…in the past century or so, the press has revolutionized transportation. The race to get and distribute news finally put an electric girdle round the earth. Shakespeare’s fancy about Puck putting a girdle round the earth in forty minutes was surpassed by telegraph and cable. Space was annihilated. And the village gossip became a world gossip. In 1844 the telegraph was greeted as “the first definite pulsation of the real nervous system of the world.”