I was at the London Zoo the other day, staring at a buffalo and thinking about the fact that such places all started as a "get inside God's head" attempt to reproduce the two-by-two conditions on board Noah's Ark. For one, there was the work of an obscure, middle-of-nowhere-North-of-England country vicar called William Paley, who wowed everybody with the 1802 equivalent of chaos theory. Paley's was an ORDER theory, and he explained it all in a large book entitled Natural Theology. What gripped the public imagination was his idea that every bit of nature was like a watch: designed with a purpose. Thus, cranes can't swim because they haven't got webbed feet, but they do have long legs to let them wade. So if zookeepers managed to collect all the animals in existence into one location, you'd get an idea of what He (they didn't think of Him as a She) was thinking at Creation and maybe work out the Heavenly Watchmaker's Grand Design.

Image: Dusan Petricic

The fellow who hoped to put this theory into practice by setting up the London Zoological Society was a big fan of Paley, and while briefly British governor of Java he had spent most of his time in the jungle, scooping up anything that walked, crawled, flew or sat there long enough. Sir Stamford Raffles (for it was he) also deviously obtained a forever lease on Singapore for the Brits and thus became one of the Great and the Good back home. He got the London Zoo job in 1826 because of another G&G name--Sir Humphry Davy, who lobbied successfully for Raffles as zoo prez.

Davy was about as big a science wheel as you could get: so eminent a savant that he was able to collect a medal from Napoleon's French Institute despite the minor inconvenience of Britain and France being in a state of war at the time. At the tender age of 23, Davy had made so much of an impression with his chemistry experiments that he was offered the job of assistant lecturer at the Royal Institute in London. His first talks on galvanism (a.k.a. electricity) won him rave reviews and swooning ladies.

By 1806 he had become the hottest thing in electrochemistry. And because that kind of guy always knew everything, in 1812, when a mining disaster killed 92 people, Davy was approached to solve the problem of firedamp. This explosive mixture of air and methane was often found underground, and if you happened to come across it with your lighted candle you tended to get taken seriously dead. In no time at all Davy had the answer, in the form of a lamp whose flame was surrounded by a fine-wire gauze. The flame burned, but the surrounding gases didn't. As a result, Davy was awarded a humongous money prize by his pals in the Royal Society.

But George Stephenson, an uneducated collieryman nobody who claimed to have done the same thing only better, didn't get a penny. Fortunately, he had other fish to fry. Mine owners, ticked off by the way the Napoleonic Wars were causing the cost of horse feed to spiral, were desperate for alternative hauling power. So by 1829 our slighted lamp maker came up with a traveling steam-power gizmo called a locomotive and instantly became a railroad biggie, feted by royalty everywhere. Better late than never. As were his trains.

George's son, Robert, picked up where his father had left off and became a famous engineer, in 1850 opening his revolutionary Britannia Bridge, which crossed the Menai Strait in Wales by means of two giant cast-iron tubes through which trains passed. The bridge was a Guinness record before Guinness. No fewer than 2,190,000 rivets were used, banged into holes put there by an ingenious automatic machine working on punched-card control. This struck Robert's friend Isambard Kingdom Brunel as an absolutely riveting idea, because he had a plan of his own that would need three million of them.

In 1866 the plan, by this time hailed as the Great Eastern, the biggest ship in the known universe, was inching into Heart's Content Bay, Newfoundland, hauling one end of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable (the other end was anchored to Valencia Island, Ireland) and making the day for a certain Cyrus Field. A retired American millionaire papermaker, Field owned all 2,500 miles of the cable (and a further 1,000 miles of another one, broken off earlier and now lying at the bottom of the sea), so the Morse code coming ashore in Newfoundland was music to his . .- . -. ...

Samuel Morse himself was one of Field's advisers, having had experience in laying cable ever since 1844, when he had done it between Baltimore and Washington, so as to transmit the first telegraph message--"What hath God wrought"--and stupefy Congress. Not stupefied enough, though, to finance his idea. Fortunately, his business manager was an astute type called Amos Kendall, a former U.S. postmaster general, over whose land Morse's cable had crossed. Kendall suggested to Morse that he'd do better setting up a private telegraph company instead of pressing for government support.

In return for this blindingly obvious idea, Kendall got 10 percent of the first $100,000 Morse would make and 50 percent of the rest. So by 1864 (guess what?), he was a very rich man. Because he was married to a deaf woman (as was Morse), Kendall decided to give some of his well-gotten gains to help found the first National Deaf Mute College (now Gallaudet University).

The mid-19th century witnessed a great deal of American interest in speech and hearing impediments, as well as arguments about how they should be treated. Several schools for stammerers were established by another self-made man, who had amassed a fortune in communications. This was Henry Wells, a stammerer himself, who started life as a freight agent in New York and went on to partnership with William Fargo in a courier company they set up in 1850, called American Express. That year, 55,000 people had gone west to California. Of these, 36,000 had made the trip by sea, as did most of the mail, because dying of thirst or sunstroke, plus objections placed in your way by Native Americans, all tended to make the overland route somewhat iffy.

As ever, it was money that would surmount these minor inconveniences. In 1858 gold was discovered in Colorado and Kansas, and two years later the miners were getting their letters hand-delivered by individuals lathered in sweat and dust because they'd done the last 100 miles at full gallop. Wells and Fargo ran the western end of this extravagant and brief-lived delivery service, known as the Pony Express. Extravagant because it lost a huge amount of money, and brief because 18 months after it started it stopped, when, in October 1861, the coast-to-coast telegraph link was completed.

By that time, however, one particular rider had already left to provide meat for the Union Pacific Railroad, because apart from his ability to ride hell-for-leather he was also a crack shot. Well, fortunately, not quite crack. Although his killing record of 4,280 animals in eight months (69 in one day alone) was so impressive it earned him his nickname, "Buffalo" Bill Cody can't have been that good, or I wouldn't have been able to admire that magnificent beast the other day in the London Zoo.

Must shuffle off now.