The Telegraph and the Nervous System

The telegraph is finally mastered in the middle of the 18 thirties, and incredibly rapidly it spreads over whole continents. Scientists drew a parallel between those telegraph networks and the nervous system and the brain. They looked, for example, at the structure of undersea cables that were carrying telegraph messages across the atlantic. And then they looked at nurons, nerves, and they said, well, this is exactly the same there's this outer sheath, which seems to be insulating it. So even our understanding of the most very basic units of the nervous system began to be completely fused with our understanding of technology.