[gkanai]

I remember reading about Gutta Percha in Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board.

"Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be proportional to the length of the cable) and William Thomson predicted that it was going to be hard (proportional to the length of the cable squared).... The two men got into a public argument, which became extremely important in 1858 when the Atlantic Telegraph Company laid such a cable from Ireland to Newfoundland: a copper core sheathed in gutta-percha and wrapped in iron wires."

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2005/07/neal_stephenson.html

[fennecbutt]

Also, the victorian Internet.