Overview

This volume foregrounds the close, and mutually informing, relationships between mediated communication and technological innovation during the nineteenth century. It draws attention to the fact that communication was a driver of innovation, but also considers how communication practices adapted to new media and technologies.

Themes and Subjects Covered

The following themes and subjects are covered:

• The development of the telegraph, from the semaphore in the late eighteenth century to the wireless in the late nineteenth.
• The shift from privately owned to nationalised telegraph infrastructure and services.
• Mail trains, travelling post offices, and accelerated public communication.
• The development of and cultural responses to steam-packet technologies and infrastructures, and accelerated international communication.
• The development of and cultural responses to submarine and transoceanic telegraphy.
• The beginnings of telephony.