THE INTERNET GROWS

Perhaps the most important and influential person in the development of the Internet was a wealthy industrialist by the name of E H Beardie. Although Beardie did not invent the Internet, he is credited as the driver of its growth from a localized technology to a national and ultimately global network and is considered by most Internet historians to be the "Father of the Internet".

E H Beardie

Born in 1822 in Philadelphia, Beardie was the first and only son of a migrant dock worker and a skilled one-armed seamstress named Mary-Lou.
Beardie opened his first mill at the young age of 14 and through zeal and cunning rapidly expanded to be one of the largest mill owners in the world.

Like Huxley, Beardie had a passion for using technology to reduce the costs of conducting business. Beardie had heard of Huxley's steam pattern system and in 1842, by coincidence, the two met at a society clam-bake in Long Island. According to other attendees, Beardie questioned Huxley persistently for hours about the steam pattern system, to Huxley's growing annoyance, and ultimately asked whether he could "borrow" John C. McGinley to help install a similar system at his own mills. Bizarrely, especially as Huxley and Beardie were competitors, Huxley agreed, perhaps because he was so irritated by Beardie's unrelenting questions that he said anything to get rid of Beardie.

By the spring of 1843, Beardie already had his first steam pattern system installed, serving 30 patterns to over 50 looms.
The following year, Beardie took a significant additional step: rather than install separate steam pattern systems in each of the mills he owned, he realized that it would be simpler and more cost effective to have one copy of the patterns in one building and then serve these to all of his mills in the locality. This necessitated the building of a network of some 3 miles of steam piping, a considerable undertaking at the time.

Detail of an early server farm, showing the disk stack enclosures

However, Beardie had an even grander vision for the development of the steam pattern system: a vision that went far beyond the humble beginnings as a system simply for sharing loom patterns within a cotton mill.
Beardie realized that if the steam pattern system was valuable to him, it would also be valuable to all mill owners. Rather than simply serving loom patterns to his own mills, why not serve patterns to other mill owners' mills and therefore make extra money in the process? In fact, why not ultimately connect every mill in the world together for this purpose?

In 1847, Beardie presented a paper titled, "An International Industrial Network of Steam Gulleys and Mechanical Actuators" to the Royal Society of Industrialists. The paper described in some detail Beardie's vision for the phased building of a wide area network connecting mills.
Beardie's idea was initially ridiculed as a flight of fancy and totally impractical. Many fellow members of the society thought that Beardie had simply gone mad through over work, so revolutionary was the idea and so comprehensive its scope.

However, through the course of the following year, certain influential members of the society started to understand the true genius of Beardie's idea. His "International Industrial Network of Steam Gulleys and Mechanical Actuators" was talked about more and more although the long name was cumbersome and was quickly abbreviated to "Internet". Before this point in time, the term "Internet" had not been used but it quickly became established, although many old-timers in the cotton industry continued to refer to it as a the "steam pattern system" or simply "steam" up until the early 20th century.

THE GREAT BOSTON INTERNET

In 1852, the Royal Society of Industrialists voted by a large majority to commission the building of the first wide area network, connecting some 340 mills in New England. Named the Great Boston Internet, this was the first phase of Beardie's vision of a global network.

Sections of the Great Boston Internet during construction, circa 1855

This was in itself a massive project and took almost 5 years to complete, employing over 3000 workers and using some 150 miles of steam piping.

In the summer of 1857, the Great Boston Internet went live, serving loom patterns to over 7500 looms from a dedicated facility in New Hampshire owned and built by Beardie. By charging for access to these loom patterns, Beardie rapidly became one of the wealthiest men in world.

E H Beardie's New Hampshire loom pattern server facility.
Note the sheer size of the disk stacks.

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