The First Online Wedding Happened in 1876
Love endures even the craziest of circumstances
As the Covid-19 pandemic wears on, more and more of life has moved online — school, playdates, conferences, civic events, court proceedings, and even weddings. According to Wired, more than 450,000 couples were married between March and May 2020, at the height of coronavirus lockdowns. A whole industry has sprung up around Zoom weddings, with services like Wedfuly offering professionally produced events complete with virtual photographers, DJs, and the bandwidth to handle up to 1,000 guests.
Most people assume that online weddings are a new thing. But they’re not. The first online wedding occurred almost 150 years ago, in 1876.
As Tom Standage describes in his book The Victorian Internet, the telegraph was the hot, new technology of the time. Every bit as revolutionary and world-changing as today’s internet, the telegraph allowed people to communicate via electronic networks across vast distances almost instantaneously. Messages that would previously take up to a year to send could…
