This is Pessimists Archive.

I'm Jason Fyfer.

The year is 1868, and the greatest minds of the day have gathered for a banquet.

They're here to celebrate Samuel Morris's retirement, and really there is a lot to celebrate.

Samuel Morris created the first commercial telegraph system, enabling people many

miles away from each other to communicate in almost real time, which is something that

simply had never been possible before.

I mean, before Samuel Morris, if you wanted to send information to someone, you had to write

it down on a piece of paper

and then have that piece of paper physically carried away by foot or horse or boat or

raven or whatever.

Anyway, getting your message to its destination could take days or weeks or months.

Then Samuel Morris came along and cut that time down to minutes.

Two minutes.

So, you know, that called for a real slammer of a banquet. And everyone's saying how wonderful he is and how he's changed the world and all of these great, and, you know, Victorian speeches used to go on forever. And you could read them all in the newspapers of the day. I mean, they're incredibly, incredibly floral and just went on, on and on and on. That's Tom Standage. He's an editor at The Economist, host of the excellent podcast, Secret History of the Future,

and, most relevant for our purposes, author of a book called The Victorian Internet,

the remarkable story of the Telegraph and the 19th century's online pioneers.

And Tom says that this banquet for Samuel Morris's retirement went pretty much according to plan

up until the time that a man named William Dodge

stood up to give his speech. Because William Dodge had come to Barrymore's not to praise him.

Dodge, frankly, was fed up with the telegraph. Here's Tom reading part of the speech. In the old days,

it was much easier for business people. Comparatively, they had an easy time, he said. But now all this

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