Before the Internet
The Reading Room has a new wing. Before the Internet is a special exhibit on a century of telegraph and telephone monopoly politics, 1834–1930, as it was argued in Boston’s own newspapers: the government-telegraph movement rising and failing, the cable cartel defending itself, Western Union absorbing its rivals, the Bell system perfecting a subtler monopoly, and regulation arriving as the century’s exhausted compromise. The exhibit follows the argument through 122 pages in six chapters. The passages are quoted verbatim from the period text, machine-verified against each page’s OCR; click any page image to see the newspaper itself.
The exhibit exists because of two institutions. The Boston Public Library digitized these newspapers and serves every page image through Digital Commonwealth. The Institutional Data Initiative at Harvard Law School Library made 1.47 million of those pages computationally searchable through its Institutional Newspapers project, the finding aid that made it practical to locate these 122 pages. The method is in the exhibit’s own notes: 166,763 candidate pages swept from the dataset, 14,059 machine-graded relevant, 278 shortlisted, 122 surviving review. Errors of selection and interpretation are ours.
Why it belongs in an Internet history collection is the subject of the Epilogue. Over the century these pages cover, communication run as a private business tended toward a single network, by patent, by acquisition, and by exclusive contract, because interconnection was worth more than competition to whoever already owned the most wire. Each remedy was tried in turn: rival carriers, municipal regulation, government ownership, and finally rate regulation, which accepted the monopoly and supervised its prices. The Internet’s builders designed against that history, with interconnection as the protocol’s premise rather than a concession from the incumbent, but the same questions came back. Who may connect, and on what terms, is now called peering and transit, and the operators have argued it for thirty years on their own mailing lists, which this collection preserves.