ABSTRACT
The news industry of the 19th century grew because of the availability of some key infrastructures, including steam railways and electricity. These innovations, in turn, boosted the development of the telegraphthe Internet of the Victorian age. Expansion of the railways in the United States and the United Kingdom stimulated the growth of the telegraph. A boom in railway development was a feature of 1830s
Britain, and a similar surge occurred in theUnited States about a decade later. By the 1840s, British moneymen had invested the equivalent of 10 times the then-value of the country’s imports in the rail networks. In the United States, the telegraph similarly followed the rail networks. Samuel Morse’s eponymous code-the Microsoft of its day-was first used with the telegraph in the United States in 1844, and it remained the basic form of telegraphic communication for more than a century. Electricity and steam drove commerce and the media. Between the mid-1840s and the American Civil War of 1861-1865, the telegraph transformed American journalism into a news-hungry industry. News became something that was topical rather than what was reprinted from overseas newspapers when they arrived, usually months later.
