Recorded September 19, 2023
Facilitator: Dr. Richard D’Elia
Dr. Richard D’Elia was born in Manhattan and raised in Larchmont, New York. He is both a retired Army officer and college professor. He is a great historian and researcher on many diverse themes and issues having lectured on a wide range of topics here at The Society of the Four Arts.
The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph’s creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.