The Victorian Internet

Having been inaugurated with Samuel Morse's first official telegram, "What hath God wrought!" in 1844, telegraph service in the United States was discontinued in 2006 with a rather more prosaic message: "Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage."

The telegram is dead; long live the telegram.

In addition to being the first war in which a government had to take the existence of the telegraph into account when making news public, the Crimean War was the first in which the telegraph played a strategic role

worldwide web of wires that trussed up the entire planet.

In 1872, Western Union (by then the dominant telegraph company in the United States) decided to implement a new, secure scheme to enable sums of up to $100 to be transferred between several hundred towns by telegraph.

By 1880, there were almost 100,000 miles of undersea telegraph cable.

This system was large enough to handle small parcels, and on one occasion a cat was even sent from one post office to another along the tubes.

And a lot of extraordinarily bad poetry was written.

characters like William "Buffalo Bill" Cody and "Pony Bob" Haslam took about 10 days to carry messages over the 1,800 miles between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento. But as soon as the telegraph line along the route was in place, messages could be sent instantly, and the Pony Express was closed down.

The line was soon completed to Baltimore, and on May 24, 1844, Morse officially inaugurated it by transmitting a message from the Supreme Court chamber in Washington to Vail in Baltimore: "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT."