This Week in History: Communication Technology Spreads Around the World:

Can you hear me now? Good, because this week in history is all about the telegraph and the very beginning of our obsession with instant communication. July 25, 1866 --- The Shrinking World: The sheer interconnectedness of the world is both staggering and mundane. Like most of the technologies that underpin our world, we see rapid communication as we see the wallpaper in our living rooms: always present, sometimes remarked on but rarely the subject of much concerted thought. And yet, at the flip of a switch, the press of a button and we are instantaneously connected to all corners of the world. To the densest jungles and the most isolated mountain ranges our calls ricochet from satellite to satellite to tower, reducing the thousands of miles separating us to the three steps to your kitchen phone. Humans are, if anything, exceptionally adaptable, and we have absorbed this useful technology so completely into our world that it is now inextricable from it. Can you imagine business, politics, even personal relationships, surviving long in the absence of instant communication? Yet, for all of its importance to our modern way of life, long-distance communication as we recognize it is relatively new in the history of the world. Sure the cell phone is remarkable and phones in general amazing, but the true grandfather of rapid communication is the telegraph.

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