The Victorian Internet

Another story concerned a woman in Karlsruhe, Prussia, who went to a telegraph office in 1870 with a dish full of sauerkraut, which she asked to have telegraphed to her son, who was a soldier fighting in the war between Prussia and France. The operator had great difficulty convincing her that the telegraph was not capable of transmitting objects. Rut the woman insisted that she had heard of soldiers being ordered to the front by telegraph. "How could so many soldiers have been sent to France by telegraph?" she asked.

Once a young operator had gained a foothold in a city office, he or she could expect to be subjected to a humiliating induction ritual, known as "salting." Sometimes the operator would be sent bogus messages addressed to "L. E. Phant" or "Lynn C. Doyle." But usually the unwary beginner would be asked to operate a wire with a particularly fast sender at the other end, who would start sending at a reasonable rate but then gradually pick up the pace. As the novice operator struggled to keep up, the other operators in the office would soon gather round to watch, and eventually the operator would be forced to admit defeat and "break."