Communication revolution
The building of the railway network was the major achievement of the Victorian period, changing for ever both social patterns and the landscape of Britain. The great engineers, Stephenson, Brunel, Locke, Vignoles and many others built their lines across hills and valleys, across mountains and marshland and over great rivers with determination and style, and often regardless of cost. Their legacy are the great embankments, viaducts, tunnels and bridges that cover the face of Britain, in many cases still visible long after the trains they served have disappeared. Their stations, wondrous constructions in iron and glass and great cathedrals to modernity, brought a new building type into British culture.
As the railway was, in essence, a British creation, it was readily exported to many parts of the world, as a concept, and in component form. British engineers, British construction teams and British capital built railways throughout the Empire, in the Americas and in many parts of Europe. The famous railway contractor Thomas Brassey built railways in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Russia, India, Argentina and Australia. Imperial railway building projects were often inspired by strategic as well as industrial and commercial motives, but such projects, notably in India and Africa, opened up huge and long lasting markets to British manufacturers.British-made locomotives, rolling stock and railway equipment were exported around the world throughout the Victorian period.
'The building of the railway network was the major achievement of the Victorian period, changing for ever both social patterns and the landscape of Britain.'
The spread of the railway in Victorian Britain was closely linked to the development of the electric telegraph. The idea of communicating via electricity dates back to the eighteenth century but it was the understanding of electromagnetism from the 1820s that gave the idea a practical reality. In 1837 Cooke and Wheatstone developed the electric telegraph which used an electric current to move magnetic needles and thus transmit messages in code. The first operational telegraph system linked Euston station and Camden town, and from there it spread all over the railway network, used both to carry messages and to control signalling. The technology of the telegraph rapidly expanded, making possible mass communication on both national and global scales. With instruments in every post office, the telegraph, and its visible offspring, the telegram, personal communication on a scale hitherto inconceivable became commonplace. A telegraph cable was laid across the Channel in 1851, followed by others across the Irish and North Seas.
In 1866 Brunel's huge ship, the Great Eastern, laid a durable telegraph cable across the Atlantic. The global network spread rapidly, with many countries establishing their own systems. Colonial, military and commercial implications were quickly appreciated. By 1878 Britain had constructed two overland and one maritime telegraph links to India, part of a network that by the end of the century had reached almost every corner of the world. Related to the telegraph, but far more practical on a personal level, was the telephone, developed by the Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. By 1887 there were 26,000 telephones in use in Britain (and 150,000 in the United States) and multiple switchboards had been installed in most major towns and cities.
With the development by Marconi of practical radio transmissions at the very end of the nineteenth century, the foundations for the global communications systems of the twenty first century were in place in Victorian Britain.
In Britain, the attitudes and achievements of the Victorians are still part of many aspects of modern life today. These legacies are probably most tangible in the fields of communication. The Victorians not only built a British railway network which was more than twice as large as today's network but often operated with greater effiency. Urban transport systems such as buses and underground railways were also created by the Victorians. With those systems came the habit of commuting, one of the most durable and least appealing of nineteenth century legacies. The post service, the electric telegraph which was the forerunner of today's internet and the phone paved the way for the making of a world which relies heavily on complex structures of domestic and worldwide communications.
Published: 2001-09-01
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