four minutes
Twitter and the Internet have shaved almost 4 minutes off newswire “delay” since Krakatoa exploded in 1883,
When President Lincoln was assassinated… it took 12 days for that news to reach London. In the [20 year] interim, they had come up with the technological ability to build telegraph cables and put them underwater.
The result of this was that the sudden message that the Reuters correspondent managed to get off saying “Massive explosion in Krakatoa, many dead”. He flashed it to Batavia - to Jakarta as it is now - it went on the undersea telegraph and arrived in London just 4 minutes later.
People in Bombay, Bournemouth, Biarritz and Birmingham Alabama were reading the same news on the same day. I think that the eruption of Krakatoa and the news coverage of Krakatoa, the instant coverage, saw the birth of what we now call the global village. link
