The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

A new paperback edition of the first book by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses--the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first Internet, which revolutionized the nineteenth century even more than the Internet has the twentieth and twenty first.

The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.

Tom Standage is technology editor at The Economist magazine and the author of four history books, A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005), The Turk (2002), The Neptune File (2000) and The Victorian Internet (1998), two of which have been serialized as Book of the Week on Radio 4. The Victorian Internet was made into a Channel 4 documentary, How The Victorians Wired the World. Tom has previously covered science and technology for a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Wired and Prospect. He holds a degree in engineering and computer science from Oxford University, and is the least musical member of a musical family. He is married and lives in Greenwich, London, with his wife and daughter.