This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on a technical development of the transport revolution, the railway, shows how an actual moving space affected understandings of identity – primarily by removing the markers which made other places easy to read and to formulate behavioural rules for. It also focuses on one place and one time, but shows how changing technologies and practices of travel, in particular the growth of touristic travel, produced the Norwegian town of Tromso anew, making it a place both on the edge of and part of Europe, a place both modern and archaic. The book examines narratives written about the laying of submarine telegraph cables, it is the narrative itself which is most unstable, travelling between genres as it attempts to blend authority and adventure.