While businesses have been working together for centuries, online collaboration is a much newer concept -- and an interesting question that I would like to ask is, just how new?

The answer probably depends on two factors: your generation and your definition of "online." Younger people may think of online collaboration as belonging exclusively to the Internet age, while slightly older people would have reason to think it dates to the 1980's, when personal computers and networks began to invade the workplace.

But what about the telephone and the fax machine? Those tools facilitated business communication for decades before the 1980's, and while the people who used those devices were not online in the sense we use the word today, they were still communicating instantly (or nearly so) for the purpose of coordinating a business process. In a way, their interaction with their colleagues was remarkably similar to our being online.

So in our definition of 'online collaboration,' I think it makes sense to include any collaborative communication that is nearly instantaneous across distances and can be used to coordinate business processes in real time.

By this definition, the first online collaboration most likely dates to the early decades of the telegraph, which was patented in the 1830's.

By the 1850's, the telegraph was widely used in business, government, and even for personal messages. However, it could hardly be called instantaneous. You had to go to a telegraph office to place the message, and then the message would have to be keyed-in by hand, and then decoded by hand on the receiving end, and then hand delivered to the recipient. It was certainly faster than any alternative, but in most cases, messages took hours to be delivered, not minutes or seconds. That hardly qualifies as instantaneous.

However, there was at least one business application that was nearly instantaneous: the unique synergy between the telegraph and the railroad. That was where serious online collaboration really began.

By the 1850's, railways already connected many cities and towns in the United States, with more being added every year. Almost all of these railways were single track; in other words, a single set of rails had to serve trains going in both directions. This meant that the movement of trains along those tracks had to be carefully coordinated -- or deadly accidents could occur. It is one thing to create a schedule that requires trains to be at certain places at certain times, but the reality was that trains could be delayed for any number of reasons, so a dispatcher could never know for sure exactly where trains were at any point in time.

By the way, if you are curious how trains traveling in two directions can operate on a single track, it is based on a feature of railway design called a 'siding' (sometimes referred to as 'passing loop' in the UK). It is essentially a short section of track that connects to the main track on both of its ends. According to a schedule, a train traveling in one direction would move onto a siding and wait for a train moving in the opposite direction to pass. After that, the original train goes back on the main track and continues safely on its way -- at least that is how it supposed to work.

But what happens if that other train is delayed for hours or perhaps even cancelled? How long does the first train wait? If no train passes, how would it know if it is safe to move back onto the main track? Without any way for a dispatcher to communicate with the trains or the stations -- or even know where the trains were -- it was a real challenge to operate a railroad safely.

Then along came the telegraph and everything changed. It was exactly the technology that the train industry needed, and the railroads had something very valuable to offer in return: rights of way. Railroads had already negotiated (or otherwise obtained) the rights to put their tracks between cities and towns, linking them together like lines on a map. In most cases, the railroads literally owned the land immediately along their right of way. That was the perfect place to put telegraph wires.

The railroads were quite happy -- very likely, ecstatic -- to allow telegraph companies to string lines alongside their tracks and to place a telegraph office in every train station -- in return for the free use of the telegraph to conduct the business of the railroad. The marriage of the railroad and the telegraph was mutually beneficial. It allowed both industries to grow and prosper, connecting the countryside with both physical and data transport.

The immediate benefit to the railroad company was knowledge of where all their trains were. Whenever a train arrived at (or left) a station, that information was sent to the central office, as well as to other stations along the same line. Dispatchers then knew which sections of track were clear, and could safely coordinate trains traveling in both directions.

Interestingly enough, the phrase 'on line' was commonly used by telegraph operators in those days to indicate that they were at their station and ready to send/receive messages. You can think of the stations as representing nodes along a telegraph line, and one telegraph operator could interact only with other operators who were currently 'on line.' While the phrase 'on line' has even earlier antecedents, its usage in the early telegraph industry was probably the first use of that term in the sense of being electrically connected.

If you think of each train as a workflow, and each station along the route as representing a step in that workflow, you start to comprehend the size of the problem. A central office was tasked with coordinating multiple interacting workflows in real time while the trains they represented were hundreds of miles away -- and doing it in the 1850's! Thanks to the telegraph, all of this activity could be done from one location.

What makes the problem more interesting is that even in the 1850's, transportation was intermodal. For example, on the Illinois Central Railroad, you could purchase a ticket in Chicago that would take you all the way to New Orleans, even though the train line ended in Cairo, Illinois. That is because when the train arrived in Cairo, a riverboat would be there waiting to take passengers down the Mississippi to New Orleans, as well as dropping off passengers heading north on the next train. Here again, the telegraph was vital in making sure the riverboat would be there when the train arrived, even if the train was delayed by hours. The riverboat also knew how many passengers to expect and what level of accommodations they had paid for. It was a marvelously sophisticated system given the technology available.

I will end this post with one more example from the Illinois Central Railroad in the 1850s. No food was served on trains, but at certain stations the train would stop for 30 minutes to allow people to purchase a hot lunch or dinner. The conductor would poll the passengers in advance to find out how many wanted to eat, and he would drop off the list at the station just before the station with the dining stop. A telegraph operator would wire the list to the next station so that the meals were ready to eat when the train arrived. Amazing!

The operation of the railroads was probably the first major use of electronic communication to coordinate business activities in real time and over huge distances. I marvel at what they achieved with a technology that seems so crude today. Sometimes, I wonder if future generations will be similarly impressed by our application of collaboration technology.