by Tom Standing (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £14.99 pp216 1998)
(I'll quickly jump over the descriptions of the mechanical semaphores, which explain what Keith Roberts' signallers would have done in PAVANE, and the details of Victorian electricity which fill in some of the gaps of THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, and more info which helps to illuminate other works).
What Standing succeeds in doing is pointing out how society is always experiencing changes, and that some people are aware of them. Nevertheless what might seem the most revolutionary aspects of these developments often serve very different purposes. For instance, authorities attempted to ban the use of codes in message sending, but finally abandoned the attempt. What then happened was not that the telegraph became the nervous system of the revolutionary underground, but that business men directed their field agents to better opportunities without informing their rivals, and cut their communication costs by sending only key words which stood for agreed sentences. Standing has an example of a detailed message about American cereals in which a 68 word message is reduced to 9, while in the India the Department of Agriculture's codeword "envelope" meant "great swarms of locusts have appeared and ravaged the crops".
The Morse tappers came to know one another, women found another clerical work in which they might be treated more equally, and men and women courted on the line. Standing even has found examples of marriage over the wires, in shades of today's teledildonics. Cyberpunk novels such as VURT and SNOWCRASH have portrayed scientific breakthroughs as likely vehicles of gratuitous pleasure, and abuse more than use, but the lesson that Standing can see in technological development is more a conservation of practise than any momentum to revolution.