At seven in the evening on this day in 1911, The New York Times handed a telegram to the operator reading “This message sent around the world” with an instruction to pass it on. It went out over ordinary commercial lines — the Azores, Gibraltar, Bombay, Manila, San Francisco — and came back to the same desk sixteen and a half minutes later, having travelled nearly 29,000 miles through the hands of sixteen relay operators.

Here’s the clever bit: no part of that journey was new. Every cable and every relay station already existed. Somebody just finally thought to ask the whole system one question and time the answer. Most revolutions, in my experience, are a test message.