![1901 Eastern Telegraph cables](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/1901_Eastern_Telegraph_cables.png)
In the nineteenth century, the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
had the world's first commercial telegraph company. British telegraphy dominated international telecommunications well into the twentieth.
Telegraphy
Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas p ...
is the sending of textual messages by human operators using
symbolic codes.
Electrical telegraph
Electrical telegraphs were point-to-point text messaging systems, primarily used from the 1840s until the late 20th century. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems ...
y used conducting wires to send messages, often incorporating a
telegram
Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas p ...
service to deliver the telegraphed communication from the telegraph office. This is distinct from
optical telegraphy
An optical telegraph is a line of stations, typically towers, for the purpose of conveying textual information by means of visual signals. There are two main types of such systems; the semaphore telegraph which uses pivoted indicator arms and ...
that preceded it and the
radiotelegraphy
Wireless telegraphy or radiotelegraphy is transmission of text messages by radio waves, analogous to electrical telegraphy using cables. Before about 1910, the term ''wireless telegraphy'' was also used for other experimental technologies for ...
that followed. Though
Francis Ronalds
Sir Francis Ronalds FRS (21 February 17888 August 1873) was an English scientist and inventor, and arguably the first electrical engineer. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph over a substantial distance. In 1816 ...
first demonstrated a working telegraph over a substantial distance in 1816, he was unable to put it into practical use. Starting in 1836,
William Fothergill Cooke
Sir William Fothergill Cooke (4 May 1806 – 25 June 1879) was an English inventor. He was, with Charles Wheatstone, the co-inventor of the Cooke-Wheatstone electrical telegraph, which was patented in May 1837. Together with John Ricardo he fo ...
, with the scientific assistance of
Charles Wheatstone
Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS FRSE DCL LLD (6 February 1802 – 19 October 1875), was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope (a device for di ...
, developed the
Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph
The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph was an early electrical telegraph system dating from the 1830s invented by English inventor William Fothergill Cooke and English scientist Charles Wheatstone. It was a form of needle telegraph, and the first te ...
. The
needle telegraph
A needle telegraph is an electrical telegraph that uses indicating needles moved electromagnetically as its means of displaying messages. It is one of the two main types of electromagnetic telegraph, the other being the armature system, as exem ...
instrument suggested by Wheatstone, the
battery invented by John Frederic Daniell, and the
relay
A relay
Electromechanical relay schematic showing a control coil, four pairs of normally open and one pair of normally closed contacts
An automotive-style miniature relay with the dust cover taken off
A relay is an electrically operated switch ...
invented by
Edward Davy
Edward Davy (16 June 1806 – 26 January 1885) was an English physician, scientist, and inventor who played a prominent role in the development of telegraphy, and invented an electric relay.
Davy was born in Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, England, ...
were important components of this system.
In 1846, Cooke and financier
John Lewis Ricardo
John Lewis Ricardo (1812 – 2 August 1862) was a British businessman and politician.
He was the son of Jacob Ricardo and nephew of the economist David Ricardo. In 1841 he married Catherine Duff (c.1820 – 1869), the daughter of General Sir A ...
formed the
Electric Telegraph Company
The Electric Telegraph Company (ETC) was a British telegraph company founded in 1846 by William Fothergill Cooke and John Ricardo. It was the world's first public telegraph company. The equipment used was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, ...
which initially supplied telegraph systems to railway companies but soon branched out into other businesses, slowly building a network that could be used by the public. Many competing companies arose; the most important of them was the
Magnetic Telegraph Company (the "Magnetic") formed in 1850. They used the telegraph invented by
William Thomas Henley
William Thomas Henley (1814–1882) was a pioneer in the manufacture of telegraph cables. He was working as a porter in Cheapside in 1830, leaving after disputes with his employer, and working at the St Katherine Docks for six years. During those ...
, which did not require batteries. The Electric and Magnetic companies soon formed a
cartel
A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. Cartels are usually associations in the same sphere of business, and thus an alliance of rivals. Mos ...
to control the market. They were profitable, but most other companies were not.
Submarine telegraph cable
A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea. The first submarine communications cables laid beginning in the 1850s carried tel ...
s were required to extend the telegraph beyond
mainland Britain
Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It is ...
. Suitable insulation for these was unavailable until Scottish military surgeon
William Montgomerie
William Montgomerie (1797–1856) was a Scottish military doctor with the East India Company, and later head of the medical department at Singapore. He is best known for promoting the use of gutta-percha in Europe. This material was an import ...
introduced
gutta-percha
Gutta-percha is a tree of the genus ''Palaquium'' in the family Sapotaceae. The name also refers to the rigid, naturally biologically inert, resilient, electrically nonconductive, thermoplastic latex derived from the tree, particularly from ' ...
in 1843. The
Submarine Telegraph Company
The Submarine Telegraph Company was a British company which laid and operated submarine telegraph cables.
Jacob and John Watkins Brett formed the English Channel Submarine Telegraph Company to lay the first cable across the English Channel. An un ...
laid the world's first international submarine cable in 1851 connecting England with France. In 1864,
John Pender
Sir John Pender KCMG GCMG FSA FRSE (10 September 1816 – 7 July 1896) was a Scottish submarine communications cable pioneer and politician.
Early life
He was born in the Vale of Leven, Scotland, the son of James Pender and his wife, Marion Ma ...
formed the
Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company
Enderby's Wharf is a wharf and industrial site on the south bank of the Thames in Greenwich, London, associated with Telcon and other companies. It has a history of more than 150 years of production of submarine communication cables and associ ...
to manufacture and maintain the
transatlantic telegraph cable
Transatlantic telegraph cables were undersea cables running under the Atlantic Ocean for telegraph communications. Telegraphy is now an obsolete form of communication, and the cables have long since been decommissioned, but telephone and data a ...
for the
Atlantic Telegraph Company
The Atlantic Telegraph Company was a company formed on 6 November 1856 to undertake and exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean, the first such telecommunications link.
History
Cyrus Field, American businessman and finan ...
. He formed many additional companies to lay various cables connecting Britain with its colonies in India, the Far East and Australia. Once these were laid, these disparate companies were merged into the
Eastern Telegraph Company
Cable & Wireless plc was a British telecommunications company. In the mid-1980s, it became the first company in the UK to offer an alternative telephone service to British Telecom (via subsidiary Mercury Communications). The company later offer ...
, established in 1872. In 1934,
Cable & Wireless Ltd absorbed the company.
The inland telegraph companies were
nationalised
Nationalization (nationalisation in British English) is the process of transforming privately-owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization usually refers to pri ...
in 1870 and then operated as part of the
General Post Office
The General Post Office (GPO) was the state postal system and telecommunications carrier of the United Kingdom until 1969. Before the Acts of Union 1707, it was the postal system of the Kingdom of England, established by Charles II in 1660. ...
. Companies operating international submarine cables remained independent. A major mistake made during nationalisation was cost estimates failed to take into account the cost of purchasing railway company
wayleave
An easement is a nonpossessory right to use and/or enter onto the real property of another without possessing it. It is "best typified in the right of way which one landowner, A, may enjoy over the land of another, B". An easement is a propert ...
s, or even that it would be necessary to do so. The final bill far exceeded the original estimate. The telegraph was never profitable under nationalisation because of government policies. Prices were held low to make it affordable for as many people as possible, and the telegraph was extended to every post office issuing
money orders
A money order is a directive to pay a pre-specified amount of money from prepaid funds, making it a more trusted method of payment than a cheque.
History
The money order system was established by a private firm in Great Britain in 1792 and was ...
, whether or not that office generated enough telegraph business to be profitable. Telegraph usage increased enormously under the Post Office, but it was never as cheap as the postal service, and growing competition from the telephone reduced its market share.
The telegraph was an important resource in both world wars, delaying its decline. The introduction of special greetings telegrams in 1935 proved highly popular and somewhat offset a further decline, but by 1970, telegram usage had fallen to its lowest total ever under nationalisation. Repeated price increases to control the deficit drove usage down even further.
Post Office Telecommunications
Post Office Telecommunications was set up as a separate department of the UK Post Office, in October 1969. The Post Office Act 1969 was passed to provide for greater efficiency in post and telephone services; rather than run a range of services, ...
was separated from the Post Office as
British Telecom
BT Group plc (trade name, trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is th ...
in 1981. This was a first step towards its privatisation in 1984. In 1982 British Telecom ended its inland telegram service. International telegrams could be sent by telephone and were received by ordinary letter post. Some private wire use of telegraph continued after the end of the telegram service, and the
telex
The telex network is a station-to-station switched network of teleprinters similar to a Public switched telephone network, telephone network, using telegraph-grade connecting circuits for two-way text-based messages. Telex was a major method of ...
system continued in use by an ever-diminishing group of private users. Most of these succumbed to alternatives on the
internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
in the 1990s.
Early development
Francis Ronalds
Sir Francis Ronalds FRS (21 February 17888 August 1873) was an English scientist and inventor, and arguably the first electrical engineer. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph over a substantial distance. In 1816 ...
conducted the first demonstration that an electric telegraph could be operated over a substantial distance in his
Hammersmith
Hammersmith is a district of West London, England, southwest of Charing Cross. It is the administrative centre of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, and identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London.
...
garden in 1816. He used eight miles of iron wire strung between wooden frames. High-voltage
friction machines were his power source. Ronalds offered his system to the
Admiralty
Admiralty most often refers to:
*Admiralty, Hong Kong
*Admiralty (United Kingdom), military department in command of the Royal Navy from 1707 to 1964
*The rank of admiral
*Admiralty law
Admiralty can also refer to:
Buildings
* Admiralty, Traf ...
. They were already using an
optical telegraph
An optical telegraph is a line of stations, typically towers, for the purpose of conveying textual information by means of visual signals. There are two main types of such systems; the semaphore telegraph which uses pivoted indicator arms and ...
, and despite it being frequently unusable because of weather, saw no need for his invention. Though never put to the test, it is unlikely that Ronalds' system would have worked over very long distances using static electricity generators. Even the relatively short test system only worked well in dry weather.
Nearly all the successful telegraph systems used extensive
electrochemical cells
An electrochemical cell is a device capable of either generating electrical energy from chemical reactions or using electrical energy to cause chemical reactions. The electrochemical cells which generate an electric current are called voltaic o ...
as their power source. The invention of the
Daniell cell
The Daniell cell is a type of electrochemical cell invented in 1836 by John Frederic Daniell, a British chemist and meteorologist, and consists of a copper pot filled with a copper (II) sulfate solution, in which is immersed an unglazed earthenw ...
in 1836 by
John Frederic Daniell
John Frederic Daniell FRS (12 March 1790 – 13 March 1845) was an English chemist and physicist.
Biography
Daniell was born in London. In 1831 he became the first professor of chemistry at the newly founded King's College London; and in 18 ...
made this possible. The earlier
voltaic pile
upright=1.2, Schematic diagram of a copper–zinc voltaic pile. The copper and zinc discs were separated by cardboard or felt spacers soaked in salt water (the electrolyte). Volta's original piles contained an additional zinc disk at the bottom, ...
suffered from falling voltage if used continuously because of the formation of hydrogen bubbles around the copper electrode which tended to insulate it. The Daniell cell solved this problem by placing the zinc and copper electrodes in separate
electrolytes
An electrolyte is a medium containing ions that is electrically conducting through the movement of those ions, but not conducting electrons. This includes most soluble salts, acids, and bases dissolved in a polar solvent, such as water. Upon di ...
with a porous barrier between them. The
sulfuric acid
Sulfuric acid (American spelling and the preferred IUPAC name) or sulphuric acid ( Commonwealth spelling), known in antiquity as oil of vitriol, is a mineral acid composed of the elements sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen, with the molecular formu ...
electrolyte consumed the hydrogen
oxidizing
Redox (reduction–oxidation, , ) is a type of chemical reaction in which the oxidation states of substrate change. Oxidation is the loss of electrons or an increase in the oxidation state, while reduction is the gain of electrons or a d ...
it to water, before it could reach the copper electrode in the
copper sulphate Copper sulfate may refer to:
* Copper(II) sulfate, CuSO4, a common compound used as a fungicide and herbicide
* Copper(I) sulfate
Copper(I) sulfate, also known as cuprous sulfate, is an inorganic compound with the chemical formula Cu2 SO4. It ...
electrolyte. A later improvement by J. F. Fuller in 1853 replaced sulfuric acid with
zinc sulfate
Zinc sulfate is an inorganic compound. It is used as a dietary supplement to treat zinc deficiency and to prevent the condition in those at high risk. Side effects of excess supplementation may include abdominal pain, vomiting, headache, and ti ...
.
Another important development was the
relay
A relay
Electromechanical relay schematic showing a control coil, four pairs of normally open and one pair of normally closed contacts
An automotive-style miniature relay with the dust cover taken off
A relay is an electrically operated switch ...
, invented by surgeon
Edward Davy
Edward Davy (16 June 1806 – 26 January 1885) was an English physician, scientist, and inventor who played a prominent role in the development of telegraphy, and invented an electric relay.
Davy was born in Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, England, ...
in 1837 and patented in 1838. It allowed the regeneration of weak telegraph pulses. The incoming pulse activated an
electromagnet
An electromagnet is a type of magnet in which the magnetic field is produced by an electric current. Electromagnets usually consist of wire wound into a coil. A current through the wire creates a magnetic field which is concentrated in the ...
that moved an
armature.
Electrical contacts
An electrical contact is an electrical circuit component found in electrical switches, relays, connectors and circuit breakers. Each contact is a piece of electrically conductive material, typically metal. When a pair of contacts touch, they ca ...
attached to it closed and completed a secondary circuit. A local battery provided the current for a new pulse through the contacts and onwards along the telegraph line. Davy's relay was the first device to use metallic make-and-break contacts, a great improvement on electrodes dipping into a container of mercury. The relay's importance was it allowed telegraph transmissions over long distances that would otherwise require operators at periodic intermediate stations to read and retransmit the message. Davy began experimenting in telegraphy in 1835, and in 1837 demonstrated his telegraph system in
Regent's Park
Regent's Park (officially The Regent's Park) is one of the Royal Parks of London. It occupies of high ground in north-west Inner London, administratively split between the City of Westminster and the Borough of Camden (and historically betwee ...
over a mile of copper wire. He held an exhibition in London, but after his marriage broke down, he abandoned telegraphy and emigrated to Australia.
