https://atlantic-cable.com/Article/GuttaPercha/
The above is a fascinating and depressing history of the Gutta Percha factory that made all these cables, after joining with the cable company that supplied the actual wires. There's an 1853 travelogue piece embedded here of an author visiting the factory, where he notes in the worst parts of the factory where boiling and heat are applied, it was staffed with boys who barely made more than a dollar a week. By boys I thought it was slang for young men then I realized 1850s England was heavily using child labor.
Those cables are the product of child labor, like much of the Victorian age's industrial and textile output. Children often made up significant portions of factory workforces, sometimes 25-50% in certain textile sectors, with many under 14. I wish the stories of child labor were better told and more prominent. This abuse and exploitation of children gets quite whitewashed during this age and its nice to see it acknowledged, albeit briefly.
Blake wrote the poem The Chimney Sweeper about boys sold into the trade long before the 1850s and Elizabeth Barrett Browning published The Cry of the Children in Blackwood's magazine in 1843. Charles Kingsley used his The Water Babies to question child labour and England's treatment of the poor in general in 1862-3.
No one with any pretensions to knowledge of those times can claim not to know about child labour.
Children have been working in dangerous environments since the dawn of humanity. Genuinely interested in why you think the industrial revolution and X years old is where we should draw the line.
The ultimate goal of humanity should be UBI and all humans living a content, peaceful life in which they can pursue the things that interest them.
But because of evolutionary behaviours that result in things like capitalism, we'll never reach that goal. I'll say it now: humans are currently biologically incapable of sustaining a true utopia.
Aside from all its other uses: the telegraph gave a way to synchronize clocks. And accurate time is accurate measurement of distance.
> [...] The latest determination in 1892 is due to the cooperation of the McGill College Observatory at Montreal, Canada, with the Greenwich Observatory. [...] The final value for the longitude of the Harvard Observatory at Cambridge, as adjusted in June, 1897, is 4h 44m 31s.046 ±0s.048.
-- https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1897AJ.....18...25S
71.12936 W; give or take about 2 metres: https://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=42.38148%7E-71.12936&style...
This essentially doubled the capital intensity of international trade since the goods had to move in one direction but the money could be sent instantaneously in the other.
Paved the way for the downfall of physical money, and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline.
Thankfully we now have the necessary tool to fill that vaccuum.
When the pound replaced the Spanish silver dollar as the default global currency, it did so with a nascent international banking system where banknotes issued by a certain bank in a certain location could be exchanged by other banks in other locations.
Payments were thus often settled in metal rather than being transacted with it.
I was surprised to realise bank notes used to be tied to a bank, not a state.
There were major wars for millenia before the invention of the telegraph. They even names like "The Hundred Years War".