12/30/2025 at 2:57:17 PM
An interesting book on the subject of telegraph networks is The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage [1]. As well as the technical and commercial drivers, it also describes how the telegraph forced people to confront concepts like simultaneity, information being distinct from its physical medium, privacy, early approaches to encryption, etc. A fascinating book.by andyjohnson0
12/30/2025 at 7:35:15 PM
That book led me to Gutta Percha, the plastic-like coating on the wires used in these cables which was quite the innovation and made this all possible. Vulcanized rubber was the other option but performed poorly in cables and was harder to work with.https://atlantic-cable.com/Article/GuttaPercha/
The above is a fascinating and depressing history of the Gutta Percha factory that made all these cables, after joining with the cable company that supplied the actual wires. There's an 1853 travelogue piece embedded here of an author visiting the factory, where he notes in the worst parts of the factory where boiling and heat are applied, it was staffed with boys who barely made more than a dollar a week. By boys I thought it was slang for young men then I realized 1850s England was heavily using child labor.
Those cables are the product of child labor, like much of the Victorian age's industrial and textile output. Children often made up significant portions of factory workforces, sometimes 25-50% in certain textile sectors, with many under 14. I wish the stories of child labor were better told and more prominent. This abuse and exploitation of children gets quite whitewashed during this age and its nice to see it acknowledged, albeit briefly.
by zoeysmithe
12/30/2025 at 9:24:49 PM
At least in the UK the fact that the Victorians and others used a lot of child labour is well and widely known.Blake wrote the poem The Chimney Sweeper about boys sold into the trade long before the 1850s and Elizabeth Barrett Browning published The Cry of the Children in Blackwood's magazine in 1843. Charles Kingsley used his The Water Babies to question child labour and England's treatment of the poor in general in 1862-3.
No one with any pretensions to knowledge of those times can claim not to know about child labour.
by ninalanyon
12/30/2025 at 9:30:12 PM
I imagine the percent of people who know these telegram cables were made by children is a very low percentage.by zoeysmithe
12/31/2025 at 11:18:33 AM
The number of people who know anything of history at all, even history of their own peoples, their own country, their own family, is "very low". Absent of course the "history" that Hollywood and other popular media pumps out.by nickdothutton
12/31/2025 at 10:15:05 AM
I think their point is that most peoole aware of the time period know child labour in factories was prominent, especially thanks to Dickens and other authors, so most would guess or be unsurprised to find these cable factories employed children.by Xss3
12/31/2025 at 4:12:16 AM
What difference does 10 years make when you are working in a shitty factory for peanuts?by fastball
12/31/2025 at 7:02:59 AM
Is this a serious question? Then here’s a serious answer - the difference between employing a 9 year old and a 19 year old for a dangerous job is All the difference in the world.by testdelacc1
12/31/2025 at 3:01:45 PM
Did you answer the question? Your answer to "how are they different?" was... "they're different".Children have been working in dangerous environments since the dawn of humanity. Genuinely interested in why you think the industrial revolution and X years old is where we should draw the line.
by fastball
1/1/2026 at 9:37:12 PM
Because we reach a certain point where it's possible and reasonable to do so.The ultimate goal of humanity should be UBI and all humans living a content, peaceful life in which they can pursue the things that interest them.
But because of evolutionary behaviours that result in things like capitalism, we'll never reach that goal. I'll say it now: humans are currently biologically incapable of sustaining a true utopia.
by fennecbutt
1/2/2026 at 3:37:33 AM
I still do not understand how this relates to child labor during the industrial revolution.by fastball
12/30/2025 at 7:11:40 PM
The GBP/USD currency pair is still known just as "the cable".Aside from all its other uses: the telegraph gave a way to synchronize clocks. And accurate time is accurate measurement of distance.
> [...] The latest determination in 1892 is due to the cooperation of the McGill College Observatory at Montreal, Canada, with the Greenwich Observatory. [...] The final value for the longitude of the Harvard Observatory at Cambridge, as adjusted in June, 1897, is 4h 44m 31s.046 ±0s.048.
-- https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1897AJ.....18...25S
71.12936 W; give or take about 2 metres: https://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=42.38148%7E-71.12936&style...
by retrac
12/30/2025 at 9:54:55 PM
One of the major uses for the telegraph was the first funds transfers that could happen quicker than moving paper (or bullion) from one location to another. London banks would telegraph correspondent banks in India, Australia, etc.This essentially doubled the capital intensity of international trade since the goods had to move in one direction but the money could be sent instantaneously in the other.
by tor825gl
12/31/2025 at 11:10:31 AM
Made it that much less likely that anyone would withdraw their gold from banks due to the disparity in utility between deposits and cash.Paved the way for the downfall of physical money, and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline.
Thankfully we now have the necessary tool to fill that vaccuum.
by cykros
12/31/2025 at 11:58:48 AM
Paper money was well established at this point.When the pound replaced the Spanish silver dollar as the default global currency, it did so with a nascent international banking system where banknotes issued by a certain bank in a certain location could be exchanged by other banks in other locations.
Payments were thus often settled in metal rather than being transacted with it.
by tor825gl
12/31/2025 at 12:10:13 PM
Terry Pratchett’s Making Money portrays it quite well, imho. It doesn’t hurt that it’s an entertaining read.I was surprised to realise bank notes used to be tied to a bank, not a state.
by ElFitz
12/31/2025 at 1:38:47 PM
"and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline".There were major wars for millenia before the invention of the telegraph. They even names like "The Hundred Years War".
by chairmansteve
1/1/2026 at 9:34:32 PM
Second this one. I've recommended it before and I'll recommend it again. Read it as a kid and had to grab a physical copy as I couldn't find digital. Well worth the read.by fennecbutt
12/30/2025 at 5:50:19 PM
Oh wow will definitely give that book a read, very interesting.by kogasa240p
12/30/2025 at 5:59:57 PM
I've recommended that book on this board before. If you read it, I'd be curious about how you think it hits now, because part of its interest - I'd say insightfulness, at the time, but it now might risk anachronistic "charm" - was noting similar emergent behaviors between telegraph operators and early internet adopters. The technical content won't have dated, but the social parts may have.by eszed
12/30/2025 at 6:02:13 PM
I came here to recommend this fine book as well.by jgalt212