Mark Twain wrote a story in 1898 that describes the internet

Boing Boing reports on an 1898 Mark Twain short story that remarkably prefigures the internet. Titled 'From The London Times in 1904,' it is set six years in the future and centers on the telelectroscope, a machine invented by a character named Szczepanik. The story opens as a murder mystery, with an army officer named Clayton accused of killing Szczepanik, who invented the machine. Twain's vision of connected technology, composed in the nineteenth century, bears striking resemblance to the networked systems we inhabit today.

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