Millions of emails get sent internationally everyday, they connect people, enable love across the borders, keep families in touch, and help billions of dollars of trade. So, isn’t it strange that nobody seems to know where the world’s first transatlantic email was sent from?
The other night, after the Connecting Innovation event I got into a conversation with Professor John Carroll from the University of Sussex about the contribution of Sussex to advancing the internet.
I had read somewhere that the first transatlantic email had been sent from the University of Sussex campus. But nobody knew about this important event. Using Danny Hope‘s iPhone in the pub afterwards, finding the information took ages, because of a total lack of any web pages mentioning it. But luckily I found a reference to it in a obituary in the The Daily Telegraph.
According to the article, in September 1973 Professor Dick Grimsdale and a group of American academics sent the world’s first transatlantic email message from the University of Sussex campus. This press release locates the event to a computer in a lecture room in the Engg 2 building. The computer was linked with a network of inter-connecting mainframe computers in the USA.
At the same conference, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn presented a paper called “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection” (pdf). This paper laid the foundation for TCP/IP which is bedrock for how the internet works. TCP/IP is the language that computers on the Internet talk to each other.
In the UK, we have a tradition of placing a blue plaque, on buildings where somebody famous lived, or an important event happened. This post is to gather support for a blue plaque to be erected on the Engg 2 building on University of Sussex campus to commemorate the sending of the world’s first transatlantic email. If you agree, or disagree please put your name into the comments at the end of this post, stating your support, or non support, and we will start the ball rolling.
Post Updated with a photo of Engg II building by Graham McAllister.
Update II spoke with English Heritage and found out that they only do plaques inside London, outside it is done by the local council.
Sound s like a great idea, as long as we can be sure it’s true.
The antiquity of the licensed email clients at Sussex should have been a clue, but I honestly had no idea. A blue plaque would be perfect.
Agree! Blue plaque ftw!
Thanks for an interesting article. A blue plaque is a very good idea. But I hope it wouldn’t contain the sort of inaccuracy that’s in the University of Sussex press release: “The network subsequently developed into the World Wide Web, providing the ubiquitous email and internet facilities we use today.” (!) Of course the Internet and email are far older than the Web, which is a relative newcomer and is a service using the Internet as supporting infrastructure.
I think they do plaques outside London as well
Interesting. So often when an application is created (like email) it’s the person that creates the application that also tests it. In this case, I wonder if it was called email? If that is what it was called, I’m surprised the creator of the application wasn’t the first to test it overseas.
I’m not trying to take anything away from the folks at the conference but surely the person that built and tested the network would have tried it overseas if only for the coolness factor.
Or maybe “email” was created by someone that waited for the conference to be held before testing overseas?
Regarding the telegraph article… Holy smokes! 27kw is a lot of power to run a computer! Great articles.
Just for reference, I first saw this info about sussex in “where wizards stay up late: the origins of the internet” (isbn 0684832674)
@brent I think the inventor was probably there at the meeting, and may have been giving a demo. But until we track some of the people down we don’t know.
@Dominic Mitchell. Thank you very much for the reference. Will look it up.
I wonder if this really was the first. I was at University of Essex at that time, and recall the ‘network’ we had to use. From a UK center we had to phone (using an 110 baud acoustic “modem” which made noises into a telephone headset) to Imperial College, London, which hosted the only ex-UK link, to a computer in, I believe, Amsterdam, which linked to a US military computer somewhere in northern Europe, which had a (military-managed) link to another military computer in Maryland, which was one node in the nascent DARPA ‘internet’, at that time having around ten machines on it, including one at Stanford, to which I managed to send a message in, I believe, 1972 or 73. But I was by no means the first. It seems most likely that the first proto-email was sent from Imperial College rather than Sussex, and that it was done in private. I see that the original press release refers to the first “public” demonstration. Hardly seems important enough to warrant a blue plaque.
[...] Where the world’s first transatlantic email was sent from: The FeraLabs blog has an interesting bit of historical research tracking down information on the building where the first transatlantic email originated. The message was sent by Dick Grimsdale from the University of Sussex in September 1973 to the United States. Unfortunately the research does not include additional information about where the message was sent. [...]