"The Internet of[...]"

Quite frequently I hear historians referring to something as "the Internet" of a previous age. This really annoys me. There was no Internet before the late 20th century, and referring to railroads as "the Internet of the mid-19th century" or to ancient Roman roads as "the Internet of the ancient world" does not do a damned thing to help the reader understand what things were like in those bygone eras. Which, supposedly, is the historians' job.

Lion Feuchtwanger's novel Jud Süß, first published in 1925, begins with a description of the roads in the German state of Wuerttemberg in the early 18th century:

"Ein Netz von Adern schnürten sich Straßen über das Land, sich querend, verzweigend, versiegend. Sie waren verwahrlost, voll von Steinen, Löchern, zerrissen, überwachsen, bodenloser Sumpf, wenn es regnete, dazu überall von Schlagbäumen unterbunden." ("Roads formed a network across the land, crossing, forking, petering out. They were unmaintained, full of stones and holes, ripped up, overgrown with weeds, bottomless swamps when it rained, but on the other hand controlled everywhere by toll booths." My translation.)

Feuchtwanger goes on to describe how these streets which were impossibly muddy whenever it rained were choked with dust whenever the sun shone. He describes the traffic on these roads, from the luxurious travel of the Prince of Wuerttemberg and the Prince-Bishop of Wuerzburg and the Venetian ambassador, and the King of Prussia and his entourage, who had visited the southern German courts in "six solid but somewhat shabby coaches," to the couriers of the powerful on fast, frequently-changed horses, to the coaches of various sorts of post which carried mail and people and various rates of speed, to a long train of Jews who had been expelled from an unspecified Imperial German city and were on their way to Frankfurt, and all sorts of other people in wagons and on foot, apprentices, students, wealthy Jewish merchants and poor Jewish tinkers, a former professor at a Bavarian university, disheveled and on foot, who had been dismissed for rebellious and heretical speech, and others still.

You know what Feuchtwanger does not do? He does not call these roads "the Internet of the early 18th century." Perhaps you'd object that this novel was published in 1925, and that there wasn't any Internet in 1925, and you'd have a very good point. However, Feuchtwanger also does not call the roads in Wuerttemberg "the telephone network of the early 18th century" or even "the telegraph network of the early 18th century." No, he describes them as what they were: roads in miserable condition, covered with toll booths, traveled by a variety of people in coaches wagons, on horseback and on foot, and not a telegraph station, telephone or wireless device in sight.

That's how you do it. That's how historians who are skilled and not lazy do it. You take the reader back into those bygone eras and let them sense how different things were than they are today. And instead of writing that the best available means of communication at the time were "the Internet of" that time, if they want to emphasize that other means of the time were even more primitive, they actually describe those other, more primitive means. It takes more work to write in this more descriptive way, but it also accomplishes a lot more.