Hacker News Reader

Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

The GBP/USD currency pair is still known just as "the cable".

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...

View on HN

One of the major uses for the telegraph was the first funds transfers that could happen quicker than moving paper (or bullion) from one location to another. London banks would telegraph correspondent banks in India, Australia, etc.

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.

Made it that much less likely that anyone would withdraw their gold from banks due to the disparity in utility between deposits and cash.

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.

Paper money was well established at this point.

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.

Terry Pratchett’s Making Money portrays it quite well, imho. It doesn’t hurt that it’s an entertaining read.

I was surprised to realise bank notes used to be tied to a bank, not a state.

"and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline".

There were major wars for millenia before the invention of the telegraph. They even names like "The Hundred Years War".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com