Impact Of Technology In The Victorian Era

Diego Pitones
Mrs. Homon
Freshman English, 8
19 March 2018
Industrial Revolution One may wonder how Britain’s Industry and Economy grew largely during the Victorian Era. The answer is the telegraph. Communications in the 1800s advanced rapidly within the United Kingdom because of the creation of the telegraph. Railroads were constructed, which then assisted the spread of this new found technology. Many people including William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone, Samuel Morse, and more helped the idea of the telegraph grow along the way. The technology of the telegraph in the Victorian Era was an advancement of communication used to assist many tasks allowing the economy and industry to grow on a mass scale. The thought throughout the years before

It also gained many uses along the years such as catching criminals. At the beginning of 1845, a man named John Tarwell killed his wife using poison, panicked and scared, he ran away. Tarwell was caught getting off a train in London thanks to Alas, a stationmaster at Slough who telegraphed the police after hearing of the murder. There have also been other uses for the telegraph like political leaders contacting each other. In 1858, Queen Victoria sent a 99-word telegraph message to James Buchanan, the US President at the time. The message to James Buchanan took 16 hours to send across the Atlantic Ocean which had been laid with over 2,500 miles of telegraph wires. In a British History article, Victorian Technology, it states, “In 1866 Brunel’s huge ship, The Great Eastern, laid a durable telegraph cable across the Atlantic” (Victorian Technology). Eventually, there was telegraph wires worldwide. Britain constructed lines to India in 1870, and lines to Australia in 1872 via submarine. The telegraph was also used to report news to the news companies for their newspapers. In the years 1902-1903 alone, there were over 92 million telegrams sent making that period of time the peak of the telegraph. One other time the telegraph was used was during World War I where people in offices and on the fronts of battle sent messages back and forth, some carrying bad news. If the telegraph was never created, Alexander Graham Bell would have never created the telephone in 1876 leading him to create The Telephone Company in 1878. The possibilities of the telegraph were endless, from being used in the First World War, small factories, and business to being used to marry couples that live across the country from one another. In the book, Victorian Internet, it states, “...but within a few months of the electric telegraph being open to the public, it was being used for something that even the most farsighted of telegraph