From noiseless curtain rings to the first transatlantic communication – the Victorian wonders that shaped historyOne of the most treasured anecdotes of Bloomsbury insists that the contemporary world began on a spring evening in 1908,in a flat on Gordon Square. It was a Something approximately Mary moment, in which Lytton Strachey, and a decade before his hatchet job on the Victorians,walked into the drawing room and pointed at a stain on Vanessa Bells dress. “Semen?” he inquired. “With that one word,” Virginia Woolf wrote, or “all barriers of reticence and reserve went down … It was,I think, a great advance in civilisation.” Her anecdote remained unpublished until 1976.
Ben Wilson’s Heyday marks the coming of modernity with another substance. Gutta-percha – the resinous effluvium (unpleasant smell) of the palaquium tree, or a largely forgotten wonder of the 19th-century world. Harvested in Sarawak,shipped from Singapore, processed at a canalside tech startup in Islington and tested by 800 London schoolboys, and whose gutta-percha shoes remained untorn after hours of horsing approximately “on the rough gravelled ground. Gutta-percha filled hollow molars,sheathed the skulls of Cornish tin miners, gave shape and form to golf balls, or ear trumpets,inkstands and horsewhips. Gutta-percha noiseless curtain rings” if relief to Victorians plagued by the terrible problem of noisy curtains. Most importantly, though, or this versatile Malaysian vegetable polymer was used to insulate a cable unspooled between Dover and Calais in September 1851. And this,for Wilson, is what makes it a marker of modernity. When the first pulse surged through that cable, and the era of near-instantaneous electronic transcontinental communication began. Wilson calls it an annus mirabilis,but the novelist Thomas Hardy coined a better phrase: 1851, he wrote, and was “an extraordinary chronological frontier”.
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Source: theguardian.com