William Fothergill Cooke
Sir William Fothergill Cooke (4 May 1806 – 25 June 1879) was an English inventor. He was, with Charles Wheatstone, the co-inventor of the Cooke-Wheatstone electrical telegraph, which was patented in May 1837. Together with John Ricardo he fo ...
was the driving force in establishing the telegraph as a business in the United Kingdom. Inspired to build a telegraph after seeing
Georg Wilhelm Muncke
Georg Wilhelm Muncke or Georg Wilhelm Munke (28 November 1772, in Hilligsfeld – 17 October 1847, in Großkmehlen) was a German physicist.
From 1797 to 1810 he worked as an administrator at the Georgianum in Hanover. In 1810 he became a pro ...
demonstrate a
needle telegraph
A needle telegraph is an electrical telegraph that uses indicating needles moved electromagnetically as its means of displaying messages. It is one of the two main types of electromagnetic telegraph, the other being the armature system, as exem ...
in March 1836, Cooke built a prototype shortly afterwards but did not pursue this design. He looked for mechanical solutions instead because he believed (wrongly) that the needle telegraph would require multiple wires, each driving a separate needle. Cooke initially made a telegraph with a clockwork
detent
A detent is a mechanical or magnetic means to resist or arrest the movement of a mechanical device. Such a device can be anything ranging from a simple metal pin to a machine. The term is also used for the method involved.
Magnetic detents are ...
mechanism operating electromagnets. The first mechanical apparatus was built in 1836. He pitched the telegraph to various railway companies as a means of
signalling to control trains without success. Cooke, who was not scientifically trained, sought advice from
Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday (; 22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic inducti ...
and
Charles Wheatstone
Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS FRSE DCL LLD (6 February 1802 – 19 October 1875), was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope (a device for di ...
. Wheatstone recommended using a needle telegraph system. After the collaboration with Wheatstone had begun, they pursued only needle telegraphs. The
Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph
The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph was an early electrical telegraph system dating from the 1830s invented by English inventor William Fothergill Cooke and English scientist Charles Wheatstone. It was a form of needle telegraph, and the first te ...
they developed and patented in May 1837 could have various arrangements of needles, but the one that initially succeeded used five needles. They were operated in pairs, so they pointed to a letter of the alphabet marked on a board.
![Cooke and Wheatstone electric telegraph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Cooke_and_Wheatstone_electric_telegraph.jpg)
Cooke proposed the Cooke and Wheatstone system to the
Liverpool and Manchester Railway
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR) was the first inter-city railway in the world. It opened on 15 September 1830 between the Lancashire towns of Liverpool and Manchester in England. It was also the first railway to rely exclusively ...
, and the
London and Birmingham Railway
The London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR) was a railway company in the United Kingdom, in operation from 1833 to 1846, when it became part of the London and North Western Railway (L&NWR).
The railway line which the company opened in 1838, betw ...
trialled a four-needle system in July 1837. Both applications were for signalling
rope-hauled trains; both railways rejected them in favour of steam-driven whistles. Their first success came in 1838 when the
Great Western Railway
The Great Western Railway (GWR) was a British railway company that linked London with the southwest, west and West Midlands of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament on 31 August 1835 and ran ...
installed a five-needle telegraph from
Paddington station
Paddington, also known as London Paddington, is a Central London railway terminus and London Underground station complex, located on Praed Street in the Paddington area. The site has been the London terminus of services provided by the Great We ...
to
West Drayton
West Drayton is a suburban town in the London Borough of Hillingdon. It was an ancient parish in the county of Middlesex and from 1929 was part of the Yiewsley and West Drayton Urban District, which became part of Greater London in 1965. The se ...
—the first commercial telegraph in the world. The cables were laid originally in an underground conduit, but the insulation began to fail. Cooke replaced the instruments with a two-needle system using only the wires that remained intact. The
code
In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...
for the two-needle system could not be read off a board; it had to be learned. The profession of
telegraph operator
A telegraphist (British English), telegrapher (American English), or telegraph operator is an operator who uses a telegraph key to send and receive the Morse code in order to communicate by land lines or radio.
During the Great War the Royal ...
(telegraphist) had been created.
In 1843, the telegraph line was extended to
Slough
Slough () is a town and unparished area in the unitary authority of the same name in Berkshire, England, bordering west London. It lies in the Thames Valley, west of central London and north-east of Reading, at the intersection of the M4 ...
and Cooke converted it to a one-needle system. New uninsulated wires were run suspended from poles on
ceramic insulators, a system Cooke patented, which rapidly became ubiquitous. Cooke financed this extension as the Great Western was unwilling to finance a system it considered experimental. Up to this point, they had insisted on exclusive use and had refused Cooke permission to open public telegraph offices. Cooke's new agreement gave the railway free use of the system in exchange for the right to open public offices, establishing a public telegraph service for the first time. A flat rate of one
shilling
The shilling is a historical coin, and the name of a unit of modern currencies formerly used in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, other British Commonwealth countries and Ireland, where they were generally equivalent to 12 pence o ...
(5
decimal pence) was charged regardless of message length; many people paid this just to see the strange equipment.
The earliest machine for sending pictures by telegraph (
fax
Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer o ...
) is credited to Scottish inventor
Alexander Bain in 1848. He patented an earlier unbuilt design in 1843.
Frederick C. Bakewell demonstrated another fax machine with an improved design at the
Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, also known as the Great Exhibition or the Crystal Palace Exhibition (in reference to the temporary The Crystal Palace, structure in which it was held), was an International Exhib ...
in 1851. Bain also invented a chemical
printing telegraph
The printing telegraph was invented by Royal Earl House in 1846. House's equipment could transmit around 40 instantly readable words per minute, but was difficult to manufacture in bulk. The printer could copy and print out up to 2,000 words per h ...
. He used a dot-dash code with this machine similar to
Morse code
Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one of ...
, but with different
codepoint
In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but ...
s. The Bain telegraph enjoyed some popularity in the 1850s in England, but when he took it to the US in 1849 he became embroiled in litigation with
Samuel Morse
Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph ...
. The dispute broke him financially, and he returned to clockmaking, his original profession, in later life.
Telegraph companies
Development of the telegraph in Britain was distinctly different from that in other European countries. In
Continental Europe
Continental Europe or mainland Europe is the contiguous continent of Europe, excluding its surrounding islands. It can also be referred to ambiguously as the European continent, – which can conversely mean the whole of Europe – and, by ...
, governments developed the telegraph for their own purposes and controlled them as a state monopoly. For instance,
Siemens
Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad.
The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', '' ...
early telegraph installations in
Prussia
Prussia, , Old Prussian: ''Prūsa'' or ''Prūsija'' was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was ''de facto'' dissolved by an em ...
had a distinctly military purpose; in France it was years before the public could use the telegraph. In Britain, between 1846, the formation of the first telegraph company, until nationalisation in 1870, the telegraph grew entirely at the instigation of private companies using private capital and without government support. 64 telegraph companies were formed during that period, though 68% of them failed and only a handful of them grew to any significant size.
Electric Telegraph Company
![PSM V03 D418 Single needle instrument](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/PSM_V03_D418_Single_needle_instrument.jpg)
Cooke and financier
John Lewis Ricardo
John Lewis Ricardo (1812 – 2 August 1862) was a British businessman and politician.
He was the son of Jacob Ricardo and nephew of the economist David Ricardo. In 1841 he married Catherine Duff (c.1820 – 1869), the daughter of General Sir A ...
established the
Electric Telegraph Company
The Electric Telegraph Company (ETC) was a British telegraph company founded in 1846 by William Fothergill Cooke and John Ricardo. It was the world's first public telegraph company. The equipment used was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, ...
(ETC) in 1846, the first company formed to provide a telegraph service to the public. Wheatstone was not involved having had a serious falling out with Cooke over who should take credit for the invention. The matter went to arbitration with
Marc Isambard Brunel
Sir Marc Isambard Brunel (, ; 25 April 1769 – 12 December 1849) was a French-British engineer who is most famous for the work he did in Britain. He constructed the Thames Tunnel and was the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Born in Franc ...
acting for Cooke and Daniell acting for Wheatstone. They reached a compromise with both taking some credit. Wheatstone had no interest in commercial enterprises, wishing only to publish scientific results. The ETC bought out Wheatstone's patent interest in exchange for royalties, and acquired Davy's relay patent. They bought out Bain for the substantial sum of £7,500 () after he had threatened to derail the bill forming the company because his patents would be infringed. The ETC bought out other telegraph patents when they could, often not because they wanted to use them, but to suppress competition.
The company concentrated on their railway business first but struggled to be profitable. Their relationship with the railways, however, gave them a structural advantage over competitors that started up later. By the time they arrived on the scene, the ETC had agreements with most railways, which gave them exclusive use of the
wayleaves, shutting out their competitors from the most economical way of building a telegraph network.
After 1848, other areas of the business grew. Supplying news to newspapers and stock exchange information to the financial sector was profitable. The insurer
Lloyd's of London
Lloyd's of London, generally known simply as Lloyd's, is an insurance and reinsurance market located in London, England. Unlike most of its competitors in the industry, it is not an insurance company; rather, Lloyd's is a corporate body gov ...
was a major user from the beginning. They had telegraph instruments installed directly in their London offices in 1851. Telegraph use by the public was slow to grow because of high prices but increased after competition drove down prices. This led to the company relocating their London
central office to bigger premises in Great Bell Alley,
Moorgate
Moorgate was one of the City of London's northern gates in its defensive wall, the last to be built. The gate took its name from the Moorfields, an area of marshy land that lay immediately north of the wall.
The gate was demolished in 1762, b ...
, in 1859. The eastern portion of the road was later renamed Telegraph Street after the company. The ETC remained by far the largest telegraph company until nationalisation in 1870, after which Cooke retired. Both he and Wheatstone were knighted for their services to telegraphy in 1869 and 1868, respectively.
The ETC was heavily involved in laying submarine telegraph cables to Europe and Ireland. They operated the first
cable ship
A cable layer or cable ship is a deep-sea vessel designed and used to lay underwater cables for telecommunications, electric power transmission, military, or other purposes. Cable ships are distinguished by large cable sheaves for guiding cabl ...
permanently fitted out for laying cables,
CS ''Monarch''. In 1853, they created the International Telegraph Company to overcome Dutch objections to a British company laying telegraph cables on their soil. This company was merged back into the ETC in 1854 and named the Electric and International Telegraph Company. Other subsidiary companies created to lay submarine cables were the Channel Islands Telegraph Company (1857) and the
Isle of Man Telegraph Company
The Isle of Man has an extensive communications infrastructure consisting of telephone cables, submarine cables, and an array of television and mobile phone transmitters and towers.
Telecommunications Telegraph
The history of Manx telecommunicat ...
(1859).
Magnetic Telegraph Company
John Watkins Brett
John Watkins Brett (1805–1863) was an English telegraph engineer.
Life
Brett was the son of a cabinetmaker, William Brett of Bristol, and was born in that city in 1805. Brett is known as the founder of submarine telegraphy. He formed the Subm ...
established the English and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company (Magnetic Telegraph Company, or "Magnetic" for short) in 1850, initially to connect Britain and Ireland with a submarine telegraph cable. The first attempt failed, as did several attempts by rival companies. The Magnetic finally succeeded in 1853, giving Ireland a telegraphic connection to Britain for the first time, and through Britain to mainland Europe. This was the deepest submarine cable laid to date.
The Magnetic was the ETC's largest competitor; both formed a virtual
duopoly
A duopoly (from Greek δύο, ''duo'' "two" and πωλεῖν, ''polein'' "to sell") is a type of oligopoly where two firms have dominant or exclusive control over a market. It is the most commonly studied form of oligopoly due to its simplicit ...
. In this context the ETC was commonly referred to as the Electric to counterpose it to the Magnetic. The Magnetic was not, however, the Electric's first competitor. The British Electric Telegraph Company (BETC), founded in 1849, was the first. Its name was later changed to the British Telegraph Company to avoid confusion with the ETC. The BETC failed because they were founded on the mistaken assumption that they could obtain railway wayleaves. They wrongly believed Parliament would force the railway companies to allow them to erect lines. They obtained very few wayleaves; one exception was the
Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway
The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (L&YR) was a major British railway company before the 1923 Grouping. It was incorporated in 1847 from an amalgamation of several existing railways. It was the third-largest railway system based in northern ...
. Magnetic took them over in 1857 under the new name of the British and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company. The Magnetic avoided the pitfalls encountered by the BETC. From the start, they planned their system based on underground cables along highways. Not only did the ETC have the railway wayleaves, but the
United Kingdom Telegraph Company
In the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom had the world's first commercial telegraph company. British telegraphy dominated international telecommunications well into the twentieth. Telegraphy is the sending of textual messages by human ope ...
had the wayleaves for canals and the BETC had the wayleaves for overground cables along highways. This asset of the BETC was the attraction for the Magnetic in its takeover of both.
The Magnetic used a telegraph system not covered by ETC's patents—
William Thomas Henley
William Thomas Henley (1814–1882) was a pioneer in the manufacture of telegraph cables. He was working as a porter in Cheapside in 1830, leaving after disputes with his employer, and working at the St Katherine Docks for six years. During those ...
and George Foster's needle telegraph, which did not require batteries. While the operator was sending a message, the handle's movement generated the electricity electromagnetically. This was the meaning of
magnetic in the company name. After the BETC takeover, the Magnetic acquired its founder
Henry Highton
Henry Highton (1816–1874) was an English schoolmaster and clergyman, Principal of Cheltenham College, known also as a scientific and theological writer.
Life
He was born at Leicester, the eldest son of Henry Highton. He spent five years at Rugb ...
's needle telegraph. This instrument was the cheapest of the manual telegraph systems at between £2 10 shillings (£2.50) and £3 (). By the time of nationalisation, the Magnetic were also using Bright's bells on their most important lines.
Charles Tilston Bright
Sir Charles Tilston Bright (8 June 1832 – 3 May 1888) was a British electrical engineer who oversaw the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858, for which work he was knighted.
Life
Born on 8 June 1832 in Wanstead, Essex, B ...
invented this instrument; it was acoustic rather than visual allowing the operator to work faster.
Not only did the Magnetic lay the first cable to Ireland, they had an exclusive agreement with the
Submarine Telegraph Company
The Submarine Telegraph Company was a British company which laid and operated submarine telegraph cables.
