Francis Foster

Now, today we have jet planes and 19-year-old illiterates Instagramming from Bali, right?

It's a different world.

But in 1791, chances that you could travel more than a dozen miles, two dozen miles, to this day, I think, to join the Travelers Club in London, in Pall Mall.

you have to say that you've traveled 400 miles from the founding stone of the club.

So even a trip across the channel to Calais, which a lot of people tried to do to join the club back in the day, didn't count.

You had to go far afield.

And 400 miles was considered to be this enormous distance.

So a correspondent would be someone from this community who traveled and wrote a letter home.

And these letters would be reprinted in the newspaper.

Like, this is what I saw in Paris.

This is what I saw in Amsterdam or Hong Kong or Shanghai.

And they would often print who the letter was addressed to.

And even like, I hope Sally's OK.

Like, that would show up in the piece.

These were very homespun kind of things originally.

But with the mass printing, they begin to think about employing their own correspondence.

And the next bit of the revolution comes with the telegraph.

The telegraph is the closest thing to the internet that the 19th century has.

Because the telegraph means that you can send a large amount of information

almost instantly over an incredible distance.