Although the movie You've Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan is billed as the first romantic comedy set in cyberspace, their great-grandparents actually got there first. And if you thought online schemes, racy chat rooms and relentless media hype are hallmarks of the Internet age, think again, says British journalist Tom Standage. The Victorian Internet has struck a chord among digerati wondering whether the telegraph's past might offer a clue to the Internet's future. In May 1844, the inventor strung a 40-mile electric wire between Washington and Baltimore, creating the first telegraph network and, by Standage's reasoning, the precursor of today's Internet. Instead of using bits and bytes, Morse used the code of dots and dashes he had invented to inaugurate the line.
Online gaming remains one of the Internet's more popular attractions today.
But public curiosity quickly turned to enthusiasm. By 1850, there were 12,000 miles of telegraph wire managed by 20 companies. Not surprisingly, Standage found that romance was a common theme among correspondents. Online courtships between lonely operators of the opposite sex became common, and stories like the 1879 novel Wired Love, which chronicled one such romance, became bestsellers. The telegraph even made possible a sort of early chat room, Standage notes, and the level of discourse was no better than it is today.