From a strictly technical standpoint, you may be right. But I think name alludes to more than that. Specifically, it encompasses the social impact of sudden, instant, global communication (remember, it wasn't just American - there were trans-Atlantic cables operating at this point too).
It's arguable that the impact of the 'Victorian Internet' was actually greater than that of our actual internet. Of course, it's hard to separate the changes it triggered from the larger cataclysms of the Industrial Revolution, of which it was a deeply embedded part. But this, too, only onderscores the extent to which sudden, massive development in communication technology has a profound effect on nearly every business it touches.
My suspicion is that we'll be another decade into our own communications revolution before we match the scale of the social disruption produced by the onset of the Machine Age.
Well, I don't disagree that the telegraph was a major earth-shrinking development. I just disagree with the analogy with the internet.
The telegraph dramatically reduced the latency of communication (from the maximum travel speed of a courier to that of the speed of electrical impulses). It didn't improve channel capacity at all though. In fact, it had less capacity than paper in a courier's satchel.
This restricted the communication to those who can pay. And even they preferred to write crude, abbreviated messages due to cost.
The internet didn't improve latency over the telex or phone networks (in fact, you're almost certain to see more latency on the packet-switched internet than on the circuit-based PSTN). What it did do is dramatically increase channel capacity, driving the cost of communication down to the point where anyone can communicate across the planet for nominal cost -- and can even send information-rich messages in data-hungry formats like video.
The telegraph was the invention of instantaneous global communication. The internet was the democratization of it.
It's arguable that the impact of the 'Victorian Internet' was actually greater than that of our actual internet. Of course, it's hard to separate the changes it triggered from the larger cataclysms of the Industrial Revolution, of which it was a deeply embedded part. But this, too, only onderscores the extent to which sudden, massive development in communication technology has a profound effect on nearly every business it touches.
My suspicion is that we'll be another decade into our own communications revolution before we match the scale of the social disruption produced by the onset of the Machine Age.