Jacob and John Watkins Brett formed the English Channel Submarine Telegraph Company to lay the first cable across the English Channel. An un ...
which controlled the cables to Europe. For a short period, the Magnetic had control of all international traffic, shutting out the ETC. It acquired most of the railway wayleaves in Ireland, forcing the ETC to use roads and canals, the exact opposite of the situation in Great Britain.
London District Telegraph Company
London District Telegraph Company (the ''District''), formed in 1859 in London, was closely associated with the Magnetic. John Watkins Brett and Charles Kemp Dyer were directors of both companies; Edward Brailsford Bright was secretary of both. Their telegraph operators were trained at the Magnetic's headquarters in the
Strand
Strand may refer to:
Topography
*The flat area of land bordering a body of water, a:
** Beach
** Shoreline
*Strand swamp, a type of swamp habitat in Florida
Places Africa
*Strand, Western Cape, a seaside town in South Africa
* Strand Street, ...
. The Magnetic installed the telegraph lines for the District and leased them back for a
peppercorn rent
In legal parlance, a peppercorn is a metaphor for a very small cash payment or other nominal consideration, used to satisfy the requirements for the creation of a legal contract. It is featured in ''Chappell & Co Ltd v Nestle Co Ltd'' (960AC 87) ...
in exchange for the District passing on the Magnetic's messages to and from outside London. The District's business model was to provide cheap telegrams within London and not install expensive links between cities. Prices were
fourpence (1.7p) for ten words and
sixpence (2.5p) for fifteen. By comparison, a long distance telegram on the Electric cost four shillings (20p). The District's area was limited to within of
Charing Cross
Charing Cross ( ) is a junction in Westminster, London, England, where six routes meet. Clockwise from north these are: the east side of Trafalgar Square leading to St Martin's Place and then Charing Cross Road; the Strand leading to the City; ...
, with possible later expansion to . The District avoided the expense of erecting telegraph poles or burying cables by stringing the wires from building to building, a technique that could only be used in heavily built-up areas.
Rooftop wires may have been cheap to install but getting the wayleaves could be troublesome. Thousands of individual permissions had to be obtained, and unusual conditions were sometimes imposed. One householder insisted the installers enter her property only once (after wiping their feet) to access the roof. Meals were hoisted up to the workmen on rooftops until they had finished. Around seven thousand interviews and negotiations were conducted, many of them equally troublesome, to erect only of wire. The District's cheap prices stimulated a much more casual use of the telegraph; in 1862 the company transmitted a quarter of a million messages.
United Kingdom Telegraph Company
The United Kingdom Telegraph Company (UKTC), founded by Thomas Allan, was the last major telegraph company to be formed. Registered in 1850, it did not raise sufficient capital to launch until 1860. The business model was to charge a
flat rate
A flat fee, also referred to as a flat rate or a linear rate refers to a pricing structure that charges a single fixed fee for a service, regardless of usage. Less commonly, the term may refer to a rate that does not vary with usage or time of us ...
of one shilling (5p) for twenty words within and two shillings (10p) beyond this, undercutting the established companies. The Electric, with the Magnetic's support, put a great deal of effort into obstructing the UKTC, challenging their right to use highways in Parliament. This was unresolved until Parliament passed an Act in 1862, allowing the UKTC to erect
trunk lines along highways. The Electric used their exclusive agreements with the railways to demand they cut down UKTC lines crossing railway property, a demand with which the railway companies mostly complied. The Electric also petitioned other landowners to exclude the UKTC; sometimes UKTC lines were cut illegally. All this activity made it extremely difficult for the UKTC to establish trunk routes between cities. They had one good option—exclusive rights along canals, but they could not reach Scotland or Ireland this way.
The UKTC completed their first trunk line in 1863 connecting London,
Birmingham
Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West ...
,
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
, and
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a popul ...
. In 1864, a second trunk ran along the route from London, to
Northampton
Northampton () is a market town and civil parish in the East Midlands of England, on the River Nene, north-west of London and south-east of Birmingham. The county town of Northamptonshire, Northampton is one of the largest towns in England; ...
,
Leicester
Leicester ( ) is a city status in the United Kingdom, city, Unitary authorities of England, unitary authority and the county town of Leicestershire in the East Midlands of England. It is the largest settlement in the East Midlands.
The city l ...
,
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city status in the United Kingdom, city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is Historic counties o ...
,
Barnsley
Barnsley () is a market town in South Yorkshire, England. As the main settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley and the fourth largest settlement in South Yorkshire. In Barnsley, the population was 96,888 while the wider Borough has ...
, and
Wakefield
Wakefield is a cathedral city in West Yorkshire, England located on the River Calder. The city had a population of 99,251 in the 2011 census.https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/ks101ew Census 2011 table KS101EW Usual resident population, ...
, ending in
Hull. The northern end of this line was linked to Manchester and Liverpool, connecting the two trunks together at both ends. Later, UKTC extended the trunk network into Scotland, reaching
Glasgow
Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...
and
Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...
. In 1865, the network was extended west, reaching
Swansea
Swansea (; cy, Abertawe ) is a coastal city and the second-largest city of Wales. It forms a principal area, officially known as the City and County of Swansea ( cy, links=no, Dinas a Sir Abertawe).
The city is the twenty-fifth largest in ...
and
Plymouth
Plymouth () is a port city and unitary authority in South West England. It is located on the south coast of Devon, approximately south-west of Exeter and south-west of London. It is bordered by Cornwall to the west and south-west.
Plymouth ...
. In 1858, the UKTC laid a cable from
Newbiggin to
Jutland
Jutland ( da, Jylland ; german: Jütland ; ang, Ēota land ), known anciently as the Cimbric or Cimbrian Peninsula ( la, Cimbricus Chersonesus; da, den Kimbriske Halvø, links=no or ; german: Kimbrische Halbinsel, links=no), is a peninsula of ...
, Denmark, which was extended to Russia giving the UK direct telegraph access to North European and Scandinavian countries.
The UKTC used the printing telegraph of
David Edward Hughes
David Edward Hughes (16 May 1830 – 22 January 1900), was a British-American inventor, practical experimenter, and professor of music known for his work on the printing telegraph and the microphone. He is generally considered to have bee ...
. This was an early form of
teleprinter
A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Initia ...
that printed the message directly without the operator needing to decode it. Transmission was from a piano-like keyboard marked with the letters of the alphabet. The system had been offered to the Electric in 1858, but they rejected it. The operation of the printing telegraph was mechanical. A spinning wheel with the character
types
Type may refer to:
Science and technology Computing
* Typing, producing text via a keyboard, typewriter, etc.
* Data type, collection of values used for computations.
* File type
* TYPE (DOS command), a command to display contents of a file.
* Typ ...
, similar to a modern
daisy wheel printer
Daisy wheel printing is an impact printing technology invented in 1970 by Andrew Gabor at Diablo Data Systems. It uses interchangeable pre-formed type elements, each with typically 96 glyphs, to generate high-quality output comparable to pr ...
, was pressed against the paper at the appropriate time. The wheel in the receiving machine had to be kept in exact
synchrony with the sending machine, otherwise the result would be unreadable. The Hughes machine did this by sending synchronisation pulses down the line, a marked improvement over earlier machines which were slow and temperamental.
Universal Private Telegraph Company
![ABC machine](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/ABC_machine.jpg)
The
Universal Private Telegraph Company
The Universal Private Telegraph Company, Limited was formed in 1861 to exploit Professor Charles Wheatstone’s 1858 ''Universal Telegraph''. The company was meant to "carry out a system by which banks, merchants, public bodies and other parties ma ...
(UPTC) was established in 1861 to provide private telegraph links for companies and institutions. They used the ABC telegraph, also known as Wheatstone's universal telegraph, an instrument patented by Charles Wheatstone in 1858. It was designed to be used by unskilled operators with no knowledge of telegraph codes. Letters were marked around a dial with a button for each. The operator pressed the desired button and then turned a handle which generated pulses of current. These pulses moved a pointer through successive positions until it reached the button that had been pressed, at which point the current was cut off. A receiving dial indicated the position that had been reached at both ends of the circuit. Although much slower than other telegraph systems, it was possible to reach 25
wpm
Words per minute, commonly abbreviated wpm (sometimes uppercased WPM), is a measure of words processed in a minute, often used as a measurement of the speed of typing, reading or Morse code sending and receiving.
Alphanumeric entry
Since words ...
with practice.
The company proved to be highly profitable. It charged £4 per mile of wire per annum and had few overheads. Unlike the public companies, it did not have to staff telegraph offices or employ operators to send and receive messages.
Profitability
Of the inland public companies, only the ETC and the Magnetic were profitable. The District, with its low prices, suffered a loss every year of its existence except 1865. The UKTC, a later start up, hoped to take business away from the big two with low prices, but they were handicapped by an inability to obtain wayleaves on the best routes. The resulting price war ended with them joining the ETC/Magnetic cartel and agreeing a common price structure, destroying their original business model.
Competition from the District and UKTC, together with economies of scale as the network grew, steadily drove down prices. In 1851, the ETC charged ten shillings (50p) for a twenty-word inland telegram over . This fell to four shillings (20p) in 1855, but was still expensive for a typical Victorian worker to use. A
weaver, for instance, earned on average
ten shillings and sixpence (52.5p) per week in 1855. Further reductions occurred in the early 1860s, with both the ETC and the Magnetic attempting to compete with the UKTC's flat one shilling rate. The ETC stopped charging for the address as part of the message, reducing the cost further. In 1865, the ETC, Magnetic and UKTC fixed a common scale of charges for all three companies. The flat rate was dropped and a twenty-word message cost one shilling (5p) up to , one shilling and sixpence (7.5p) up to , and two shillings (10p) up to . Local messages within London and large towns were sixpence (2.5p).
The falling prices stimulated more traffic as the public used the telegraph for mundane everyday messages. This generated a steep increase in profits. Between 1861 and 1866, the combined net profits of the ETC and Magnetic rose from £99,000 to £178,000. This was not due solely to the increasing size of the network, the
gross income per mile of wire was also increasing.
News service
The telegraph companies offered a news service useful to regional newspapers, which would otherwise have received the information some time after an event. The ETC had a staff of news gathering journalists and by 1854 had 120 newspaper customers. News items included political news from Parliament, stock exchange prices, and sports news, especially horse racing where race results were wanted quickly. Until telegraph offices were opened directly at the racetrack, (
Newmarket did not get one until 1860) a fast rider took the results to the nearest telegraph office. In places where the office was in
line of sight
The line of sight, also known as visual axis or sightline (also sight line), is an imaginary line between a viewer/observer/spectator's eye(s) and a subject of interest, or their relative direction. The subject may be any definable object taken ...
, the results could be signalled to an observer with a telescope at the office but only in clear weather.
In 1859, the ETC and Magnetic entered into an exclusive agreement with
Reuters
Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world.
The agency was estab ...
to supply foreign news. Reuters retained the right to supply shipping and commercial news directly to private subscribers in the London region. In 1865 the ETC, Magnetic, and UKTC formed a combined news service, leaving only one source of news by telegraph. This monopoly irritated the newspapers, and some campaigned vigorously against the telegraph companies. This control of the news became an argument for nationalisation of the telegraph system.
Submarine cables
To connect the telegraph to anywhere outside Britain, submarine telegraph cables were needed. The lack of a good insulator held back their development.
Rubber
Rubber, also called India rubber, latex, Amazonian rubber, ''caucho'', or ''caoutchouc'', as initially produced, consists of polymers of the organic compound isoprene, with minor impurities of other organic compounds. Thailand, Malaysia, and ...
was tried but degraded in salt water. The solution came with
gutta-percha
Gutta-percha is a tree of the genus ''Palaquium'' in the family Sapotaceae. The name also refers to the rigid, naturally biologically inert, resilient, electrically nonconductive, thermoplastic latex derived from the tree, particularly from ' ...
, a natural
latex
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...
from trees of the genus ''
Palaquium
''Palaquium'' is a genus of about 120 species of trees in the family Sapotaceae. Their range is from India across Southeast Asia, Malesia, Papuasia, and Australasia, to the western Pacific Islands.
Description
Within their range, ''Palaquium'' s ...
'' in the Far East. It sets harder than rubber when exposed to air, but when soaked in hot water it becomes plastic and mouldable. On cooling it rehardens.
William Montgomerie
William Montgomerie (1797–1856) was a Scottish military doctor with the East India Company, and later head of the medical department at Singapore. He is best known for promoting the use of gutta-percha in Europe. This material was an import ...
, the head of the medical department in
Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...
, brought the material to the attention of the
Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
in 1843 when he sent samples of Gutta-percha to them. Montgomerie thought of using the material, in place of rubber which deteriorated rapidly in damp tropical conditions, to make medical equipment. After testing some samples, Michael Faraday recognised its potential for underwater cables.
Wheatstone introduced plans in the
House of Commons
The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...
for submarine cables as early as 1840. In 1844–1845, he tested (probably short) lengths of cable in
Swansea Bay
Swansea Bay ( cy, Bae Abertawe) is a bay on the southern coast of Wales. The River Neath, River Tawe, River Afan, River Kenfig and Clyne River flow into the bay. Swansea Bay and the upper reaches of the Bristol Channel experience a large tidal ...
. He tried various insulations, including gutta-percha, but he could not find a suitable way of applying it to long runs of cable.
Cable manufacturing companies
The
Gutta Percha Company
The Gutta Percha Company was an English company formed in 1845 to make a variety of products from the recently introduced natural rubber gutta-percha. Unlike other natural rubbers, this material was thermoplastic allowing it to be easily mou ...
was founded in 1845 to exploit the new material. They initially made bottle stoppers, but soon expanded to a wide range of products. In 1848, on hearing of its potential use for telegraph cables, the firm modified a machine for extruding gutta-percha tubing into one capable of continuously applying gutta-percha to a copper conductor. Up to 1865, the Gutta Percha Company, which had a monopoly on the supply of the material, made nearly all the cores for submarine cables in the UK.
S. W. Silver and Co.
S is the nineteenth letter of the English alphabet.
S may also refer to:
History
* an Anglo-Saxon charter's number in Peter Sawyer (historian), Peter Sawyer's, catalogue Language and linguistics
* Long s (ſ), a form of the lower-case letter s ...
in
Silvertown
Silvertown is a district in the London Borough of Newham, in east London, England. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames, Thames and was historically part of the parishes of West Ham and East Ham, Becontree Hundred, hundred of Becontr ...
