The “victorian internet” reaches halfway to cairo: Cape tanganyika telegraphs, 1875-1926

Abstract

In 1998 Tom Standage published The Victorian Internet, which hailed the early telegraph as the forerunner of the Internet, creating a nineteenth-century network of instantaneous electronic communication used by bureaucracies and businesses across the world. McNeill & McNeill (2003: 5-8) and van Dijk (2006: 23) have similarly argued that the Global Web of modem communications can be dated back to the invention of the telegraph 160 years ago.1.