The hyphen text transregional postcard

How a British Lord accidentally invented the web in the 17th century

14^th Aug. 2020 8 min. read

The origin of the World Wide Web is commonly traced to the scientific work at CERN in the 1980s and ’90s. What few people know, however, is that a few centuries ago, somewhere in Britain, there briefly existed a transregional network for exchanging information that bore a remarkable resemblance to the web as we know it today. Sadly, almost no testimony of it was passed down, and over time it mostly fell into oblivion. I know this legend only from hearsay myself, so I have tried my best to recall it and set it down in writing for posterity.

Grafting in the library

The story¹ takes place in the mid-17th century in the south of Great Britain – more precisely, in a county governed by a wealthy family that went by the name of Learnersbee. The son and heir was Lord Timothy, an aristocratic yet good-natured man in the prime of his life. With all burdensome administrative matters left to his diligent staff, Timothy was free to spend his days as he pleased: pursuing his passion for learning and feeding his insatiable hunger for knowledge. Not only was he the most well-read and broadly learned man for miles around, but he also harboured a heartfelt ambition – to spread the spark of learning among his fellow men, and above all among his poorer subjects.

The most comprehensive store of knowledge back then was the renowned Great Encyclopædia Wicitannica. Only a handful of moneyed families, the Learnersbees among them, could afford all of its roughly eighteen thousand leather-bound volumes. The complete edition filled seven long aisles of bookshelves, covering every imaginable topic: from “A” for aardvark (a peculiar, anteater-like sort of pig), through “I” for Ireland (a relatively recent – but unpleasantly rebellious – addition to the British empire), all the way to “Z” for Zygmund Freud (author of the morally controversial bestseller The Amorous Adventures of Young Oedipus).

As befitted a man of the British establishment, Lord Timothy relished the comfort of a stately armchair and prized nothing so highly as a fresh cup of tea within arm’s reach. Such a life was not one everyone could enjoy – least of all Timothy’s butler, Isaac. While the Lord scarcely ever left his study, his butler was forever rushing between the endless shelves of the mansion’s private library. He clambered up and down the creaking ladders, hastily gathering whichever books the Lord wished to browse next. But no sooner had Isaac hauled one heavy pile of tomes to the study than the Lord would send him back with yet another list of titles to fetch.

And so, day after day, the years passed at the Learnersbee villa – until early October 1659. It was a drizzly, murky, altogether dull afternoon (like most afternoons in Britain), and Lord Timothy was just finishing a cup of mediocre second-flush Darjeeling. His butler had left for the library an hour earlier to track down a couple of Wicitannica volumes. Timothy, feeling a little out of sorts that day anyway (to say nothing of the underwhelming beverage), eventually lost patience. He heaved himself out of his armchair and shuffled over to the library to see “what the bloody deuce” was going on. There he found Isaac slumped on the carpet, his back against the side of a bookshelf, snoring blissfully.

Lord Timothy wasn’t amused. Despite his exceptionally calm temperament and impeccable manners (even by British standards), his composure deserted him for the briefest of moments. A twinge of sheer anger made him stamp his foot with such vigour that the doors and windows trembled. Before Isaac could grasp what was happening, a small wooden box worked loose from one of the upper shelves and dropped – squarely onto the butler’s head. Its lid sprang open, and hundreds of small paper slips scattered across the floor. What happened next was recorded, word for word, in Isaac’s journal: Lord Timothy stood rooted to the spot, eyes fixed stonily on the drift of paper at his feet. Then, after a long and excruciating silence, he cried out “Eureka!” – and bolted back to his study, where he locked himself away for three days straight.

The hyphen text transregional postcard

This curious incident of October 1659 is said to mark the birth of a remarkable innovation, which soon became known as the hyphen text transregional postcard – or HTTP for short. Lord Timothy’s idea was at once technically groundbreaking and profoundly humane: he wished to establish a public, decentralised communication network across all of Learnersbeeshire – one that would let everyone exchange information and ideas freely, no matter where they lived or what class they belonged to; young or old, rich or poor, man or woman, weak or strong.

His invention was put in place county-wide within just a few months, and is best described as a postcard-based message-exchange system. Its centrepieces – and also its most recognisable symbols – were small, square kiosks, painted a glaring red, erected in the middle of every village. Each had windows on every side and was staffed by a dispatcher during daylight hours. Any citizen could simply walk up and have a message taken down and sent on its way.² The message itself was written on the front of a small, roughly hand-sized card, along with some meta-information about sender and recipient. To save precious space, the notation followed a strictly standardised protocol in which the parts of the message were separated by hyphens (hence “hyphen text”).

Whoever was about to leave town – be it on foot, on horseback, or by carriage, from the poorest beggar to the Lord himself – was officially obliged to stop by the local kiosk beforehand and pick up a batch of postcards. The clever part was that these were sorted not by their final destination, but rather by the direction they were meant to travel. So if someone set off on an eastbound path, they would carry along every postcard destined for somewhere in the East. On reaching the next village along the route, the traveller would drop the postcards at the local kiosk, where they were looked through afresh and dispatched onward.

In this way the messages moved, gradually but steadily, towards their eventual destination. And since there was usually brisk traffic between the villages throughout the day (Sundays excepted, of course), the routing was both fast and reliable. On arrival at the target village, the postcards were delivered to their recipients once or twice a day.³ The response was recorded on the back of the postcard and returned by the very same mechanism.

As far as we know, several hundred postcards were in transit on a busy day across all of Learnersbeeshire. Their contents were as varied as the people who sent them: a caring mother, anxious to know whether her son had arrived safely after a day’s journey to the next village; a price-conscious farmer, comparing offers from cattle traders across the region; a sick man, seeking advice from a distant doctor. To aid discoverability, everyone was invited to register in a public directory.⁴ It recorded a location, a name and, optionally, a short descriptive headword for each entry, and could be consulted at any kiosk.

It was a point of honour for Lord Timothy to be listed from the very start. He offered up the use of his private library – of which, to his own surprise, people took full advantage. Questions poured into the Learnersbee villa from every corner of the county: curious children wanted to know what lay beyond the horizon; eager teachers asked after the latest developments in the Commonwealth; self-taught healers enquired about the properties of local herbs. Before long, Timothy had to appoint a resident savant whose sole duty was to research and answer the daily swelling volume of requests.

A political wind of change

The idea behind the hyphen text transregional postcards was well ahead of its time and had every potential to be a societal game-changer. Unfortunately, it never got a real chance to take off; it ended as abruptly as it had begun. Lord Timothy Learnersbee was dismissed in the wake of the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in late 1660. His appointed successor thereupon as leader of the county was Lord Boris, son of John II – an uncompromising traditionalist and ardent champion of the monarchy, who took little pleasure in the notion of an interconnected and independently thinking populace. And so the hyphen text transregional postcards were doomed to extinction almost as soon as they had risen. Lord Timothy’s fate is unknown.

All in all, this brief chapter in British history is interesting for more than purely technical reasons. It is also a striking example of how infrastructure and technology, in the broadest sense, can shape society for the good of all. At the same time, the course of events shows how the success of forward-looking ideas so often hangs on the whims of those who rule. And that, for once, not just in Britain.