, London, made waterproof clothing using rubber and gutta-percha. In 1864, an offshoot of Silver and Co., the
India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company
The India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company was a London-based company based in Silvertown, East London. It was founded by Stephen William Silver in March 1864 as Silver's Indiarubber Works and Telegraph Cable Company Ltd. However ...
, was founded as a rival cable manufacturer.
Some early submarine cables were laid with just their insulation for protection. This was often unsuccessful. The cables were easily damaged and some attempts to lay them failed because they would not sink. The configuration found to work well was to twist the cable cores together, bind them with tarred
hemp
Hemp, or industrial hemp, is a botanical class of ''Cannabis sativa'' cultivars grown specifically for industrial or medicinal use. It can be used to make a wide range of products. Along with bamboo, hemp is among the fastest growing plants o ...
, wind a tarred cord around the whole group of cores, and then protect the assembled cores with iron wires twisted around them. The Gutta Percha Company never made completed cables of this sort, sending them to another company for finishing instead. These companies were specialists in the manufacturing of wire rope.
R.S. Newall and Company
Robert Stirling Newall FRS FRAS (27 May 1812 – 21 April 1889) was a Scottish engineer and astronomer.
Life and work
Born at Dundee on 27 May 1812, Newall began work in a local mercantile office before leaving for London, where, in the employ ...
in
Tyne and Wear
Tyne and Wear () is a metropolitan county in North East England, situated around the mouths of the rivers Tyne and Wear. It was created in 1974, by the Local Government Act 1972, along with five metropolitan boroughs of Gateshead, Newcastl ...
,
Glass, Elliot & Company, and
W. T. Henley
William Thomas Henley (1814–1882) was a pioneer in the manufacture of telegraph cables. He was working as a porter in Cheapside in 1830, leaving after disputes with his employer, and working at the St Katherine Docks for six years. During those ...
in London. were the principal companies involved in this early work. In 1864, the Gutta Percha Company merged with Glass, Elliot to form the
Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company
Enderby's Wharf is a wharf and industrial site on the south bank of the Thames in Greenwich, London, associated with Telcon and other companies. It has a history of more than 150 years of production of submarine communication cables and associ ...
(Telcon).
John Pender
Sir John Pender KCMG GCMG FSA FRSE (10 September 1816 – 7 July 1896) was a Scottish submarine communications cable pioneer and politician.
Early life
He was born in the Vale of Leven, Scotland, the son of James Pender and his wife, Marion Ma ...
instigated this becoming chairman. Pender, with a consortium including
Thomas Brassey
Thomas Brassey (7 November 18058 December 1870) was an English civil engineering contractor and manufacturer of building materials who was responsible for building much of the world's railways in the 19th century. By 1847, he had built about o ...
and
Daniel Gooch
Sir Daniel Gooch, 1st Baronet (24 August 1816 – 15 October 1889) was an English railway locomotive and transatlantic cable engineer. He was the first Superintendent of Locomotive Engines on the Great Western Railway from 1837 to 1864 and ...
, bought the
SS ''Great Eastern'', a huge, failing passenger ship built by
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Isambard Kingdom Brunel (; 9 April 1806 – 15 September 1859) was a British civil engineer who is considered "one of the most ingenious and prolific figures in engineering history," "one of the 19th-century engineering giants," and "one ...
. They converted it into a
cable layer
A cable layer or cable ship is a deep-sea vessel designed and used to lay underwater cables for telecommunications, electric power transmission, military, or other purposes. Cable ships are distinguished by large cable sheaves for guiding cab ...
. Telcon chartered the ship using it on some of the major cable installations around the world.
By 1880, cable production was centred on the banks of the
Thames
The River Thames ( ), known alternatively in parts as the River Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At , it is the longest river entirely in England and the second-longest in the United Kingdom, after the R ...
in
East London
East or Orient is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth.
Etymology
As in other languages, the word is formed from the f ...
. Telcon was the major supplier, with some work subcontracted to W. T. Henley at
North Woolwich
North Woolwich is an area in the London Borough of Newham in East London. It is located on the northern bank of the River Thames, across the river from Woolwich. It is connected to Woolwich by the Woolwich Ferry and Woolwich foot tunnel.
Des ...
, a major manufacturer of electrical equipment with a site. Gutta-percha production was near-monopolised by the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company, by then a subsidiary of Telcon, at their site in Silvertown. The company operated several cable ships, of which the ''Silvertown'' was the largest in the world.
Siemens
Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad.
The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', '' ...
also had a cable manufacturing facility at
Woolwich
Woolwich () is a district in southeast London, England, within the Royal Borough of Greenwich.
The district's location on the River Thames led to its status as an important naval, military and industrial area; a role that was maintained throu ...
. Exports were a large part of the business totalling well over £2 million in 1873—one per cent of total British manufactured exports.
Ocean cable companies
The world's first ocean cable was laid across the
English Channel
The English Channel, "The Sleeve"; nrf, la Maunche, "The Sleeve" (Cotentinais) or ( Jèrriais), (Guernésiais), "The Channel"; br, Mor Breizh, "Sea of Brittany"; cy, Môr Udd, "Lord's Sea"; kw, Mor Bretannek, "British Sea"; nl, Het Kana ...
.
Jacob and John Watkins Brett
John Watkins Brett (1805–1863) was an English telegraph engineer.
Life
Brett was the son of a cabinetmaker, William Brett of Bristol, and was born in that city in 1805. Brett is known as the founder of submarine telegraphy. He formed the Subm ...
had been planning such a cable since 1847. In 1849, the
South Eastern Railway Company conducted a trial of of cable made by the Gutta Percha Company from the ship ''Princess Clementine'' anchored off
Folkestone
Folkestone ( ) is a port town on the English Channel, in Kent, south-east England. The town lies on the southern edge of the North Downs at a valley between two cliffs. It was an important harbour and shipping port for most of the 19th and 20t ...
. The ship could send telegraph messages directly to London via a connection to the South Eastern's overhead telegraph line. After several failed attempts, the Bretts' company, the Submarine Telegraph Company (STC), succeeded in connecting to France in 1851. The company went on to lay many other cables to European countries.
The Magnetic had a close relationship with the STC. From about 1857, the two companies had an agreement that all STC submarine cables were to be used only with the Magnetic's landlines. The Magnetic also controlled the first cable to Ireland. This control of international traffic gave them a significant advantage in the domestic market. Both Newall and Glass, Elliot laid cables as subcontractors to the inland telegraph companies. Newall was prone to fall out with his customers and was often involved in litigation resulting in the company slowly moving away from the telegraph cable business.
The British government took a strong interest in the provision of international telegraph connections. Government assistance to telegraph projects included the provision of
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against F ...
ships to assist with cable laying and monetary guarantees. Two major failures gave them cause for concern—the first
transatlantic telegraph cable
Transatlantic telegraph cables were undersea cables running under the Atlantic Ocean for telegraph communications. Telegraphy is now an obsolete form of communication, and the cables have long since been decommissioned, but telephone and data a ...
, laid in 1858 by the
Atlantic Telegraph Company
The Atlantic Telegraph Company was a company formed on 6 November 1856 to undertake and exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean, the first such telecommunications link.
History
Cyrus Field, American businessman and finan ...
, and the
Red Sea
The Red Sea ( ar, البحر الأحمر - بحر القلزم, translit=Modern: al-Baḥr al-ʾAḥmar, Medieval: Baḥr al-Qulzum; or ; Coptic: ⲫⲓⲟⲙ ⲛ̀ϩⲁϩ ''Phiom Enhah'' or ⲫⲓⲟⲙ ⲛ̀ϣⲁⲣⲓ ''Phiom ǹšari''; T ...
to India cable in 1859 laid by the Red Sea & India Company. The transatlantic cable's insulation failed after a few weeks. The cable to India (manufactured and laid by Newall) was too thin and laid taut over underwater peaks which soon broke it in multiple places. The guarantees provided by the government for these two ventures led to a financial loss. In response, a government committee was formed in 1859 to investigate the issue. In their final report in 1861, the committee concluded that future failures of this kind were avoidable now that the technology was better understood. They recommended specifications for future cable construction, installation, and maintenance. After the Red Sea failure, the government no longer provided subsidies or guarantees and left it to private companies to assume the risk of new ventures entirely.
Getting a telegraph connection to India was a priority for the government after the
Indian Mutiny
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the fo ...
of 1857; the urgent telegram requesting assistance had taken forty days to reach London. The telegraph went only as far as the coast of India and from there the message travelled by ship. The failure of the first cable was a significant blow. A connection to India was finally achieved in 1864 after the
Indian government
The Government of India (ISO 15919, ISO: ; often abbreviated as GoI), known as the Union Government or Central Government but often simply as the Centre, is the Government, national government of the Republic of India, a federal democracy lo ...
had laid a new cable made by W. T. Henley from
Karachi
Karachi (; ur, ; ; ) is the most populous city in Pakistan and 12th most populous city in the world, with a population of over 20 million. It is situated at the southern tip of the country along the Arabian Sea coast. It is the former cap ...
to
Fao, Iraq, and the using overland routes. This ocean route was a shorter distance than the Red Sea route and in shallower water, but still . Many times longer than any other submarine cables, this was the first extremely long submarine cable to be a permanent success. The British government believed the telegraph would provide the means for much greater central control of overseas possessions. Colonial officials necessarily had a great deal of latitude for independent action due to the communication delay. The telegraph greatly restricted their independence, although it took some time for embedded attitudes to change.
![Inside Porthcurno Cable Hut - geograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Inside_Porthcurno_Cable_Hut_-_geograph.org.uk_-_318578.jpg)
Pender's motivation in creating Telcon from the merger of Glass, Elliot and the Gutta Percha companies was to create a company that could make and maintain the second transatlantic telegraph cable for the Atlantic Telegraph Company. It was also his motivation for buying ''Great Eastern'', the only ship capable of holding all the required cable. With great difficulty, the transatlantic connection was achieved by 1866, creating a truly worldwide telegraph network. London could now communicate with most other telegraph offices in the world. In 1862, a new submarine cable had been laid from
Queenstown in southern Ireland to
St David's Head
St David's Head ( cy, Penmaen Dewi) is a headland in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, southwest Wales, which marks the divide between the Irish Sea and the Celtic Sea. It is noted for its wildflowers and wildlife, and for the remains of ...
in Wales. When this was connected to the transatlantic landing point at Valentia Bay (opposite
Valentia Island
Valentia Island () is one of Ireland's most westerly points. It lies off the Iveragh Peninsula in the southwest of County Kerry. It is linked to the mainland by the Maurice O'Neill Memorial Bridge at Portmagee. A car ferry also departs from R ...
), it dramatically reduced the distance transatlantic messages had to travel from Ireland to London from to .
The success of the transatlantic cable triggered the formation of many new companies to lay more submarine cables around the world. Pender founded most of these companies. His first project was to lay a new cable to India that covered most of the distance in international waters. This put it fully under British control, avoiding the political and other risks associated with an overland route. Telcon manufactured the cable and used the ''Great Eastern'' to lay it. To limit the risk, Pender founded three companies, each tasked with laying one section of the cable. The Anglo-Mediterranean Company (founded 1868) laid a cable from
Malta
Malta ( , , ), officially the Republic of Malta ( mt, Repubblika ta' Malta ), is an island country in the Mediterranean Sea. It consists of an archipelago, between Italy and Libya, and is often considered a part of Southern Europe. It lies ...
to
Alexandria
Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandria ...
in Egypt. From there, a short overland cable via
Cairo
Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...
connected to
Suez
Suez ( ar, السويس '; ) is a seaport city (population of about 750,000 ) in north-eastern Egypt, located on the north coast of the Gulf of Suez (a branch of the Red Sea), near the southern terminus of the Suez Canal, having the same boun ...
. The Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company (founded 1869) connected Malta to
Porthcurno
Porthcurno ( kw, Porthkornow, Porthcornow, meaning ''"pinnacle cove"'', see below) is a small village covering a small valley and beach on the south coast of Cornwall, England in the United Kingdom. It is the main settlement in a civil and an ec ...
, Cornwall, with landings at
Gibraltar
)
, anthem = " God Save the King"
, song = " Gibraltar Anthem"
, image_map = Gibraltar location in Europe.svg
, map_alt = Location of Gibraltar in Europe
, map_caption = United Kingdom shown in pale green
, mapsize =
, image_map2 = Gib ...
and
Carcavelos
Carcavelos () was, until 2013, a Freguesia (Portugal), civil parish in the Portugal, Portuguese Concelho, municipality of Cascais, about west of Lisbon. In 2013, the parish merged into the new parish Carcavelos e Parede. The parish was known for t ...
, Portugal. The company was so named because
Falmouth was originally intended as the landing site in England. The tiny village of Porthcurno became the largest submarine cable station in the world after numerous other cables were landed there. In 1870, the British-Indian Submarine Company (founded 1869) provided the final link from Suez via
Aden
Aden ( ar, عدن ' Yemeni: ) is a city, and since 2015, the temporary capital of Yemen, near the eastern approach to the Red Sea (the Gulf of Aden), some east of the strait Bab-el-Mandeb. Its population is approximately 800,000 people. ...
to
Bombay
Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...
. Once the connection was complete, the three companies were merged as the
Eastern Telegraph Company
Cable & Wireless plc was a British telecommunications company. In the mid-1980s, it became the first company in the UK to offer an alternative telephone service to British Telecom (via subsidiary Mercury Communications). The company later offer ...
in 1872.
James Anderson James Anderson may refer to:
Arts
*James Anderson (American actor) (1921–1969), American actor
*James Anderson (author) (1936–2007), British mystery writer
*James Anderson (English actor) (born 1980), British actor
* James Anderson (filmmaker) ...
, the captain of the ''Great Eastern'', was made managing director.
The British-Indian Submarine Extension Company laid a cable going east from India in 1871. This ran from
Madras
Chennai (, ), formerly known as Madras ( the official name until 1996), is the capital city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost Indian state. The largest city of the state in area and population, Chennai is located on the Coromandel Coast of th ...
