How could a newspaper in the Britain report on something that happened in the Americas?
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They were only as up-to-date in the sense that it had only recently arrived in Britain. News from America in the 1700s would have taken months to reach Britain and become widespread. Sailors arrived from the new world and said what had happened.
Once the telegraph came in, this changed everything. Near-instant communication was possible, so people could find out what happened across the world right away. This is what a telegram is, it’s a message sent via a telegraph, which can obviously get there instantly instead of spending months travelling.
Interesting aside, this also led to the introduction of time zones as we know them. Towns all used to have their own local time, since it was impossible to have, say, London and Edinburgh sync up their clocks, but with a telegraph, they could. This was important because of the trains. Originally it didn’t matter that towns were all slightly different, because you weren’t travelling fast enough for it to matter. But if you got a train from, say, Norwich to Portsmouth, and your pocket watch was set to Norwich time, you might miss your train home, or be really really early for it. And it especially mattered for the train companies themselves to make sure 2 trains weren’t occupying the same track at once. They actually used to publish time zone conversion sheets for various cities, until they finally sat down and standardised stuff nationwide.
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