Net-Warriors

After more than a century, the vision of Victorian engineer Alexander Stanhope St. George has finally been realized. Massive dirt-covered drill bits emerged from the ground–one by the Thames River near the Tower Bridge in London, and the other on Fulton Ferry Landing by the Brooklyn Bridge in New York–thus completing St. George’s transatlantic tunnel. Workers removed the drills and fitted both tunnel ends with identical Telectroscopes, allowing Londoners and New Yorkers separated by 3500 miles to view each other in real-time.

The Telectroscope is device that’s 37 feet long by 11 feet high and allows people on one side of the Atlantic to look into its person-size lens and see those on the other side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. Think 19th-century Webcam or Victorian-age video phone.

In reality, the trans-Atlantic tunnel is a trans-Atlantic broadband network rounded off on each end with HD cameras. The Telectroscope itself was a fanciful idea that, according to St. George, resulted from a typo by a 19th-century reporter who misspelled Electroscope, a device used to measure electrostatic charges. “The journalist also misunderstood what it was about and wrote in the article that it was a device for the suppression of absence,” St. George said. “The accidental hope captured their imagination, and lots of people at the end of the 19th century thought it was a great idea.”

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