could add to it, and boom, email.

I'm just rambling, now...
 
Someone actually suggested that back in the early '30s. But then there was the war and everyone ignored him. He amassed a collection of millions of index cards, but the Nazis burnt them.
 
Someone actually suggested that back in the early '30s. But then there was the war and everyone ignored him. He amassed a collection of millions of index cards, but the Nazis burnt them.

I'll believe it; if I just thought it up in an afternoon, I'm sure someone who actually cared about it thought it up OTL.
 

Thande

Donor
Wait, I've just had a sweet idea; some sort of library that works on this principal. It's not a message board or website as we think of it, but you can still recall information from anywhere in the world from its central location in London. Individual users would be given access codes to put at the front of their telegrams to provide authentication that they had actually paid for the service/been allowed to use it by the British Government. Perhaps the thing would go "live" to a series of parties all over the world, with the first book just being a Bible or something suitably Victorian.

Someone actually suggested that back in the early '30s. But then there was the war and everyone ignored him. He amassed a collection of millions of index cards, but the Nazis burnt them.

Very nice ideas. I don't see any reason why it couldn't have been tried earlier than the 30s - sounds like a good project for the 1890s era.
 
Could a POD perhaps be that Babbage realises that the Analytical Engine isn't that practical early on, and instead gets funding for a "web of knowledge" using telegraphy?

Actually, we don't even need him, just some librarian that never rose to prominence OTL happens to mention an interesting little idea to an engineer friend of his...:p
 
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