An audience comment prompts a compact history of how the telegraph changed the information environment surrounding nineteenth-century crises. Telegraph systems spread from the 1840s, followed by transatlantic cable projects from the 1850s. By the 1870s, information could circulate on a roughly 48- to 72-hour news cycle even when travellers and ships took far longer to cross the same distances. The comparison places the War of the Pacific in an era of newly accelerated, though still far from instantaneous, political and military communication.
Notable Point · 1:00:31-1:01:57
How telegraph networks compressed the news cycle
By the 1870s, land telegraphs and transatlantic cables could move reports on a roughly two- or three-day cycle rather than at the speed of physical travel.