Back in the Europe of the 1600s, Twitter was a far simpler affair, the brainchild of Danish nobleman Lars
Schleswig who stumbled onto the initial concept while talking to a friend on the other side of a room. He experimented with this idea, first talking to his companion from just outside the room, then from inside a wardrobe and so on. Eventually discovering that communication became impossible after a certain point, he declared to his court that "[this] dog will not hunt!" and he resolved to develop a more advanced means of communication.
The messages or "tweets" were initially transmitted by storing them on birds and having them fly the messages to their intended destination, in principle a basic
DM protocol. However, the birds performed poorly at this task and as frequently as they would deliver the correct message to the correct recipient, they would just as often send garbled notes to the wrong target or, occasionally they would band together and lift whales out of the ocean.
Around 1677, to ensure accuracy of delivery, couriers were introduced to ferry the birds around the continent. The role of bird-courier was both highly coveted and respected and was one of the few methods a serf could enlist to better their station. Astonishingly, it took over fifty years for someone to streamline the service by eliminating the birds from the equation and just telling the message to the courier. The sudden influx of newly useless birds into the wild accounts for their continued presence there today.
Human memory at that time was limited by today's standard and the limit of 140 characters can be traced back to this
idiosyncrasy. Longer messages were attempted, but had to be transmitted by teams as every courier who tried to "break the barrier" endured a
disastrous consequence ranging from losing their facial features or turning into a frog to the more fatal cranial implosion or murder.
A legend from the late 1700s tells of a master "Twitter", one Malachi
Tweetsure, who was supposedly engaged by the Duke of
Anjou to deliver a message of some 200 characters to King Louis XVI warning of the imminent revolt. The strain on Malachi's mind was too much for him and his surviving ghost delivered only a partial warning about a spoiled pheasant dinner that had been revolting, a message that was dismissed by the King as "irrelevant". No
official records remain of this incident, but it has long been held as historical fact by the Tweet community.
The 1800s saw a drastic downturn in the use of Twitter, or "The
Wordsman's Folly" as it was known then. Instead letters, a primitive form of email, saw a massive increase in
use after Queen Victoria saw a demonstration of the technology at the Royal Exhibition and the subsequent increase in popularity maintains today. The Tweets remained in use however, for now though, they were the purview of the criminal gangs of London. Used most famously in the ransom of the son of the Earl of Norfolk, a case that worked out well thanks to the police being able to trace the "
IP" or "Input Person" of the tweet back to the Red Razors Gang's hideout by following him, whereupon the Earl's son was found safe and bored.
The person, perhaps most responsible for the return of The Twitter to prominence and popularity is, of course, Andy Warhol. His pop-art experiments with "a semi-mechanised silkscreen process" allowed him to create his work
32 Campbell's Soup Cans, a series of portraits depicting the entire range of Campbell's Soup available at the time. It was the process of capturing repetition that still allowed for variance that Warhol obsessed with for years, until finally he stumbled upon perhaps his greatest contribution to popular culture. The
hashtag. Thus allowing the Tweets that had become popular again with The Alphabet City's bohemians to generate repeating themes while still remaining unique, Warhol unwittingly saved the ancient communication tool from obsolescence.
After the subsequent popularity boost, it was only a matter of time before an unknown research fellow from MIT designed a basic Twitter program that allowed the 140 character messages to be exchanged over a linked network of computers between laboratories. That same network became sentient only weeks later and subsequently gave birth to what we now call the
internet. The rest, as they say, is what's happening right now to all of us.
And that, my friends, is the story of Twitter in just under 140 characters.
