Chapter 13. Telecommunications
Until the invention of the telegraph, no reliable communications traveled long distance faster than via a human letter carrier. That didn't stop people from trying, so in the pre-telegraph days a lot of exciting technologies promised to revolutionize communications—smoke signals, semaphore flags, and carrier pigeons were all attempts to break the bond between messenger and message.
The telegraph was able to let the messenger rest his feet and put pigeons back where they belong, atop the heads of dignitaries' statues in the park. With the advent of the telegraph, messages finally were able to travel at the ultimate speed limit of the universe—the speed of light.
Well, not quite. The telegraph only changed the speed ...
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