One would be tempted to think that communication technology recently underwent the most explosive change ever experienced in human history.
Many of us can still remember when moving beyond reaching distance of a land-line telephone meant losing touch with the outside world.
There were the people standing beside us in the hardware store line, of course, and there were pay phones. But other than that, we were on our own.
And then almost overnight, that all changed. There was the internet and cellphones, and then cellphones that could send text messages instantaneously to almost anywhere.
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The changes in how we communicate with each other have truly been phenomenal, something the world has never seen before, right? Not true.
Think back for a moment to the mid-19th century on this continent. Sending a letter from Halifax to Victoria meant putting it on a boat and sailing it halfway around the world.
In the United States, 25 days was considered an appropriate amount of time to expect the mail to be delivered overland from east to west.
And then, in a blink of an eye, that all changed.
First there was the Pony Express, which from April 3, 1860, to Oct. 26, 1861, moved mail across the United States using relays of horse-mounted riders. This service reduced the amount of time it took to send messages from coast to coast to 10 days. It must have seemed like a miracle.
And then this achievement was obliterated by the arrival of transcontinental telegraph lines, which reduced that time to a matter of minutes.
It must have seemed like a world-changing event that could never be surpassed.
At the time, the telegraph was called “the instantaneous highway of thought,” which was an eerie foreshadowing of an early name for the internet — the information highway.
Canada’s cross-country communications improved with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, but it got really fast when the CPR built its own coast-to-coast telegraph line in 1886.
The technological feats didn’t stop. Next there was a trans-Atlantic telegraph line, then wireless telegraphs and telephones.
But in the 19th century, when telegraph lines slashed communication time to almost nothing, people must have felt very much like we do today.
