![]() “Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers,” Gleick writes, although “newspapers could not wait to put the technology to work.” All of a sudden, information was not just a tool but also a commodity. The telegraph, after all, changed everything when it was popularized in the 1840s by 1858, a transatlantic cable had put Britain’s Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan in direct contact, while news, gossip and commercial orders blazed across the wires. It was like the bursting of a dam whose presence had not even been known.” This was not a doubling or tripling of transmission speed it was a leap of many orders of magnitude. … Information that just two years earlier had taken days to arrive at its destination could now be there - anywhere - in seconds. “‘The transmission of thought, the vital impulse of matter.’ The excitement was global but the effects were local. “What was the essence of the achievement?” Gleick asks. Partway through “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,” James Gleick describes a technological innovation so transformative that it was heralded as “one of the grand way-marks in the onward and upward march of the human intellect” by the New York Times. ![]()
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