Friday, May. 07, 2010 - 1:43 p.m.
Th Victorian Internet
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Perhaps the only way of explaining to modern people what submarine cables, telegraphs and telephone lines represented to another generation who played out their whole lives in the 19th Century where this was the cats ass as far as high teck communication was concerned. A message from point A to point B that for all time prior had taken months - suddenly through the agency of electricity and wires took just minutes ! Mind blowing for the human race
For this book to make any sence it was essential that a modern concept tag gets transposed _backwards into the past so that the moderns can grasp a value or significance that would otherwise be completely lost on them. No, instant communication had not always been around not even successful communication..not even communication in its rudest form. People second guessed their way through life, or consented to rigid forms of social dicipline to get any information about anything at all beyond what they could perceive with their own bodily 5 senses. Now was there any expectation of ever understanding more than what you could see. hear or smell or taste.It was a simplier life but a much more uncertain existance without information to act on.
an example of reverse transposition is equating the strength of a horse onto mechanical work machines.
blah blah this mechanical engine is rated at XYX horsepower, the next machine incarnation many many more horsepower-- until we get to a point where nobody understands horses and what one horsepower is and still that archaic value is applied to something right out of its league like the thrust of the bbooster stages of a Saturn rocket pro rated at millions of horses -implying accurately but absurdly a notion of vast herds of horses galloping skywards into the Milky Way,
like WTF ?
even the Metric system is not be of any help straightening out _that one
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21st Centurt baby:
-Daddy, what's a horse?
21st Century adult:
- I dunno honey' I think Europeans ate them all after the unicorns went extinct a million years ago
