I guess Alexander Graham Bell’s family could’ve theoretically just happened to have been on vacation from Scotland to London when it fell in 1862, which would’ve naturally thrown a wrench in Bell inventing his telephone, but Elisha Gray independently invented his own version of a phone the same year Bell did (1876), and he was American, so it’s unlikely his own invention progress would’ve been impacted by the Fall. By 1880, America alone had nearly 50 thousand telephones throughout the country, is there any particular reason that none are ever seen in the Neath despite it being nearly 1900? (and/or am I just dumb and have completely forgotten any stories that had them?)
Likewise, telegraphs have been around since 1938, but I can’t recall seeing any of those mentioned either.
Telegrams are mentioned here and there - the Great Game uses them, for instance. I suspect this is one of those things where a technology is more common on the surface than in the Neath - like the big stir there was when movie cameras came to London a few years ago.
No steam lorries or motorcars either, that I can recall. The horse was still king, but there ought to be some about by the late 1890s. Clearly the fall changed something there.
Also, that Penny Farthing that keeps showing up on a card in my deck: They were obsolete by the 1890s, and weren’t being made after 1893. The more familiar modern style of ‘safety’ bicycle had taken over. I honestly think that things have been excluded or included because they fit or don’t fit an idea of what is archetypally Victorian, not because Failbetter had a meeting one day where they said ‘Today we are going to discuss how the fall affected the development of the telephone.’ edited by Plynkes on 11/25/2020
Mr Spices mentions motorcars if you bring him a Storm-bird. I half-remember a car featuring in the same Exceptional Story as the movie camera, too? But my memory could be playing tricks on me.
Mind you, the option to make a film for the Empress’ Court released in Oct 2017 (at least assuming the creation date for those wiki pages accurately reflects the release time of the content?), or 1895 in FL time, which is the actual year a film was first projected to a paying audience (which happened in late December, but obviously the technology had been available for a small tad so those people could, well, film the film), so London actually got access to cinematography at pretty much the same time everyone on the Surface did.
For now, I’ll write it off as something like "the Masters don’t want people having phones for the same spooky reasons they changed all of the street/location names & banned old maps of the city". I once saw someone describe those reasons as along the lines of "they don’t want people to be able to easily put together how much they’ve changed the city", and I’d imagine a bunch of phone lines would make it easier to figure some of those changes out just by merit of places being that much more connected.
edit: also had no idea there was an ES about a movie camera, which one was that? edited by Xorph on 11/25/2020