1893 Van Hoven / Lips Map of International Telegraph Network

This is an 1893 map of the world's telegraph network, prepared by the Berne Bureau International des Administrations Télégraphiques.

A Closer Look

This map presents the world on a Mercator Projection with national borders outlined in red. Black lines trace the world's telegraph network, both within and between countries, including undersea cables. The predominance of the British Empire and the American portions of the world's network is immediately apparent. However, the expansion of telegraphs across the Russian Empire, Qing China, the Middle East, Australia, and over the Andes in South America is notable. Five inset maps appear, detailing Nova Scotia and Newfoundland (landing point for cables under the North Atlantic), the English Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Aegean Sea, and the Strait of Perim (Bab-el-Mandeb).

A Pioneer in International Cooperation

The Bureau International des Administrations Télégraphiques was created by the 1865 International Telegraph Conference, which met at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris at the invitation of Emperor Napoléon III. Twenty European countries participated, though not Great Britain, which had the largest telegraph network, due to the competing private interests that owned the various parts of the network. The conference aimed to standardize rates, regulations, equipment, signals (Morse Code), and infrastructure across the continent. Three years later, a second conference met in Vienna, and a permanent bureau in Berne was established to oversee these efforts. Additional conferences were held in the following years. Evolving into the International Telegraph Union, and later the International Telecommunication Union and incorporated into the United Nations, the Berne bureau and related conferences and agreements were a landmark in the development of 'First Globalization' (c. 1870 - 1914) and international organizations, and was one of the earliest such agreements. The standardization of the telegraph network in Europe greatly reduced the cost of transmitting messages and facilitated easier communication between distant places. As would happen with later forms of communication technology, including the Internet in recent decades, idealists hoped that easier dialogue between countries could usher in an era of peace and harmony. These hopes were quickly dispelled when the Prussians used telegraphy to deadly effect in battlefield victories over Austria and Napoléon III's France in the years immediately after the initial conference. Sadly, the flurry of telegraphs sent during the July Crisis of 1914, including friendly messages between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II (who were cousins and got along well), did not stop the armies of Europe from mobilizing for total war.

Expanding the Global Telegraph Network

Often forgotten in the wake of even more advanced communications technologies, telegraphy was nevertheless a revolutionary innovation that entirely transformed economies and societies in the 19th century. Two major forces had driven the development of international telegraph networks in the years before this map's production, one being the economic benefits of linking North America to Europe and the other being the desire on the part of European powers (especially the British) to establish near-instantaneous communications throughout their empires. The importance of the latter objective became abundantly clear in the course of the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

Though completed in 1858, the first Transatlantic cable was plagued with problems and was barely usable, leading the architect of the project, Cyrus W. Field, to spend nearly a decade preparing a second, much improved, cable. By the time this map was produced, the Atlantic was crisscrossed by more than a dozen cables, with additional cables reaching all along the coasts of the Old and New World, across the Mediterranean and Red Seas and the Indian Ocean, and through Southeast Asia to Australia and even New Zealand.

The only piece missing from a continuous global circuit was a direct link between Asia and the Americas, an extremely difficult logistical undertaking (either a submarine cable across the Pacific Ocean or an overland cable through Alaska and Siberia), and one that was arguably unnecessary since a telegraph could be sent from Shanghai to San Francisco with the existing network (in a sense, the global network was already complete once telegraphs reached China and New Zealand in the 1860s). Ultimately, while the economic logic for a cable linking the Far East directly to the American West was not compelling, political logic drove the project. After the Spanish-American War, a cable across the Pacific was seen as a necessity and was completed in short order by the Commercial Pacific Cable Company, which had linked San Francisco with Shanghai via Honolulu, Guam, and Manila by 1906.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by the Bureau International des Administrations Rélégraphiques in Berne, was drawn and 'engraved' by C. van Hoven and was printed by Imprimerie Lips. Very little is known about both van Hoven and Lips, and they appear to have done little but publish this map and other works by the Bureau. A map similar to the present one (earlier editions with the title 'Carte communications telégraphiques internationales') was issued in many editions from 1874 until the early 1920s, all of which are quite scarce. The present edition is noted in the OCLC among the holdings of the British Library and is also held by Library and Archives Canada.