, which was connected overland to Bombay, to
Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...
via
Penang
Penang ( ms, Pulau Pinang, is a Malaysian state located on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia, by the Malacca Strait. It has two parts: Penang Island, where the capital city, George Town, is located, and Seberang Perai on the Malay ...
and
Malacca
Malacca ( ms, Melaka) is a state in Malaysia located in the southern region of the Malay Peninsula, next to the Strait of Malacca. Its capital is Malacca City, dubbed the Historic City, which has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site si ...
. This met a cable in Singapore laid by the China Submarine Telegraph Company (founded 1869) running to
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...
. The British-Australian Telegraph Company (founded 1870) then connected Hong Kong to
Port Darwin
Port Darwin is the port in Darwin, Northern Territory, in northern Australia. The port has operated in a number of locations, including Stokes Hill Wharf, Cullen Bay and East Arm Wharf. In 2015, a 99-year lease was granted to the Chinese-owned ...
, Australia, via
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
. This was the end point of the
Australian Overland Telegraph Line
The Australian Overland Telegraph Line was a telegraphy system to send messages over long distances using cables and electric signals. It spanned between Darwin, in what is now the Northern Territory of Australia, and Adelaide, the capital o ...
, running to
Port Augusta
Port Augusta is a small city in South Australia. Formerly a port, seaport, it is now a road traffic and Junction (rail), railway junction city mainly located on the east coast of the Spencer Gulf immediately south of the gulf's head and about ...
in
South Australia
South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...
. The three companies were merged as the Eastern Extension, Australasia and China Telegraph Company in 1873. This company connected Australia to New Zealand in 1876. Other Pender companies included: the Western and Brazilian Telegraph Company (1873), the Brazilian Submarine Telegraph Company (1873), Marseilles, Algiers and Malta Telegraph Company (1870), Eastern & South African Telegraph Company (1879), and the African Direct Telegraph Company (1885). These companies were all merged into the Eastern Telegraph Company, which became the Eastern and Associated Cable Company—the largest multinational of the 19th century.
![All Red Line (retouched)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/All_Red_Line_%28retouched%29.jpg)
The development of the undersea telegraph cable network began in the late nineteenth century. In October 1902, a worldwide network of cables and relay stations—including some 100,000 miles of undersea cables—was inaugurated. Called the
All Red Line
The All Red Line was a system of electrical telegraphs that linked much of the British Empire. It was inaugurated on 31 October 1902. The informal name derives from the common practice of colouring the territory of the British Empire red or ...
, because at that time British territories and colonies were usually coloured red or pink on maps, it carried long-distance telecommunications to all parts of the British Empire. The idea was to create a network that did not pass through any non-British territory to avoid security and political risks.
In 1928, British submarine cables still dominated world telecommunications, but they were increasingly under threat from
radiotelegraphy
Wireless telegraphy or radiotelegraphy is transmission of text messages by radio waves, analogous to electrical telegraphy using cables. Before about 1910, the term ''wireless telegraphy'' was also used for other experimental technologies for ...
. A particular concern was
RCA
The RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded as the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. It was initially a patent trust owned by General Electric (GE), Westinghouse, AT&T Corporation and United Fruit Comp ...
in the US, but they were also losing business because of the
Imperial Wireless Chain
The Imperial Wireless Chain was a strategic international communications network of powerful long range radiotelegraphy stations, created by the British government to link the countries of the British Empire. The stations exchanged commercial a ...
set up by the British government to connect the empire. The
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, which was also a competitor outside the Empire, supplied the transmitters for the Imperial Chain. The Electra House Group, an informal alliance of British telecommunication companies, decided that they could best compete worldwide by merging their cable and radio companies into a single entity. Thus, the Eastern Telegraph Company and the Marconi Wireless Company were merged into Imperial and International Communications Ltd, which changed its name to
Cable & Wireless Ltd in 1934. The Porthcurno station remained open for exactly one hundred years, closing in 1970 when the last cable was taken out of service. Submarine
coaxial cable
Coaxial cable, or coax (pronounced ) is a type of electrical cable consisting of an inner conductor surrounded by a concentric conducting shield, with the two separated by a dielectric ( insulating material); many coaxial cables also have a p ...
s with
repeater
In telecommunications, a repeater is an electronic device that receives a signal and retransmits it. Repeaters are used to extend transmissions so that the signal can cover longer distances or be received on the other side of an obstruction. Some ...
s, which carried multiple telephone channels using
frequency division multiplexing
In telecommunications, frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) is a technique by which the total bandwidth available in a communication medium is divided into a series of non-overlapping frequency bands, each of which is used to carry a separate ...
, had been in use for some time. By then, there was no real need for distinct telegraph cables. Telegraph was declining, and multiple telegraph channels could be multiplexed into a single telephone channel since the 1920s. The Porthcurno Cable Hut where cables were landed is now the
Porthcurno Telegraph Museum
PK Porthcurno is a museum located in the small coastal village of Porthcurno Cornwall, UK. Porthcurno was the point at which many submarine telegraph cables—transatlantic and to other locations—came ashore. The first cables were direct curr ...
and the historic archive of Cable & Wireless.
Maintenance and technical problems
Maintenance costs of submarine cables were high. Ships' anchors frequently damaged them, and their insulation deteriorated over time. They were most at risk in shallow water near the coast, but very deep water was avoided because it was difficult to retrieve cables for repair. In 1868, the expected life of a cable was fifteen years, and most laid to that date had not lasted that long. A similar problem with deteriorating insulation plagued buried inland cables, the Magnetic suffering the most from this.
![Lord Kelvin photograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Lord_Kelvin_photograph.jpg)
A recurring problem with buried cables, and most especially submarine cables, was the phenomenon of
dispersion
Dispersion may refer to:
Economics and finance
*Dispersion (finance), a measure for the statistical distribution of portfolio returns
*Price dispersion, a variation in prices across sellers of the same item
*Wage dispersion, the amount of variatio ...
, which produces the effect called ''retardation''. Dispersion, as it relates to
transmission lines
In electrical engineering, a transmission line is a specialized cable or other structure designed to conduct electromagnetic waves in a contained manner. The term applies when the conductors are long enough that the wave nature of the transmis ...
, is different
frequency components of a signal travelling along a line at different speeds. Early telegraph engineers did not understand frequency analysis of this sort. The effect of dispersion on a telegraph pulse is to spread it out in time. This is because a rectangular pulse (as used in telegraphy) has multiple frequency components. At the receiving end it appears as if part of the pulse has been retarded, hence the term. The problem this causes for telegraphy is that adjacent pulses smear into each other, an effect called
intersymbol interference
In telecommunication, intersymbol interference (ISI) is a form of distortion of a signal in which one symbol interferes with subsequent symbols. This is an unwanted phenomenon as the previous symbols have a similar effect as noise, thus making ...
by modern engineers, and if severe enough the message cannot be read. It forces the operator to slow the speed of sending so that there is again separation between the pulses. The problem was so bad on the first transatlantic cable in 1858 that transmission speeds were in minutes per word rather than words per minute. Thinking he could solve the problem by using a higher voltage, telegraph engineer
Wildman Whitehouse
Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse (1 October 1816 – 26 January 1890) was an English surgeon by profession and an electrical experimenter by avocation. He was recruited by entrepreneur Cyrus West Field as Chief Electrician to work on the pi ...
only succeeded in permanently damaging the cable, making it unusable. This failure represented a loss of nearly £2 million (£ million in )) for the Atlantic Telegraph Company.
Retardation is worse in insulated cables because the
electromagnetic wave
In physics, electromagnetic radiation (EMR) consists of waves of the electromagnetic (EM) field, which propagate through space and carry momentum and electromagnetic radiant energy. It includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, (visib ...
is travelling mostly in the insulation material. Uninsulated wires on overhead poles, the most common system on overland routes, are largely unaffected, even over long distances. This solution is not open to submarine cables and the very long distances maximise the problem. The problem of retardation was not fully solved until the introduction of long-distance telephony made it essential to do so. However, various mitigating actions were taken. The Magnetic, operating a large number of buried cables, had an instrument that sent a delayed pulse of opposite polarity to the main pulse, cancelling the worst of the retarded signal. The
mirror galvanometer
A mirror galvanometer is an ammeter that indicates it has sensed an electric current by deflecting a light beam with a mirror. The beam of light projected on a scale acts as a long massless pointer. In 1826, Johann Christian Poggendorff devel ...
designed by
Lord Kelvin
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, (26 June 182417 December 1907) was a British mathematician, Mathematical physics, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. Professor of Natural Philosophy (Glasgow), Professor of Natural Philoso ...
made it easier to read weak signals, and larger cables with thicker insulation had less retardation.
In 1854, Kelvin produced a
mathematical description of retardation by analogy with heat flow after the fiasco with the first transatlantic cable. In 1881,
Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside FRS (; 18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925) was an English self-taught mathematician and physicist who invented a new technique for solving differential equations (equivalent to the Laplace transform), independently developed vec ...
gave the
full analysis of transmission lines which described how the problem arose and suggested how it could be resolved n 1887. Heaviside believed that adding the right amount of
inductance
Inductance is the tendency of an electrical conductor to oppose a change in the electric current flowing through it. The flow of electric current creates a magnetic field around the conductor. The field strength depends on the magnitude of the ...
to the line would completely remove the dispersion effect. He tried to persuade the
General Post Office
The General Post Office (GPO) was the state postal system and telecommunications carrier of the United Kingdom until 1969. Before the Acts of Union 1707, it was the postal system of the Kingdom of England, established by Charles II in 1660. ...
(the Post Office) to take up the idea, but as an outsider—and considered a maverick—he was ignored, largely because of his long-running dispute with
William Preece
Sir William Henry Preece (15 February 1834 – 6 November 1913) was a Welsh electrical engineer and inventor. Preece relied on experiments and physical reasoning in his life's work. Upon his retirement from the Post Office in 1899, Preece was m ...
, the Post Office chief electrician (chief engineer). It was left to
George Ashley Campbell
George Ashley Campbell (November 27, 1870 – November 10, 1954) was an American engineer. He was a pioneer in developing and applying quantitative mathematical methods to the problems of long-distance telegraphy and telephony. His most import ...
in the US to implement the idea when he added
loading coils
A loading coil or load coil is an inductor that is inserted into an electronic circuit to increase its inductance. The term originated in the 19th century for inductors used to prevent signal distortion in long-distance telegraph transmission c ...
to a telephone line for the first time in 1900.
Employment of women
Telegraph companies began employing women as telegraph operators early on in the companies' period. The Magnetic was one of the first to do so and the ETC started employing them from 1855. It was a popular, keenly sought job with unmarried women, who had few other good employment options—a well- paid job in nice surroundings. The ETC paid between ten shillings (50p) and thirty shillings (£1.50) per week and the Magnetic paid a starting rate of ten shillings. The District heavily employed women when it began operating in 1859. New recruits were unpaid until they completed training—typically six weeks. At the end of training, the Magnetic expected trainees to achieve a minimum transmission speed of , at the ETC. Failure to achieve this minimum speed resulted in dismissal.
These wages compared very well with other common occupations for women. A
seamstress
A dressmaker, also known as a seamstress, is a person who makes custom clothing for women, such as dresses, blouses, and evening gowns. Dressmakers were historically known as mantua-makers, and are also known as a modiste or fabrician.
Nota ...
working at home, for instance, earned about threepence (1.3p) per day. The pay was still less than a male operator could expect. Companies preferred to use women primarily because of their lower pay rate and because they were not organised into unions. Adolescent boys were also employed, but only men worked the night shifts. Employment of women continued after nationalisation. The primary reason was the economic one of lower wages, but a secondary reason was the social class of the women. They usually had a well-educated middle-class background. Only men from an "inferior class" could be employed at the same wage.
Spread of public use
The ability of the telegraph was first brought to the attention of a wider public on 6 August 1844 when ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...
'' reported the birth of
Alfred Ernest Albert to
Queen Victoria
Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until Death and state funeral of Queen Victoria, her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 21 ...
only 40 minutes after it was announced. A second event was even more sensational when
John Tawell
John Tawell (1784–1845) was a British murderer and the first person to be arrested as the result of telecommunications technology.
Transported to Australia in 1814 for the crime of forgery, Tawell obtained a ticket of leave and started as a ch ...
murdered a woman in
Salt Hill
Salt Hill is a district within the unitary authority of Slough in Berkshire in the south of England, close to London. Before 1974, Salt Hill was part of Buckinghamshire. It is to the north of Chalvey and the Great West Road, surrounding Salt H ...
(near
Slough
Slough () is a town and unparished area in the unitary authority of the same name in Berkshire, England, bordering west London. It lies in the Thames Valley, west of central London and north-east of Reading, at the intersection of the M4 ...
) and tried to escape by train. His description was telegraphed to Paddington station, and he was arrested shortly after arriving. The event was widely reported in the newspapers.
The 1851 channel cable boosted the telegraph's reputation further. Prices in Paris could be relayed to the
London Stock Exchange
London Stock Exchange (LSE) is a stock exchange in the City of London, England, United Kingdom. , the total market value of all companies trading on LSE was £3.9 trillion. Its current premises are situated in Paternoster Square close to St Pau ...
the same day during opening hours, a hitherto unprecedented ability in international communication. Likewise, news stories in France could be reported promptly to London newspapers. In the same year, the
Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, also known as the Great Exhibition or the Crystal Palace Exhibition (in reference to the temporary The Crystal Palace, structure in which it was held), was an International Exhib ...
featured many telegraph instruments which greatly enhanced the public awareness of the telegraph.
The biggest driver of the public take up was the fall in prices; firstly, through competition between the companies, especially competition with the District, and later price control under nationalisation. By 1860, it had become common to use the telegraph for everyday purposes, especially in areas where a cheap service was available such as the London area covered by the District.
Nationalisation
Thomas Allan was an early advocate of nationalisation in 1854. He believed a flat rate of one shilling (5p) for 20 words regardless of distance would encourage wider use of the telegraph, which would lead to more intensive usage of lines and provide the economic case for building new ones. According to Allen, this could only happen if the
Post Office
A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional serv ...
ran the network as a unified whole. He compared his proposal to the effect of the introduction of the
Penny Post The Penny Post is any one of several postal systems in which normal letters could be sent for one penny. Five such schemes existed in the United Kingdom while the United States initiated at least three such simple fixed rate postal arrangements.
Un ...
