Internet?

Well not quite, but very similar indeed! William Cook and Charles Wheatstone invented the electrical telegraph. This allowed people miles apart to send messages instantly. Then in 1866, huge telegraph lines were laid under the Atlantic Ocean allowing England to talk to America.

Smile

Two men named John Herschel and William Henry Fox Talbot invented the first, easy to use camera. When he first came up with his idea, William Henry Fox Talbot called his photographs, "photogenic drawings".

Stay In Touch

It was becoming very expensive to send letters during Victorian times, and it was the person who got the letter who had to pay when it arrived. So Rowland Hill came up with the idea of the sticky postage stamp. This meant that the sender paid the postage and it cost the same all over the country!

Other countries copied his idea, but they had to put their name on the stamp, England is the only country without its name on its stamps, only the Queen's head.

Hello?

Alexander Graham Bell was a Scotsman and he came up with an invention that would change the world. He experimented with sending speech down electrical wires to his assistant in another room, thus inventing the telephone.

The first telephone conversation that ever took place in 1876 when Bell rang his assistant and said, "Come here Watson, I want you."

Switch On

Times were dark for Victorians until Joseph Swan brightened lives with his invention of the electric light bulb! He ran an electrical current through a piece of wire called a filament that was inside a glass bulb, and produced light.

Dust Busting

Maids in the household used to have to brush all the carpets by hand. Then in 1901 the first ever successful vacuum suction device was invented by Hubert Booth. After seeing a similar invention that blew dust away, he asked "why don't you suck the dust up?"

His invention worked very well and Booth was asked to clean the ceremonial carpet for King Edward VII's coronation.

Choo Choo

When he worked in a coal mine, George Stephenson was asked to build an engine to haul the cartloads of coal out of the mine. He built a steam engine that could go 4 miles and hour and pull 30 tons of coal.

It wasn't until 1825 that he invented the first public railway to carry steam trains and the first public passenger train.   He named his invention the "Locomotion". Since then train tracks have spread all over the country allowing people to travel much further and merchants to trade more goods.