Maybe you heard the old saw: "What goes around, comes around".
Maybe you heard the old saw: "History repeats itself".
Maybe you heard the old saw: "Same soup. Different bowl".
Maybe you heard the old saw: "It's the same old dead horse in the bathtub".
No.
You never heard this one.
Only I heard this one.
From my seventh grade socialite math teacher, Miss Joyner.
Never mind.
So a question now:
What technology has become most significant in our daily lives in the last
decade?
There is more than one answer.
But you could easily argue....
That the Internet.............
Matches.......................
The Internet is a new thing...
Is it not....................?
Not necessarily..............!
Well, there was the ARPANET.
A cold war Caesar salad of some GOVs, some MILs and some EDUs.
Triviologists recall the ALOHANET.
A Darwinian precursor to our own packet radio network.
Very esoteric, though.
Our Internet is actually the second coming.
What came around today already has come around a few centuries before.
There was another Internet and the first operational network devices went on
line 200-plus years ago in France at 11:00AM on the 2nd of March, 1791.
But these network devices were not computers.
Not as we know computers to be.
Not digital.
Analog.
They were five foot tall pivoting wooden panels.
Painted black on one side.
White on the other.
Peripherals came in the form of clocks and telescopes.
The operating system was a hand-written codebook.
The first two transceivers were spaced about ten miles apart and two guys, Claude and Rene Chappe reckoned they would call their new communications contraption the TACHYGRAPH, taken from the Greek meaning "fast writer" but quickly the name was modified to another which translated as "fast writer" and the new word was TELEGRAPH! This was the debut of some significant history that would repeat itself 200- plus years later with some better equipment.
Hi, this is Bill Baran - N2FNH - with a history lesson, a book review and a homework assignment from the Packet Radio Junkbox, a monthly feature heard exclusively over This Week In Amateur Radio. Last month, I was loitering in George Bowen's kitchen. George W2XBS is our Techn-Wiz here at This Week. George had dragged out some old Q-Streets that were dumpsterbound for me to peruse and I caught sight of a letter to the editor discussing a recent review done on a volume entitled: "The Victorian Internet", authored by Tom Standage. Catchy title.
A fan of SF magazines such as Analog and Issac Asimov's, it struck me that this might be a title you might see in those august and somewhat mentally enlightening pulps so I sallied forth to the local bibliotech and secured a copy and summarily digested it. "The Victorian Internet" is the story of the telegraph. The Chappe brother's black and white panels gave way to a more sophisticated optical telegraph, a small house with a large swinging arm tower assembly overhead that, depending on how and where the arm was positioned, could be translated into letters and numbers.
"By the mid-1830's, lines of telegraph towers stretched across much of western Europe, forming a sort of mechanical Internet of whirling arms and blinking shutters and passing news and official messages from one place to another". The author goes on to say: "The continental network eventually reached from Paris...to Amsterdam...to Venice with other networks in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia and Britain bringing the total number of telegraph towers in Europe to almost a thousand".
This continental network was actually a large network of several optical telegraph networks and by extension this is the basic definition of an internet. The first suggestion of a telegraph system making use of electromagnetism to send messages was put forth by an anonymous author identified by the initials C.M. in an article appearing in Scots Magazine dated February 17th, 1753, The title of the article was: "An expeditious Method of Conveying Intelligence". From there, "The Victorian Internet" launches into a three decade-long fast track documenting the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph, how undersea cables came to be designed and built, how the career of the telegrapher, the men and the women behind the key fed into the maturity of the telegraph here in the United States and overseas, the merging of these systems into an inter-networked global communications web.
But who knew that something as mundane as the quiet humming and clicking of a newlyinvented ticker tape machine would be the harbinger of hands-free operation and the death knell of a choice career in working the key, a doorway into things like fully duplexed, and then completely multiplexed automated transmissions.
And then the ultimate decline and replacement of the electromagnetic telegraph by the equally electromagnetic but much more consumer-accessible "number please" telephone. And of course, along the way, all the names associated with this prehistoric Internet like Francis Ronalds, William Cooke, Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison.
And this is where I will leave the tale to hang because I do not want to ruin the story for you by telling the whole schmear. So run to the library right after This Week in Amateur Radio and borrow this book. And to further entice, you will learn how the worldwide electrical telegraph network gave rise to some rather creative business enterprises, the DOT COMs of the 1800s. Likewise, romance and crime, the bastion of 21st century television and hacking and cracking, the bane of 21st century Internet were also part of the territory of the electromagnetic telegraph network.
After reading "The Victorian Internet", it occurred to me that if the Internet were nothing more than a network of networks, then there are actually all sorts of networks and internets out there. But I'm not talking about Microsoft or MAC or TCPIP or AX25. Nothing so digital. Nothing so electronic as that. What came to mind was Analog networks. Physical networks. Mechanical networks.
Prior to the development of the first optical telegraphs, the news moved as fast as word of mouth, horses, carriages and seafaring vessels could carry it. But there were a few primitive though fully operational communications schemes in place in some seemingly uncivilized localities. Every kid growing up in the 1950's USA knew from watching Davey Crockett on TV that those nasty Injuns were sending smoke signals from one mountain to the other.Tarzan movies taught us kids that those pesky African natives beat on drums or big fallen tree trucks or sometimes even whistled really loud between mountain valleys. Analog long distance point-to-point communications. Using an agreed upon transmission protocol.
If these nasty injuns and pesky natives were so savage and uncivilized, how come those clever Europeans and us feisty Americans didn't have e-mail like that. We can bring this analog network communications theory a little closer to home, maybe even in your own home,especially you live now or grew up in a big city apartment. If your apartment had steam radiator pipes or air vents or even better, a dumb waiter, than Mrs. Blum could shout to Mrs. Cohen and relay all the latest neighborhood happenings and general purpose gossip. The telephone? Why? Shouting down the air vent or the dumb waiter is more organic. More granular. More whole earth.
Mrs. Blum's voice is channeled through several hundred feet of ducting that by its very unintentional design provides considerable amplification albeit with some inharmonic distortion to the receiving party, namely Mrs. Cohen. Internet Phone today is the air vent of yesterday. Pounding a broomstick on the ceiling or banging on the steam pipes to express anger or displeasure is yet another approach to point-to-point communications and not unlike ICQ, AOL or MSN instant messaging except the emoticon is the message and the message is the emoticon. Such a message need not be abrasive or angry, The pop singers Tony Orlando and Dawn offered up a somewhat more positive scenario in a song by suggesting to a girl fiend on the next flight up that she "knock three times on the ceiling if you want me. Twice on the pipes if the answer is no".
Again, we see an inter-connected ceiling and pipe network and a previously agreed-to protocol. Pretty advanced thinking for the 1970's!
And, how about those tubes? I learned in "The Victorian Internet" that pneumatic tube systems were developed during the rise of the electrical telegraph as a means to help increase the volume and distribution of the hand-written message from office to office and building to building. In fact, in localities like New York City and Paris, these tube networks were so vast they covered much of their respective cities. You still see these pneumatic tubes in use at many banks where you may have the choice of the teller's window or access to the teller via pneumatic tube. A kind of A-mail or perhaps a very simple form of A-commerce. That's "A" for what now? So finally, your homework: To the library! The title: The Victorian Internet The author: Tom Standage. The publisher: Walker and Company of New York City. Don't ask what the Dewey decimal number is. I don't know. Or You could (ick!) Embrace the paid model. As of this writing, the paperback was still available from the publisher. It's not terribly gelt-intensive. About 12 US. - 30 -
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