. Allan later tried to bring about cheaper telegrams through private enterprise by founding the UKTC. A surprising and influential advocate was John Ricardo, co-founder of the ETC. He was a free trade campaigning
Member of Parliament
A member of parliament (MP) is the representative in parliament of the people who live in their electoral district. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, this term refers only to members of the lower house since upper house members of ...
and a railway entrepreneur and banker. In 1861 he wrote a memorandum to
William Gladstone, then
chancellor of the exchequer
The chancellor of the Exchequer, often abbreviated to chancellor, is a senior minister of the Crown within the Government of the United Kingdom, and head of His Majesty's Treasury. As one of the four Great Offices of State, the Chancellor is ...
and future
prime minister
A prime minister, premier or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. Under those systems, a prime minister is not ...
, setting out the case for nationalisation. Ricardo's argument was the telegraph was an important government tool for diplomatic, military, and administrative purposes. He pointed out that in all European countries state control had been in place from the beginning.
The first sign of government disquiet came in 1862 when the Act enabling the UKTC was passed. The Act included provisions to prevent the UKTC selling assets to other companies without permission. This was to discourage the UKTC from joining the emerging cartel in the telegraph industry. A further cause for concern came in 1865 when the companies, including the UKTC, set common tariffs and dropped the one shilling/20-word flat rate. In 1863, a Telegraph Act gave the
Board of Trade
The Board of Trade is a British government body concerned with commerce and industry, currently within the Department for International Trade. Its full title is The Lords of the Committee of the Privy Council appointed for the consideration of ...
the power to regulate the telegraph companies on the same basis as other utilities. In 1865,
Lord Stanley
Earl of Derby ( ) is a title in the Peerage of England. The title was first adopted by Robert de Ferrers, 1st Earl of Derby, under a creation of 1139. It continued with the Ferrers family until the 6th Earl forfeited his property toward the en ...
the
postmaster general
A Postmaster General, in Anglosphere countries, is the chief executive officer of the postal service of that country, a ministerial office responsible for overseeing all other postmasters. The practice of having a government official respons ...
, came out in favour of nationalisation with Post Office reformer
Frank Ives Scudamore leading the campaign. Scudamore pointed out that telegraph offices were often located inconveniently at railway stations outside town, some towns were not served at all, and some had multiple rival companies' offices next to each other. State control in continental countries, according to Scudamore, ensured a more rational and convenient distribution of offices and cheaper rates would lead to greater telegraph use. His opponents pointed to the United States, where rates were also cheaper but with a great profusion of private companies. Many newspapers campaigned for nationalisation. They were generally dissatisfied with the news service they got from the companies, and they especially resented being unable to choose their own news provider. They wanted the telegraph merely to deliver the product from their chosen supplier.
Telegraph Act 1868
By 1866 it was clear the government intended to nationalise the inland telegraph. This had the effect of inhibiting growth of the network. In fact, growth temporarily went backwards that year because of a great snowstorm in January, which had damaged every above ground line within a radius of London; the rooftop system of the District was put out of action entirely. Across the country, the Electric had of line damaged. In May, the
Panic of 1866
The Panic of 1866 was an international financial downturn that accompanied the failure of Overend, Gurney and Company in London, and the ''corso forzoso'' abandonment of the silver standard in Italy.
In Britain, the economic impacts are held pa ...
put a further brake on growth. The financial turmoil and the resultant change of government caused a delay but did not change the policy. In the following year, the
Reform Bill
In the United Kingdom, Reform Act is most commonly used for legislation passed in the 19th century and early 20th century to enfranchise new groups of voters and to redistribute seats in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. ...
took up significant parliamentary time and Scudamore's bill did not come before parliament until 1868. It did not mandate nationalisation or give the Post Office a legal monopoly. It merely gave it the right to set up telegraph services on the same basis as private companies and the ability to purchase private companies or their assets through normal commercial negotiation.
The government had expected the telegraph companies' opposition. They had not expected the railway companies were going to be a problem. In costing the scheme, Scudamore had made no allowance for purchasing railway wayleaves. The railway companies started to oppose the Telegraph Bill vociferously. Many railway telegraph systems were run by the telegraph company that had the wayleave. If the Post Office were to take over the telegraph company, the railway company would, or so they claimed, have the additional expense of running their own telegraph. This difficulty came as a great surprise to the new chancellor,
George Ward Hunt
George Ward Hunt (30 July 1825 – 29 July 1877) was a British statesman of the Conservative Party who was Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Admiralty in the first and second ministries of Benjamin Disraeli.
Early life
He was bo ...
. The problem for the Post Office was they could not take over on the same terms as private companies, effectively becoming servants of the railway companies. They wanted the lines but not the terms that came with them.
The government was determined to reach a decision quickly so that future planning was not left in limbo. Rising company share prices meant any delay would likely add to the costs. In June, the companies began to negotiate, fearing that if they did not, a disadvantageous arrangement would be imposed on them. A
select committee Select committee may refer to:
*Select committee (parliamentary system), a committee made up of a small number of parliamentary members appointed to deal with particular areas or issues
*Select or special committee (United States Congress)
*Select ...
under Hunt reached deals with the telegraph companies based on the last twenty years'
net profits and compensation for the railway companies. By July, opposition had largely disappeared. Originally, the government had not planned to nationalise the UPTC because they had no lines for public use; their lines were private wires of no interest to the Post Office. However, the UPTC complained that the planned Post Office uniform rate would so damage their business that they would become unprofitable. This persuaded Hunt that private wires should also be nationalised. Another problem area was the cables to continental Europe. The Magnetic was obliged to send all continental traffic through STC's cables. The ETC was obliged to use Reuter's
Nordeney
Norderney ( nds, Nördernee) is one of the seven populated East Frisian Islands off the North Sea coast of Germany.
The island is , having a total area of about and is therefore Germany's ninth-largest island. Norderney's population amounts ...
cable. It would be impossible for a unified nationalised organisation to meet both contractual obligations simultaneously. To solve this, the government purchased Reuter's cables and leased them back to the STC, together with other continental cables acquired by the Post Office. This was done in a great hurry, and the government admitted afterwards it had not been ideal. Reuters and STC were to remain un-nationalised. Parliament passed the bill into law as the
Telegraph Act 1868
The Telegraph Act 1868 (31 & 32 Vict. c.110) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It paved the way for the British state to take over telegraph companies and/or their operations.
It has been effectively repealed (only s.1, provi ...
, to take effect in July 1869.
Under the act, government expenditure was not allowed immediately. They had concerns the entrepreneurs who had been bought out would set up in business again undercutting the Post Office flat rate of one shilling (5p) in lucrative city areas (the District charged sixpence (2.5p) in London) with no obligation to serve unremunerative outlying areas. Consequently, nationalisation was delayed until The Telegraph Act of 1869 was passed. This amended the 1868 Act to create a Post Office monopoly, with the actual transfer taking effect on 1 January 1870. The Act excluded companies operating submarine cables with no landlines from nationalisation. Any company the Post Office had not taken over so far could demand this happen under the Act on the same 20-year net profit basis as before. Several small companies that the Post Office considered virtually defunct and not worth buying took advantage of this. The
Telegraph Acts Extension Act 1870 extended the monopoly to the
Channel Islands
The Channel Islands ( nrf, Îles d'la Manche; french: îles Anglo-Normandes or ''îles de la Manche'') are an archipelago in the English Channel, off the French coast of Normandy. They include two Crown Dependencies: the Bailiwick of Jersey, ...
and the
Isle of Man
)
, anthem = "O Land of Our Birth"
, image = Isle of Man by Sentinel-2.jpg
, image_map = Europe-Isle_of_Man.svg
, mapsize =
, map_alt = Location of the Isle of Man in Europe
, map_caption = Location of the Isle of Man (green)
in Europe ...
, resulting in the purchase of the
Jersey and Guernsey Telegraph Company
JT Group Limited (doing business as JT) is the parent company of several subsidiaries including Jersey Telecom Limited and Wave Telecom Limited. Jersey Telecom is the former monopoly operator in the Bailiwick of Jersey. JT provides telecommunicat ...
and the
Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company
The Isle of Man has an extensive communications infrastructure consisting of telephone cables, submarine cables, and an array of television and mobile phone transmitters and towers.
Telecommunications Telegraph
The history of Manx telecommunicat ...
. The Orkneys & Shetland Telegraph Company was purchased in 1876–77 and the Scilly Islands Telegraph Company in 1879–80. The STC was finally nationalised in 1890, bringing their international submarine cables and cable ships under Post Office control.
Aftermath
There was some criticism of the government handling of the nationalisation. The total price paid to nationalise the telegraph was £5.9 million, compared to Scudamore's original estimate of £2.5 million. By 1876, the total cost of acquisitions and extensions had exceeded £10 million. The price paid for most of the telegraph companies far exceeded their capital value because of the 20-year profit calculation. In comparison, the cost of the telegraph across the whole of continental Europe was only £4 million. It was alleged in Parliament, somewhat speculatively, that a new UK telegraph system could have been built from scratch for £2 million. The discrepancy was due largely to the unbudgeted payments to the railways, but compounded by paying them based on 20 year's net profit. Most of the railway leases had far less than 20 years to run, so the Post Office would not get 20 years profit from the purchase. However, it was difficult to avoid once the principle had been established; Reuters went to arbitration over the issue when the government offered them a lesser deal and won.
Further criticism concerned the purchase of the reversionary rights of the railway wayleaves, which had been another unforeseen expense. Without these purchases, when the lease expired, the railway company would then have the right to use the line for public telegraphy on its own account unless a new lease was taken out. Another issue concerned the railways' free use of the telegraph on their property. This was part of the leasing arrangement with the private companies inherited by the Post Office. Also, in most cases, the railway company was entitled to send free messages to stations not on its own line for the purpose of controlling trains, but it was heavily abused; in 1891 1.6 million free messages were sent, compared to 97,000 in 1871. The contractual arrangements with the railway companies were so complex arbitration cases concerning them were still being heard ten years after nationalisation.
Post Office Telegraphs
Post Office Telegraphs, the branch of the Post Office running the telegraph network, located their head office in Telegraph Street in the old ETC building. "The ever open door" was their slogan above the entrance. Immediately after nationalisation, they set about extending the telegraph from outlying railway stations to town centres. It was their policy to provide telegraph facilities at every office where
money orders
A money order is a directive to pay a pre-specified amount of money from prepaid funds, making it a more trusted method of payment than a cheque.
History
The money order system was established by a private firm in Great Britain in 1792 and was ...
could be sent, a great increase over the existing number. For example, telegraph offices in London increased from 95 in 1869 to 334 in 1870. By the end of 1870, over 90% of telegrams were sent from post offices. By 1872, the Post Office had 5,000 offices, and traffic had increased 50% over pre-nationalisation, to some 12 million messages per year. More offices meant installing more lines, plus the lines handed over to the railways for operating their own internal telegraphs had to be replaced. There were of line, of wire, and over 6,000 instruments in 1872. By 1875, the Telegraph Street central office was the largest telegraph centre in the world, with 450 instruments on three floors working connections both in the UK and worldwide on the Imperial telegraph network.
![Hugh Childers, Lock & Whitfield woodburytype, 1876-83 crop](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Hugh_Childers%2C_Lock_%26_Whitfield_woodburytype%2C_1876-83_crop.jpg)
The Post Office decided to standardise on the Morse telegraph system, the international standard since 1865. Companies had used a great variety of different equipment. The largest company, ETC, used the Cooke and Wheatstone needle telegraph. It is possible to send Morse code on a needle telegraph system but this is slower than using Morse sounders. This standardisation could not be implemented everywhere immediately, not least because the
Franco-Prussian War prevented imports of German-made instruments. Some needle telegraphs continued in use, mostly on the railways, well in to the 20th century.
In 1873, Scudamore left the Post Office under a cloud. He had been taking money out of other Post Office budgets to pay for the unforeseen costs of telegraph expansion, anticipating that Parliament would soon approve more money. He went to Turkey where he was employed to modernise the post and telegraph of the
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
. Post Office Telegraph losses grew steadily until 1914. Interest on the capital overspend was not the only problem. Although Scudamore's estimate of the increase in traffic from expansion proved largely accurate, he badly underestimated the operating costs. As a result, net revenue did not cover the interest on loans and year on year the debt was growing, but overall the Post Office remained profitable throughout the period.
The government attempted to stop the rot with a change in policy in 1873. It was no longer policy to open a telegraph facility at every office issuing money orders in outlying areas. It would now have to be shown the office was likely to be profitable. There was no proposal to disconnect already connected unprofitable offices. However, the number of these declined with increasing traffic. The situation was not helped when in 1883, against the wishes of the government and the Chancellor of the Exchequer
Hugh Childers
Hugh Culling Eardley Childers (25 June 1827 – 29 January 1896) was a British Liberal statesman of the nineteenth century. He is perhaps best known for his reform efforts at the Admiralty and the War Office. Later in his career, as Chancellor ...
, parliament, under pressure from business groups, called for the minimum charge on inland telegrams be reduced to sixpence (2.5p). In 1885 Postmaster General
George Shaw-Lefevre
George John Shaw Lefevre, 1st Baron Eversley (12 June 1831 – 19 April 1928) was a British Liberal Party politician. In a ministerial career that spanned thirty years, he was twice First Commissioner of Works and also served as Postmaster Gene ...
introduced a bill to implement the sixpence rate, which was passed into law. Shaw-Lefevre tried to mitigate the adverse effects by limiting sixpence telegrams to only 12 words, including the address. Addresses had been free but would now be charged for on all telegrams. £500,000 was spent on new wires and training additional staff in anticipation of the increased traffic. Traffic did increase from 33 million messages in 1884–85 to 50 million in 1886–87, reaching its peak by 1900 at over 90 million. At the same time, there was an increase in the deficit, mainly due to the cost of the increased staff. Despite the losses, the telegraph remained under national ownership as it was considered a public service.
Unionisation
In 1871, telegraph clerks in Manchester formed the Telegraphers' Association to agitate for higher wages. This was the first active union in the public service. Scudamore demanded the clerks resign from the association and then dismissed those who refused. A strike followed to demand their reinstatement. Scudamore blocked the telegraphic transmission of news of the strike to national newspapers. The resulting protests from the press got him officially censured. Wages were increased in 1872 and a formal staff structure introduced. Their pay was still less than that of cable and maintenance companies, resulting in more than 2,300 out of 6,000 clerks leaving the Post Office between 1872 and 1880.
