the telegraph/telephone:
With the sum total of human knowledge residing on our smart phones, it’s easy to think of the Victorian age as primitive, but the information age was born during this period with the:
- post (12 deliveries a day)
- telegraph (SIGN: “He telegraphed to me from London that he had arrived all safe”)
- telephone (SIGN: “I can step across the road and telephone to make sure”)
- the Underground (REDH: “We travelled by the Underground as far as Aldersgate”)
- and the competing railway companies (COPP: “ ‘There is a train at half-past nine,’ said I, glancing over my Bradshaw”)
One has to imagine that to the Victorians their age was as fully at the forefront of modern technology as is ours. Some have argued that the impact of the telegraph exceeds that of the internet.