Kassia St Clair

You've got the female victim who's morally ambiguous or grey.

And that was something that newspapers

really enjoyed at the time, you know, sort of kind of suggesting that her death, her end, was a product of her lifestyle or her life choices.

You also have this idea that progress can defeat crime or the kind of inexorable...

triumph of progress and this is something that newspapers really enjoyed too and so this particular crime this particular story has real appeal to newspapers of um of the age and they make a lot of the kind of the role of the telegraph it's the sort of the role of progress the role of science um having this kind of ability to kind of almost create a kind of godlike effect you know the fact that man reasonable intellectual man can with their inventions kind of

foil a crime is really kind of a compelling narrative.

Stories like this that almost kind of act like parables and are really kind of easy to grasp

the role of technology and are kind of widely transmitted because they're about murder and they're kind of juicy and salacious, do have a surprising impact on the way that people perceive these new technologies.

No longer is it just like boring train timetables and helping to overcome the kind of idiosyncrasies of local time.

It's kind of playing a role in the capture of a wrongdoer or an evil person.

And that's really compelling.

It's kind of a really sort of good demonstration of the

capacity of this new technology.

So I think it's one of those things where the success of the telegram, I think, was already assured.

There are so many forces pushing it forward, but time is a big one.

The fact that you can relay accurate time around a country, but also around the world, is really key.

Within a few years, particularly after the telegraph has spread globally,

astronomers at Greenwich Mean Time are able to transmit time across the world and kind of standardize time.

you also have big financial interests.

The fact that once you lay a cable between America and the UK, and basically these cables crisscross the world, and suddenly you're able to send financial information across the world relatively quickly.