From The Victorian Internet

On an April day in 1746 at the grand con-
vent of the Carthusians in Paris, about two
hundred monks arranged themselves in a long, snaking
line. Each monk held one end of a twenty—f1ve—foot iron
wire in each hand, connecting him to his neighbor on ei-
ther side. Together, the monks and their connecting wires
formed a line over a mile long.
Once the line was complete, the abbé ]ean—Antoine
Nollet, a noted French scientist, took a primitive electrical
battery and, without warning, connected it to the line of
monks—giving all of them a powerful electric shock.
Nollet did not go around zapping monks with static
electricity for fun; his experiment had a serious scientific
objective. Like many scientists of the time, he was measur-
ing the properties of electricity to find out how far it could
be transmitted along wires and how fast it traveled. The
simultaneous exclamations and contortions of a mile—long
line of monks revealed that electricity could be transmit-
ted over a great distance; and as far as N ollet could tell, it
covered that distance instantly.
This was a big deal.
It suggested that in theory, it ought to be possible to
harness electricity to build a signaling device capable of
sending messages over great distances incomparably faster
than a human messenger could carry them.
At the time, sending a message to someone a hundred
miles away took the best part of a day—the time it took a
messenger traveling on horseback to cover the distance.
This unavoidable delay had remained constant for thou-
sands of years; it was as much a fact of life for George
Washington as it was for Henry VIII, Charlemagne, and
Iulius Caesar.
As a result, the pace of life was slow. Rulers dis-
patched armies to distant lands and waited months for
news of victory or defeat; ships sailed over the horizon on
epic voyages, and those on board were not seen or heard
from again for years. News of an event spread outward in
a slowly growing circle, like a ripple in a pond, whose edge
moved no faster than a galloping horse or a swift—sailing
ship.
To transmit information any more quickly, something
that moved faster than a horse or a ship was clearly re-
quired. Sound, which travels at a speed of about twelve
miles per minute, is one means of speedier communica-
tion. lf a church bell strikes one olclock, a monk standing
in a field half a mile away knows what time it is about
two seconds later. A horse—borne messenger, in contrast,
setting out from the church precisely on the hour to de—
liver the message "It is one o’clock,” would take a couple
of minutes to cover the same distance.
Light also offers an expeditious way to communicate.
If the monk has keen eyesight and the air is clear, he may
be able to make out the hands of the church clock. And
since light (which travels at nearly 200,000 miles per sec-
ond) covers short distances almost instantly, the informa-
tion that it is a particular time of day effectively travels
from the clock face to the monk in what seems to be no
time at all.
Now experiments by Nollet and others showed that
electricity also seemed capable of traveling great distances
instantaneously. Unlike light, electricity could be trans-
mitted along wires and around corners; a line of sight
from one place to another was not needed. This meant that
if an electric shock was administered at one o’clock via a
half—mile—long wire running from the church to a distant
monk, he would know exactly what time it was, even if he
was underground or indoors or otherwise out of sight of
the clock tower. Electricity held out the promise of high-speed signaling.