Kassia St Clair

And that's really exciting for people.

There's lots of practical applications, but there's also a real kind of draw for the Victorian imagination, particularly the kind of colonial British imagination for this kind of network of cables.

And this is very compelling to the Victorian mind, particularly the British mind, because they see themselves as like the nerve centre, the brain, and their influence is spreading out across the world.

They love that.

And you get this kind of standardization of time.

You get kind of the ability to react very quickly, particularly to unrest.

Again, you know, that's very helpful in colonial contexts.

You also get that, you know, in very large countries like America, like Australia, like, you know, the Russian Empire, for example, it's really, really, really helpful to be able to send messages from one end of the country to the other.

It really helps bring a country together and

rule it but also kind of administer it far more seamlessly and makes it feel much more cohesive and it really has this effect of like shrinking the world another sort of metaphor that's used is that the telegraph system has leveled the world and now all of mankind is sort of standing on one plane because you have this ability to get in touch with people really quickly and really seamlessly

No, I really agree.

I think this story is really appealing to me in kind of being a story that allows people to imagine the future and kind of is popular and widespread and has this kind of surprisingly subtle but powerful impact on public perception of a new technology and allows people to kind of throw out the possibilities of a technology into a kind of wider sphere.

Yeah, you know, I think there've been lots of kind of ways in which people either like to see the telegraph at the time or now like to reflect on its impact.

You know, people have talked about it as being like the Victorian internet.

People have liked to talk about it as like, you know, annihilating or flattening space or time.

It was really exciting to people, this capacity to transmit information instantaneously, you know, particularly in America, the very first kind of,

telegraph message sent kind of using the telegraph system in America was, look what God hath wrought.

There was this feeling that this was miraculous and really significant.

And it must have felt quite God-like.

Great.