Victorian Telegraph Codes: Secrets of Global Trade Networks

Victorian-era merchants developed sophisticated commercial codebooks beginning in the 1850s to combat the extreme expense of telegraph communications, which could cost up to $5 per word in today's currency. These codebooks assigned short code words to common business phrases and terms, resulting in a cost reduction of over 90 percent. By 1896, more than 30 different commercial codes were competing in the market, each with specialized versions tailored to various industries. Beyond cost savings, these codes provided security benefits, with many companies developing proprietary supplements or entirely custom codes to gain a competitive advantage. The systems evolved to meet international regulations requiring pronounceable words of five letters or fewer, leading to the creation of artificial vocabularies with hundreds of thousands of meaningfully structured but nonsense words. These telegraph codes presaged features of modern digital communication, essentially functioning as compression algorithms for business language and resembling primitive markup languages. They gradually declined with the introduction of telex in the 1930s, but represent a crucial evolutionary link between handwritten correspondence and digital data exchange.

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