> In the age of sail, sending international mail was no easy matter. A sealed note would be left with some ship going in roughly the right direction, and then luck more than anything would decide the outcome. This was before steam ships, before the rail road and the telegraph, and it could well take a year or more before the sender eventually recieved a reply. The preserved letters from Lossius are full of references to other letters that never made it across the oceans.

This was striking to read; it's absolutely impossible for me to imagine a pre-telegraph world with such utterly slow communications where people nevertheless had friends and family separated by years of latency.

It makes me appreciate the significance of the electric telegraph and of long-range communication that is not limited by the speed of any physical vehicle. I recently read a short romance novel (called "Wired Love") published in 1880 about two telegraph operators who meet online (well, on the wire), use spare time on the wire to talk (and flirt) with each other; and eventually fall in love -- before even having met each other IRL or knowing each other's IRL names! There's even a quite modern impersonation that happens -- someone else steals the identifier of the operator the main character is in love with, and proceeds to be an rude asshole to her. Almost like IRC nick stealing, except a century or so earlier! The antics involving the telegraphs were, amusingly enough, the least antiquated part of the novel, as there's an entirely shocking amount of aspects of Internet communication/relationship practices that have pretty clear equivalents in that telegraph-era book. For example, the main character disdains the telephone and prefers the elegant and more technically-involved telegraph, she and her partner "clasp hands" over the wire in the same way people do "/me hugs" on IRC, she gets called crazy for laughing to herself and "smiling at vacancy" while telegraphing with her online lover -- and after they've met IRL, her suitor even installs a private telegraph wire from her bedroom to his. There's something quite endearing about reading an old novel and realising that the people with access to real-time text chat more than a century ago might have used it in quite similar ways as people use it today.