In 1868
Charles Monk introduced a
private member's bill
A private member's bill is a bill (proposed law) introduced into a legislature by a legislator who is not acting on behalf of the executive branch. The designation "private member's bill" is used in most Westminster system jurisdictions, in whi ...
in parliament that extended the vote to Post Office workers and other civil servants. It became law, despite opposition from the
Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British statesman and Conservative politician who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He played a central role in the creation o ...
government and lack of support from Gladstone, the leader of the opposition. There was concern that organised workers could have an undue influence on Members of Parliament, but this fear never materialised.
Exchange Telegraph Company
The
Exchange Telegraph Company
The Exchange Telegraph Co. Ltd. (also known as Extel) was created in March 1872 specifically to distribute financial and business information from the London Stock Exchange and other commercial markets direct to subscribers. The company establishe ...
(later known as Extel) was a news distribution service like Reuters. Founded in 1862, it was a very minor player until 1872 when the Post Office granted it a license to provide London Stock Exchange prices and other financial news to its customers in London. The license limited their operation to within 900 yards of the stock exchange. The Post Office granted similar licenses for local stock exchanges in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dublin. These were all linked to a central office from which news could be distributed. Extel also provided a service for calling the police, or raising a fire alarm.
Competition from the telephone
![William Henry Preece - Page's Magazine](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/William_Henry_Preece_-_Page%27s_Magazine.png)
Telegraph usage never developed to the extent Scudamore predicted. Despite the introduction of the sixpence (2.5p) rate, it was still too expensive to compete on price with the letter post, and the
telephone
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into e ...
after its introduction at the end of the 19th century. Telephones were introduced to Britain when William Preece exhibited a pair he brought from America in 1877. In 1878 the Post Office entered into an agreement with the
Bell Telephone Company
The Bell Telephone Company, a common law joint stock company, was organized in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 9, 1877, by Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who also helped organize a sister company – the New Englan ...
for the supply of telephones. They initially intended to rent telephone instruments as an alternative to the Wheatstone ABC telegraph on private wires.
The founding of a string of private telephone companies followed; the Telephone Company had the rights to
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell (, born Alexander Bell; March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born inventor, scientist and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Te ...
's patent, and the Edison Telephone Company had
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...
's rival patents. These two firms later merged, forming the United Telephone Company (UTC). Additionally, a number of companies were founded to set up
telephone exchanges
telephone exchange, telephone switch, or central office is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It interconnects telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital syste ...
, starting with the Lancashire Telephone Exchange Company in Manchester in 1879. Telephones on private wires were not a threat, but if exchanges were allowed to connect people over more than a very limited distance, or even worse, connect between exchanges nationally, they could do serious damage to the telegraph business. Parliament had declined to give the Post Office a monopoly over telephones. However, the Post Office argued telephone
messages counted as telegraph messages under the Telegraph Act 1869, so private companies so could not set up telephone exchanges without a license from the Post Office.
The Post Office announced they would issue licenses similar to that granted to Extel in 1872, with a limit of half a mile to the distance an exchange could connect. The companies challenged the Post Office monopoly in court, but lost the case in 1880. The same year, a new Postmaster General,
Henry Fawcett
Henry Fawcett (26 August 1833 – 6 November 1884) was a British academic, politician, statesman and economist.
Background and education
Henry Fawcett was born in Salisbury, and educated at King's College School and the University of Cambri ...
, began setting up telephone exchanges on the Post Office's own account by modifying the ABC telegraph private wire network, and using telephones made by the
Gower Bell Telephone Company The Edison Gower-Bell Telephone Company of Europe, Ltd. was organized on October 28, 1881.
Its areas of operations covered all of continental Europe, excluding France, Turkey, and Greece. . The telephone companies launched an appeal against the court decision. The UTC, which held all the telephone instrument patents, further claimed that Gower-Bell, by selling to the Post Office, were in breach of their license which forbade them to set up their own exchanges. However, an agreement was reached before it came to court. The companies were given licenses on more liberal terms and in exchange they dropped their appeal and recognised the Post Office monopoly.
Although the Post Office now accepted the telegraph service was going to decline, they were in a better position financially as the telephone business was very lucrative. Not only was there a fixed charge for the licenses, but the Post Office also took 10% of company gross receipts as a
royalty payment
A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset o ...
. The cost to the Post Office of maintaining the telephone system was insignificant compared to the cost of the telegram system. The Post Office was careful not to allow the companies to grow into a national system. They refused the companies permission to install trunk lines in 1881, preferring to provide them themselves and rent them to the companies. Licenses were limited to one year so that only the Post Office had long term control. In response to complaints that the Post Office was hindering the development of the telephone in the UK, Fawcett allowed the companies to build trunk lines in 1874. Nevertheless, telephone development in the UK still lagged behind other countries.
In 1889, the three main companies, UTC, the National Telephone Company, and the Lancashire & Cheshire Telephone Company amalgamated as the
National Telephone Company
The National Telephone Company (NTC) was a British telephone company from 1881 until 1911 which brought together smaller local companies in the early years of the telephone. Under the Telephone Transfer Act 1911 it was taken over by the General P ...
(NTC). In 1891, the NTC patents ran out and the question of nationalisation was raised, but the Post Office was not ready to do so. The NTC was accused of inefficiency, high prices, and of disfiguring the landscape with haphazard overhead wires—especially in London. When the NTC's license expired in 1911, they were nationalised under the Post Office. After 1911, telegraph usage declined rapidly. At the same time, telephone use grew, especially after 1960; by 1970 there were nearly 14 million telephones in the UK, nearly double the 1960 figure.
Specialist uses
Railway block signalling
From the beginning, Cooke promoted the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph to the railways as a safer way of working, particularly on
single lines, with the first installations in the 1840s. Previously, separation of trains had relied on strict timetabling.
Block working, controlled by the telegraph, ensured that only one train at a time could be on a section of line. The benefits of block working were not generally appreciated until the late 1860s. The number of block instruments on the
London and North Western Railway
The London and North Western Railway (LNWR, L&NWR) was a British railway company between 1846 and 1922. In the late 19th century, the L&NWR was the largest joint stock company in the United Kingdom.
In 1923, it became a constituent of the Lo ...
, for instance, increased from 311 in 1869 to 3,000 in 1879.
News service
![Lord Rothermere](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Lord_Rothermere.jpg)
Prior to
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...
, the telegraph rates charged to news services became a political issue. There was a preferential rate granted for news providers. They were charged one shilling (5p) for 75 or 100 words (depending whether it was inside or out of office hours respectively) and then twopence (0.4p) for each additional 75/100 words, including repeat messages to different addresses. A journalist could send 100 messages and 99 of them would cost only twopence. This was unprofitable for the Post Office, but the government was reluctant to act because they did not want to antagonise the newspapers. The issue was put on hold when war broke out, but in 1915, the minimum price of ordinary inland telegrams was raised from sixpence (2.5p) to ninepence (3.8p). Postmaster General
Herbert Samuel
Herbert Louis Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel, (6 November 1870 – 5 February 1963) was a British Liberal politician who was the party leader from 1931 to 1935.
He was the first nominally-practising Jew to serve as a Cabinet minister and to beco ...
commented, "If 6d for 12 words is unremunerative, 1s for 100 words is far more so", let alone the twopence copy rate for subsequent messages. Samuel proposed a new press scale of 1s for 60/80 words and a copy rate of threepence (1.3p). This was delayed to 1917 because of the war, and then to 1920, when it was finally implemented.
Some London newspaper proprietors, notably
Lord Rothermere
Viscount Rothermere, of Hemsted in the county of Kent, is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created in 1919 for the press lord Harold Harmsworth, 1st Baron Harmsworth. He had already been created a baronet, of Horsey in th ...
, proprietor of the ''
Daily Mirror
The ''Daily Mirror'' is a British national daily tabloid. Founded in 1903, it is owned by parent company Reach plc. From 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was simply ''The Mirror''. It had an average daily print ...
'' and cofounder of the ''
Daily Mail
The ''Daily Mail'' is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper and news websitePeter Wilb"Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail: The man who hates liberal Britain", ''New Statesman'', 19 December 2013 (online version: 2 January 2014) publish ...
'', supported increased charges, which could discourage new rivals. In 1926 Rothermere tried to persuade the chancellor of the exchequer,
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, dur ...
, but the postmaster general,
William Mitchell-Thomson, was against charging an economic rate. Provincial papers would stop using the telegraph, or be driven out of business altogether, with little saving to the Post Office. The fixed costs of maintaining and operating the telegraph system would still have to be paid. The press rate was not increased until 1940 when it went up to one shilling and threepence (6.3p), the result of a general increase in all charges. The copy rate remained at threepence until 1955, when it was abolished. By that time, with increasing use of the telephone, income from press telegrams had become insignificant.
Military
The first military use of the telegraph in action was during the
Crimean War
The Crimean War, , was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between Russia and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia.
Geopolitical causes of the war included the de ...
(1853–1856). A submarine cable was laid across the
Black Sea
The Black Sea is a marginal mediterranean sea of the Atlantic Ocean lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Roma ...
from
Varna
Varna may refer to:
Places Europe
*Varna, Bulgaria, a city in Bulgaria
**Varna Province
**Varna Municipality
** Gulf of Varna
**Lake Varna
**Varna Necropolis
*Vahrn, or Varna, a municipality in Italy
*Varniai, a city in Lithuania
* Varna (Šaba ...
to
Balaklava
Balaklava ( uk, Балаклáва, russian: Балаклáва, crh, Balıqlava, ) is a settlement on the Crimean Peninsula and part of the city of Sevastopol. It is an administrative center of Balaklava Raion that used to be part of the Crim ...
. The army found the use of civilian volunteer telegraphists problematic because of their lack of military training. From 1870, the
War Office
The War Office was a department of the British Government responsible for the administration of the British Army between 1857 and 1964, when its functions were transferred to the new Ministry of Defence (MoD). This article contains text from ...
arranged with the Post Office to train military telegraphists. The army used
Royal Engineers
The Corps of Royal Engineers, usually called the Royal Engineers (RE), and commonly known as the ''Sappers'', is a corps of the British Army. It provides military engineering and other technical support to the British Armed Forces and is heade ...
from the
Telegraph Battalion
The Royal Corps of Signals (often simply known as the Royal Signals – abbreviated to R SIGNALS or R SIGS) is one of the combat support arms of the British Army. Signals units are among the first into action, providing the battlefield communi ...
on state telegraphs, withdrawing them for overseas duties in time of war.
In World War I, the telegraph was recognised as being of crucial importance. Both sides tried to damage the other's international telegraph lines. Post Office cable ships were involved in the action. Just a few hours after the declaration of war on 4 August 1914,
CS ''Alert'' cut the German cables in the English Channel, almost completely isolating Germany from the rest of the world.
Meteorology
The rapid weather reports made possible by the telegraph assisted the science of
meteorology
Meteorology is a branch of the atmospheric sciences (which include atmospheric chemistry and physics) with a major focus on weather forecasting. The study of meteorology dates back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did not ...
. In 1860, the Board of Trade contracted the Magnetic to pass weather data between London and Paris.
Lighthouses
A lighthouse is a tower, building, or other type of physical structure designed to emit light from a system of lamps and lenses and to serve as a beacon for navigational aid, for maritime pilots at sea or on inland waterways.
Lighthouses mark ...
,
lightships Lightship may refer to:
* Lightvessel, a moored ship that has light beacons mounted as navigational aids
* ''The Lightship'', a 1985 American drama film directed by Jerzy Skolimowski
*''The Lightship (novel)'', by Siegfried Lenz on which the film w ...
, and islands got telegraph connections and became weather stations. There were even attempts to place
weather ship
A weather ship, or ocean station vessel, was a ship stationed in the ocean for surface and upper air meteorological observations for use in weather forecasting. They were primarily located in the north Atlantic and north Pacific oceans, reportin ...
s far out into the Atlantic. The first attempt was in 1870 with the old Corvette ''The Brick'' off
Lands End
Land's End ( kw, Penn an Wlas or ''Pedn an Wlas'') is a headland and tourist and holiday complex in western Cornwall, England, on the Penwith peninsula about west-south-west of Penzance at the western end of the A30 road. To the east of it is ...
. £15,000 was spent on the project, which ultimately failed. In 1881, a proposal for a weather ship in the mid-Atlantic came to nothing. Deep-ocean weather ships had to await the commencement of radiotelegraphy.
Emergency services
The provision of telegraph connections to lightships gave them a means of calling for assistance for a ship in difficulties. Prior to having a telegraph connection, there had been cases of ships wrecked on rocks after being seen to be struggling by a lightship for as long as twelve hours. For instance, the
SS ''Agnes Jack'' sunk with the loss of all hands in January 1883 in view of a lightship off the coast of Wales.
Street
call points to raise a fire alarm by electric telegraph had been installed in Berlin as early as 1849.
Siemens Brothers
Siemens Brothers and Company Limited was an electrical engineering design and manufacturing business in London, England. It was first established as a branchThe company started with a small factory at 12 Millbank Row, Westminster SW1, London, ne ...
had proposed a system in Manchester using the now ubiquitous
break glass call points around 1861. The town council rejected the scheme, fearing hooliganism. The first system was not installed in Britain until the
Metropolitan Fire Brigade in London took it up in 1880, installing 40 call points. Other towns soon followed resulting in a dramatic reduction in serious fires.
The police were an early user of telegraph private wires. In 1850
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard (officially New Scotland Yard) is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing Greater London's 32 boroughs, but not the City of London, the square mile that forms London's ...
had a line to
Charing Cross railway station
Charing Cross railway station (also known as London Charing Cross) is a central London railway terminus between the Strand and Hungerford Bridge in the City of Westminster. It is the terminus of the South Eastern Main Line to Dover via Ashf ...
. In 1860, the Wheatstone ABC system connected the
City of London
The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London fr ...
's police stations. Church steeples were used to keep the wires out of reach of vandals and criminals. In 1872–73 the
Metropolitan Police
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), formerly and still commonly known as the Metropolitan Police (and informally as the Met Police, the Met, Scotland Yard, or the Yard), is the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement and ...
connected numerous points in their district to police stations.
Commercial codebooks
Telegraph
codebooks
A codebook is a type of document used for gathering and storing cryptography codes. Originally codebooks were often literally , but today codebook is a byword for the complete record of a series of codes, regardless of physical format.
