Thursday, February 7, 2008

The first internet wedding

It's Valentine's Day this week so we need a story that links love and innovation.

How about the first internet wedding? It happened in 1848. At that time, the world was getting used to a disruptive innovation. This was the telegraph. The continents were becoming joined together for the first time by cables laid under the oceans to form a networked society. Before the telegraph, information travelled over land at the speed of a horse, perhaps 40 miles a day. So news from London would probably take four days to reach Leeds. The telegraph enabled information to be transmitted from one place to another in a matter of minutes. The network gradually extended across Europe, over to North America, on to India, Australia and beyond. The world must have felt like a global village, with information travelling so quickly from any place on the network to any other place, however near or far. The diffusion of this innovation is described more fully in The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (384.109 STA in the library).

In this book, Standage tells the story of a wedding that was conducted using this Victorian internet. The bride was the daughter of a Boston businessman who had fallen in love with one of the clerks at her father's business. Her father was unhappy with their relationship and wanted her to marry someone more 'appropriate'. To prevent the marriage, he sent the clerk to England on business. Of course, at this time transatlantic travel was undertaken by ship. Its first port of call was New York.

The enterprising young woman sent a message to her intended, asking him to go to the New York telegraph office, accompanied by a magistrate, at an agreed time. She was in the Boston telegraph office at that same time. The magistrate then conducted the marriage ceremony over the wires, with the bride and groom being assisted by the telegraph operators who translated their vows into Morse code.

It is hard to believe, but the marriage was deemed to be legal.

We sometimes state that innovation is socially shaped. The artefact alone is not the innovation. Here is an example of an artefact (the telegraph) that was devised for one social purpose being adapted to be used for a completely different purpose.

Some of our students are exhibiting a similar degree of creativity in their studies on the Innovation & Enterprsie module. These students are taking the product being developed in their project module and showing how they now might use it as the artefactual basis of an entirely different innovation.

Happy Valentine's Day!