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by zkms
3290 days ago
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> In the age of sail, sending international mail was no easy matter. A sealed note would be left with some ship going in roughly the right direction, and then luck more than anything would decide the outcome. This was before steam ships, before the rail road and the telegraph, and it could well take a year or more before the sender eventually recieved a reply. The preserved letters from Lossius are full of references to other letters that never made it across the oceans. This was striking to read; it's absolutely impossible for me to imagine a pre-telegraph world with such utterly slow communications where people nevertheless had friends and family separated by years of latency. It makes me appreciate the significance of the electric telegraph and of long-range communication that is not limited by the speed of any physical vehicle. I recently read a short romance novel (called "Wired Love") published in 1880 about two telegraph operators who meet online (well, on the wire), use spare time on the wire to talk (and flirt) with each other; and eventually fall in love -- before even having met each other IRL or knowing each other's IRL names! There's even a quite modern impersonation that happens -- someone else steals the identifier of the operator the main character is in love with, and proceeds to be an rude asshole to her. Almost like IRC nick stealing, except a century or so earlier! The antics involving the telegraphs were, amusingly enough, the least antiquated part of the novel, as there's an entirely shocking amount of aspects of Internet communication/relationship practices that have pretty clear equivalents in that telegraph-era book. For example, the main character disdains the telephone and prefers the elegant and more technically-involved telegraph, she and her partner "clasp hands" over the wire in the same way people do "/me hugs" on IRC, she gets called crazy for laughing to herself and "smiling at vacancy" while telegraphing with her online lover -- and after they've met IRL, her suitor even installs a private telegraph wire from her bedroom to his. There's something quite endearing about reading an old novel and realising that the people with access to real-time text chat more than a century ago might have used it in quite similar ways as people use it today. |
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So my great grandfather just decides to get on a boat in Latvia and sail to Australia. I'm really not sure why. He settles and sends for a bride. One comes. They've never met. They marry and have a bunch of children.
The wife's family is from Latvia and the Ukraine. She writes back and forth to her family over the next 20 years. I'm not sure what the latency is on communication here but I imagine at least 6 months, best case, more likely closer to 12. The last letter she received from her family was in 1937 and it was heavily censored. This of course being Stalin's USSR at this point.
Now it never really occurred to me that in this time there was such long lines of communication but in hindsight I guess there had to be because what was the alternative?
All of this was just a century ago too. Taking 6-12 months to communicate with family. Marrying an unknown bride. It's really quite bizarre.
Go back two centuries and it's even more surreal. One relative has a stated occupation of "scutcher". What's that you might ask? (I know I did). It's one of those English words that's now largely unknown and searching for it leads to a list of pre-Industrial Revolution jobs that don't exist anymore. A scutcher is someone who bashes flax seeds for linen fibers, a job later done by machines.