How could a newspaper in the Britain report on something that happened in the Americas?
In: 1
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.
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.
As others have said, they didn’t.
My Nanny May (my cousin’s grandmother who lived 1905-1995) used to tell us when we were kids how when she was 7 the Titanic sank – and the horror was intensified by how slowly the information trickled in and how much worse the disaster seemed to get over the next 2 weeks of updates. And this in the 20th century.
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.
Read [*The News from Waterloo*](https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Brian-Cathcart-News-from-Waterloo-9780571315260) to find out how it was in 1815. The battle ended by the evening of 18 June (a date once as well known as 6 June is today) but London wasn’t sure of the outcome until three days later when the official despatch arrived. As the crow flies, Waterloo to London is only 200 miles. Much of the delay was due to the fact that newspapers then almost never employed foreign correspondents.
There were optical telegraph chains used during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars but these were very expensive with very limited capacity and so restricted to official use only. The British had quickly dismantled their system following Napoleon’s first abdication so it wasn’t available during the Hundred Days and the Waterloo Campaign.
Read [*The News from Waterloo*](https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Brian-Cathcart-News-from-Waterloo-9780571315260) to find out how it was in 1815. The battle ended by the evening of 18 June (a date once as well known as 6 June is today) but London wasn’t sure of the outcome until three days later when the official despatch arrived. As the crow flies, Waterloo to London is only 200 miles. Much of the delay was due to the fact that newspapers then almost never employed foreign correspondents.
There were optical telegraph chains used during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars but these were very expensive with very limited capacity and so restricted to official use only. The British had quickly dismantled their system following Napoleon’s first abdication so it wasn’t available during the Hundred Days and the Waterloo Campaign.
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