This is the untold story of the earliest days of coin operated devices which ultimately resulted in today's internet.

It rewrites the history of Victorian technology. Many of the devices now claimed as the earliest or the first in fact were not. The supposed low brow technology used by the masses, hitherto deemed by the mainstream as not worth recording as history actually led directly to today's world.

It ultimately succeeded in the late 1800s because it attracted some very high brow and highly influential money men as backers following the commercial success of a female patentee in the 1870s.

Ironically the technology spread to America in the way that it did in the early 1880s because a young randy man couldn't keep his trousers on and had to be got out of the way for the sake of maintaining the respectability of members of Queen Victoria's household!

Nic Costa is the acknowledged expert in the field, author of the best selling Automatic Pleasures