I had a great time researching and writing this book, digging up all the unexpected parallels between the old-fashioned telegraph and today's Internet. We like to think of things like online weddings, hackers, secret codes and information overload as peculiarly modern phenomena, but it turns out that they could all be found on the telegraph networks of the nineteenth century too. So what? Well, I think that tells us something important about our attitudes to technology: that as new inventions come and go, the ways people react to them stay pretty much the same. Telling the story of the telegraph, an old-fashioned but paradoxically modern technology, is also a fun way to stick a pin in the Internet balloon. Sure, I like the Internet, I use it all the time, but I don't think it's the answer to the world's problems. People said the same about the telegraph in the nineteenth century, and they were wrong. My message, then, is one of historically-informed scepticism. When you're using the Internet, browsing the Web, sending emails -- ordering my book, even -- remember that even though it seems to be cutting edge technology it is, in many ways, old hat.