How to email a cat

By Tom Standage

In 2006 Ted Stevens, a senator from Alaska, inadvertently coined a phrase when he cluelessly described the internet as “a series of tubes”. The internet is made up of many things – wires, optical fibres, servers, switches and routers – but tubes are not among them. Yet there was a time when communications networks really did rely on tubes. Messages written on paper whizzed along underground pipes, propelled by compressed air from steam engines. This steampunk internet has been largely forgotten but its origins shed light on the ways that rapid digital communication can create problems as well as solutions.

The first pneumatic-tube system was set up in London in 1854 to carry telegrams between the Central Telegraph Office (CTO) and the stock exchange, just 220 yards away. At the time around half of all telegrams received at the CTO related to stock trades. As the volume of incoming traffic increased, the connection to the stock exchange became overloaded, and time-sensitive telegrams started to pile up. It became apparent that it would be quicker to transport the messages in physical form rather than retransmit them electrically over such a short distance. Josiah Latimer Clark, an engineer at the Electric Telegraph Company, devised a novel way to do it.