Electrical Telegraph - Applications

Applications

In many instances, applications of the electrical telegraph in the long period between its invention and demise as a significant carrier of information were similar to the Internet. Telegraphy allowed applications such as message routing, social networking (between Morse operators—with gossiping and even marriages among operators being celebrated via telegraph), instant messaging, cryptography and text coding, abbreviated language slang, network security experts, hackers, wire fraud, mailing lists, spamming, e-commerce, stock exchange minute-by-minute reports (via the ticker tape machine invented by Edison), and many others. These points of comparisons have spurred modern commentators, such as Tom Standage, to refer to the 19th Century telegraphic network as the "Victorian Internet".