 As telegraph networks sprung up in different countries, the benefits of joining them became very apparent and in fact the first interconnection treaty was signed between Prussia and Austria such that messages could be carried between the cities of Berlin and Vienna and this was in late 1849 and shortly thereafter in fact in early 1850s a cable was laid between Britain and France. Now this was not a very long cable but this was nonetheless a landmark event because it connected the two major imperial powers of the time and it was also the longest underwater cable laid to this point and within just a couple of years it didn't take very long most of the other European countries had these interconnection treaties such that messages could travel between all the different countries and of course today we would call these agreements as peering agreements where different networks could carry messages between each other and also share their capacity which led to more growth within each of the individual networks and of course the more networks and the more people using them the higher the need for more peering agreements and more peering agreements led to more growth which established this virtuous cycle and of course this also enabled a number of innovations in the underlying technology and the first of these and perhaps the most important are improvements in the actual copper cable and the installation of the cable so the early cables failed very often and they were not insulated well against the elements because the technology simply was not there we did not know how to do that so as more of these cables especially the underwater cables between France and England were laid we got a lot better at creating more reliable cables at the same time recall that a lot of the inefficiencies in the early telegraph systems were due to inefficiencies within the office so another big area for innovation was automation and there's probably no better example than Edison's stock ticker which is what you see here and this was effectively a remote printer where an operator on one side would send a message and on the other side you would have the stock ticker so you didn't need the second operator instead this machine would print out the actual message so this became very very popular and then last but definitely not least was the rapid adoption of what became to be known as capsule pipelines and the way this worked is that once the message arrived on the wire the message would actually be the physical message would be put into a capsule at the telegraph office and it would travel through quite literally a series of tubes to the destination so this is the physical message not the electric signal so for example the first deployment was between the telegraph office in London and the London stock exchange where this distance was only about 200 meters but it enabled it nonetheless enabled much quicker delivery of messages both between the telegraph station and this London stock exchange and these systems were deployed all over many different cities in a very quick order such that by the mid 1850s you already saw the emergence of the Victorian internet where multiple interconnected networks could carry messages from Britain to France or Austria on the order of minutes but even all of this pales in comparison to the grand vision that one man Cyrus Field had for the telegraph and specifically he wanted to connect North America to Britain which is a distance of approximately 4300 kilometers but he did much more than dream about it he managed to find investors and build a cable long enough to have his first expedition in 1857 to attempt to actually lay this cable and they made it about halfway there so they laid about 2000 kilometers of this cable at which point it failed and unfortunately they had to return and abandon the entire 2000 kilometers of this cable but that didn't stop him in 1858 with a better cable they set out on the second expedition which unfortunately also suffered the same fate they failed once again but within the same year he was back they got the extra 2000 kilometers of cable that they needed and set out on a second expedition and this one believe it or not actually succeeded so in 1858 they had the first instance of a cable from Britain to Newfoundland in Canada and then from Newfoundland they had another cable to the New York City and this was definitely a landmark event because the world shrunk by an order of magnitude with this cable in place and on August 18 1858 the first telegraph message between North America and Britain were sent between a president of the United States and Queen Victoria and the message was only 98 words but nonetheless it actually took about 16 hours to send this message unfortunately the cable wasn't very good and at the time we didn't have the knowledge for how to interpret these very weak signals because the signal degraded as it traveled across this very long distance and not only that but within two weeks because of a number of factors the cable actually failed so we were able to send some messages but shortly thereafter the the cable went bad once again which of course was a major setback but in a true example of grit and perseverance Cyrus Field nonetheless managed to raise more money later it took him a little bit of time it was not until 1865 that he would make his fourth attempt to lay this cable and believe it or not this one once again failed and a lot of people thought that this was just not meant to be but in 1866 he tried again and not only did he actually complete the cable but he also fixed the cable that they lost in 1865 so by 1866 we actually had two operating cables between North America and Britain and the world was never the same after that with two of these cables in place we could actually transport about eight words per minute reliably between North America and Britain and the time to deliver a message shrunk from literally weeks by ship to just on the order of minute for a short message and once we knew this was possible that we could actually have a transatlantic cable that reliably sends telegraph messages across these very long distances we started seeing a lot more of these and we began to interconnect remote parts of the world and to put this into perspective let's look at some numbers so by 1874 we had over 1 million kilometers of telegraph cable laid across the world which is a huge number and not only that but we also had over 50 000 kilometers of underwater cable and all of this combined enabled 20 000 plus cities and towns to interconnect with each other which dramatically changed how we communicate in 1844 a message sent from London to Mumbai would take 10 weeks and by 1874 once we had all of this telegraph cable in place the same message would take four minutes so if you do the math this works out to be about 25 000 times faster which is also the single biggest improvement in the overall latency throughout the history because if we wanted to make this four minute delivery time 25 000 times faster once again we would actually have to travel faster than the speed of light or rather a message we have to travel faster than the speed of light which of course is impossible so this period between 1844 to 1874 is where we've seen the largest absolute improvement in the overall latency and it is definitely not an understatement to say that the Victorian internet was already in place by the late 1800s we had different networks they were interconnected or if you prefer peering agreements were established between the different countries we had the underwater cables and we were able to communicate between the most part of the world