This is pretty weird. Google has a tiny site called Google Books Ngram Viewer. It's connected to Google Books, their hugely ambitious project to collect, scan and make available pretty much every book in history. What Ngram Viewer does is allow you to see what words or phrases were most used across the years.

And if you search for the word "internet" from 1800 to today, as you would expect, the line stays flat for most of that period and then goes up dramatically starting around 1980 -- except for a brief period in 1900-1910. Huh. You can check it out here.

Does someone have an explanation for us? Is it just (as is most likely) a glitch? Was there a series of science fiction novels published around that time with something called an internet?

Because the only other explanation we see is that this is evidence of time travel.

Hat tip Twitter user @christophe971.