Cryptog ...
comprise many short
codeword
In communication, a code word is an element of a standardized code or protocol. Each code word is assembled in accordance with the specific rules of the code and assigned a unique meaning. Code words are typically used for reasons of reliability, ...
s which replace a whole phrase or sentence. They were important in the UK, and elsewhere. Used by businesses which sent a large number of telegrams, their use reduced a message's word count, holding down its cost. This was particularly important for international traffic sent over long, expensive submarine cables, and much more effective than the common practise of
telegram style
Telegram style, telegraph style, telegraphic style, or telegraphese is a clipped way of writing which abbreviates words and packs information into the smallest possible number of words or characters. It originated in the telegraph age when telecom ...
—heavily abbreviated messaging using the minimum number of words. In some cases, telegraph codes also served the purpose of maintaining the secrecy of commercially sensitive information; companies developed their own private codes.
Many commercial codebooks were published in the UK. Popular titles included ''The ABC Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code'', first published 1873, and ''Bentley's Complete Phrase Code'', first published 1906.
William Clausen-Thue, a shipping manager, who later became a Fellow of the
Royal Geographical Society
The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), often shortened to RGS, is a learned society and professional body for geography based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1830 for the advancement of geographical scien ...
, wrote the ''ABC Code'', the first public code to be widely sold. Many codebooks were written for a specific trade or industry. ''Bentley's'', for instance, published a supplement especially for mining.
''Bentley's'', written by
Ernest Lungley Bentley, may have been the most widely used codebook worldwide. It had sold 100,000 copies by 1967. In 1905, Bentley was working for a shipping agency on the company's private code. He left to found his own company and develop a code for general use. He used codewords from ''Whitelaw's Telegraph Cyphers'', published in London in 1904, which contained 20,000 pronounceable five-letter words. ''Whitelaw's'' could be used to generate 400 million codewords by running any two five-letter words together to make a still pronounceable ten-letter word. Pronouncability was important because the telegraph authorities only allowed pronounceable codewords. ''Whitelaw's'' was purely a list of codewords with no meanings assigned to them. ''Bentley's'' was the first codebook of such five-letter codewords.
Starting in 1896, the
International Telegraph Union
The International Telecommunication Union is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Union ...
(ITU) attempted to control the use of codes in international telegrams to protect telegraph incomes and avoid messages difficult for operators to transmit. In 1875 they reduced the maximum length of a word (telegrams were charged by the word) from seven syllables to ten letters. In 1879, at a conference in London, they decided all words used must come from one of eight named languages. Codes using invented words could then be charged as a
cipher
In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...
message at a much higher rate. The attempt was unsuccessful. The rules were abused in the UK and Europe and incoming messages from the US (which was not an ITU member) ignored them entirely. In 1890, in an attempt to stop the abuse, the ITU published a list of a quarter of a million authorised codewords. There was strong opposition to this, as many existing codes would not be allowed under this scheme. In 1896, they allowed any code provided it was first submitted for approval and the words added to the official dictionary. By 1901 this had expanded to well over a million words. Maintaining the list had become too difficult, and in 1903 the requirement became that words merely had to be "pronounceable". The publication of Whitelaw's 400 million codewords permanently killed the idea of an official list.
Automation
![Lochstreifen-2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Lochstreifen-2.png)
On busy lines,
multiplexing
In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...
was used to avoid the cost of erecting additional wires. The Post Office used a system that could send four messages simultaneously in each direction (eight simultaneous messages in all). These systems were usually used with high-speed paper
punched tape
Five- and eight-hole punched paper tape
Paper tape reader on the Harwell computer with a small piece of five-hole tape connected in a circle – creating a physical program loop
Punched tape or perforated paper tape is a form of data storage ...
readers to maximise usage of the line. Messages were first typed on to punched tape before sending to the line. The code used was the
Baudot code
The Baudot code is an early character encoding for telegraphy invented by Émile Baudot in the 1870s. It was the predecessor to the International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2), the most common teleprinter code in use until the advent of ASCII. ...
, invented by
Émile Baudot
Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot (; 11 September 1845 – 28 March 1903), French telegraph engineer and inventor of the first means of digital communication Baudot code, was one of the pioneers of telecommunications. He invented a multiplexed printi ...
. The early keyboards used were Baudot's five-key "piano" keyboards (each key corresponding to one of the
bit
The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represente ...
s of the code, and hence to one hole in each column of holes on the tape). Later keyboards were like a typewriter and used
Murray's 1901 modification of the Baudot code.
The teleprinter was invented in the United States in 1915, but the Post Office did not adopt it until 1922, after a British firm,
Creed & Company
Creed & Company was a British telecommunications company founded by Frederick George Creed which was an important pioneer in the field of teleprinter machines. It was merged into the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) in ...
, began producing a similar machine in 1921. From then on, the adoption of teleprinters replaced the Morse system. Morse was eliminated from Post Office landlines and submarine lines in 1932, but continued in use in radiotelegraphy. A teleprinter has a typewriter-like keyboard for sending messages, which are printed automatically at both the sending and receiving ends. The system had great cost savings for the Post Office. The operators did not need to be trained in Morse, and a receiving operator did not need to be attending the machine during receipt of the message. It was only necessary to fix the printed message to the telegram form for delivery, allowing one operator to work several telegraph lines simultaneously.
Because traffic was declining in the 1920s, it was not worthwhile to automate many less-busy lines. Wherever possible, the Post Office closed direct lines and diverted traffic on to the main automated lines by a more circuitous route. About eighty such circuits were closed. Between 1929 and 1935, on the recommendation of a committee set up by Postmaster General William Mitchell-Thomson in 1927, Creed teleprinters replaced the old Morse and Baudot equipment without waiting for it to reach end of life. The War Office expressed concern at this change; they would no longer have a pool of trained Morse operators to call upon. Another innovation in this period was the use of motorcycle messengers to speed up delivery.
Automation, closing uneconomic lines, and staff rationalisation reduced, but did not eliminate, the deficit on the telegraph service. Between 1930 and 1934 the deficit fell from over £1 million to £650,000. Towards the end of the 1930s, teleprinter automatic switching in exchanges was introduced, eliminating the need for manual exchange operators. The possibility of direct dialing between customers' teleprinters was investigated in 1939, but nothing was done until after
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
.
Decline and recovery
![Female telegraph messenger (cropped)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Female_telegraph_messenger_%28cropped%29.jpg)
The pre-war decline was halted briefly during World War I, but usage started falling again in 1920 when the minimum charge for inland telegrams doubled to one shilling (5p). By 1935, with the country in the grip of an
economic depression
An economic depression is a period of carried long-term economical downturn that is result of lowered economic activity in one major or more national economies. Economic depression maybe related to one specific country were there is some economic ...
, inland telegram messages had fallen to 35 million, less than half the pre-war figure, and just over one third of the 1900 peak. At the same time, telephone usage increased rapidly as the number of subscribers grew. The number of telephone calls grew from 716 million in 1919 to over 2.2 billion in 1939. Even the number of telephone trunk calls alone, 112 million in 1939, exceeded the number of telegrams. In some cases telegrams were sent or received by telephone (phonograms), making it increasingly difficult to treat the two services separately. By 1939, 40% of telegrams were phonograms.
Another issue that encouraged the decline was the introduction in 1921 of telegram delivery by "walks" similar to mail delivery. A group of telegrams was delivered by one messenger on the same outing over a predefined route. Previously, as soon as the telegram was received, a messenger was sent out to deliver it. Walks eroded the speed advantage of the telegraph over the post, although the time between them was still usually very short; the postal service was cheaper and could guarantee next-day delivery almost anywhere in the British Isles, which for most purposes was good enough. Around 800 fewer messengers were required as a result of the introduction of this system.
In 1935, Postmaster General
Kingsley Wood
Sir Howard Kingsley Wood (19 August 1881 – 21 September 1943) was a British Conservative politician. The son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, he qualified as a solicitor, and successfully specialised in industrial insurance. He became a membe ...
took steps to increase use of the telegraph service. The sixpence (2.5p) rate was restored, but for only nine words. A priority service was introduced for an additional sixpence, delivered in a red envelope. Special envelopes were also introduced for greetings telegrams, coloured gold with a red and blue border, and a dove logo. This service was heavily publicised to overcome a widespread belief that telegrams usually meant bad news. The message was handwritten rather than using the printed tape, and the Post Office provided a free diary service for recurring events like birthdays and anniversaries. In 1939, over four million greetings telegrams were delivered and the total number of telegrams rose back to 50 million. Another service introduced around this time was
facsimile
A facsimile (from Latin ''fac simile'', "to make alike") is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, Old master print, art print, or other item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible. It differs from ...
by telegraphy (fax), which newspapers used heavily to receive photographs.
World War II
![The Telephone Service Carries On, London, January 1942 D6422](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/The_Telephone_Service_Carries_On%2C_London%2C_January_1942_D6422.jpg)
World War II saw an increase in telegraph traffic. Usage peaked in 1945 with 63 million messages.
Children evacuated overseas were given one free telegram per month to stay in touch with their parents. Telegraph operators trained in Morse were considered important enough to make it a
reserved occupation
A reserved occupation (also known as essential services) is an occupation considered important enough to a country that those serving in such occupations are exempt or forbidden from military service.
In a total war, such as the Second World War, w ...
.
Enemy action caused disruption to the British telegraph system both domestically and in the imperial network worldwide, but communication was largely maintained. A German bombing raid in December 1940 destroyed the Central Telegraph Office in Telegraph Street. Service was maintained by emergency centres in London set up to cover just such an eventuality. The financial centre in the City of London was important enough that messengers were stationed in the street in 1941 to collect telegrams. Italy entered the war on the
Axis
An axis (plural ''axes'') is an imaginary line around which an object rotates or is symmetrical. Axis may also refer to:
Mathematics
* Axis of rotation: see rotation around a fixed axis
*Axis (mathematics), a designator for a Cartesian-coordinate ...
side in June 1940, before the
fall of France
The Battle of France (french: bataille de France) (10 May – 25 June 1940), also known as the Western Campaign ('), the French Campaign (german: Frankreichfeldzug, ) and the Fall of France, was the German invasion of France during the Second World ...
to the Germans. The Italian navy then cut the five British telegraph cables from Gibraltar to Malta and two of the five going on from Malta to Alexandria. This was the most direct route of communication with the British forces in
Egypt
Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...
and East Africa. The resistance of the British forces in Egypt to first the Italians, then
Erwin Rommel
Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel () (15 November 1891 – 14 October 1944) was a German field marshal during World War II. Popularly known as the Desert Fox (, ), he served in the ''Wehrmacht'' (armed forces) of Nazi Germany, as well as servi ...
's
Afrika Korps
The Afrika Korps or German Africa Corps (, }; DAK) was the German expeditionary force in Africa during the North African Campaign of World War II. First sent as a holding force to shore up the Italian defense of its African colonies, the ...
played an important part in winning the war, and it was vital to maintain a telegraph connection. Malta was important too because of the threat it posed to the German
line of communication
A line of communication (or communications) is the route that connects an operating military unit with its supply base. Supplies and reinforcements are transported along the line of communication. Therefore, a secure and open line of communicati ...
supplying their forces in North Africa. The telegraph system was resilient enough to do this, but only by a very roundabout route going round the African continent on submarine cables.
End of the telegraph era
Telegrams
After the war, telegram usage went back into decline and the deficit returned into the millions of pounds. Telegram numbers were 42 million in 1950, under 14 million in 1960, and only 7.7 million in 1970, the lowest it had ever been under nationalisation. Repeated price rises by successive postmasters general,
Ness Edwards
Ness Edwards (5 April 1897 – 3 May 1968) was a trade unionist and Welsh Labour Party politician: he served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Caerphilly from July 1939 until his death.
He was born in Abertillery, Monmouthshire, Wales, the se ...
and
Ernest Marples
Alfred Ernest Marples, Baron Marples, (9 December 1907 – 6 July 1978) was a British Conservative politician who served as Postmaster General (1957–1959) and Minister of Transport (1959–1964).
As Postmaster General, he oversaw the introdu ...
, in an attempt to keep the deficit under control only made the situation worse by driving traffic down even further. Other measures were the ending or reduction of special prices for certain categories. These included the end of free messages for the railways in 1967, an increase of the press rate, and an increase of the surcharge for telegrams to the
Republic of Ireland
Ireland ( ga, Éire ), also known as the Republic of Ireland (), is a country in north-western Europe consisting of 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, on the eastern side of the island. A ...
, which had not been part of the United Kingdom since 1922, and officially a republic since 1949.
![Post Office Telegram Art](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Post_Office_Telegram_Art.IWMPST10025.jpg)
One area that continued to grow was greetings telegrams. More special occasion categories were added and premium "de luxe" telegrams were introduced for some categories in 1961. Business use of public telegrams, once the major user of the service, was now minimal. A greeting telegram unique to the UK was the practise of the monarch sending a message to citizens reaching their hundredth birthday. Instituted by
George V in 1917, in the 1940s a special telegram bearing a
Royal Crest
The royal arms of England are the arms first adopted in a fixed form at the start of the age of heraldry (circa 1200) as personal arms by the Plantagenet kings who ruled England from 1154. In the popular mind they have come to symbolise the ...
was introduced. There were only 24 recipients in 1917, rising to 255 in 1952 and by 2015, over 8,000 messages were sent, but no longer by telegram as the service had been discontinued.
In 1969
Post Office Telecommunications
Post Office Telecommunications was set up as a separate department of the UK Post Office, in October 1969. The Post Office Act 1969 was passed to provide for greater efficiency in post and telephone services; rather than run a range of services, ...
, of which the telegraph service formed a part, was made a distinct department of the Post Office, and in 1981 it was separated entirely from the Post Office as
British Telecom
BT Group plc (trade name, trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is th ...
as a first step to its privatisation in 1984. British Telecom ended their inland telegram service in 1982. International telegrams were still handled, of which there were 13.7 million in 1970. However, incoming international telegrams were no longer delivered by messenger but by ordinary post.
The telegram service was replaced with the
telemessage service in which the message is dictated over the phone to an operator and delivered by post in a yellow envelope similar to the old telegram envelope. British Telecom discontinued this service in 2003 and sold the business to Telegrams Online.
Telex and private wires
At the end of World War II, the Post Office restarted their move to automatic switching, which had been put on hold for the duration. Automatic switching was established in 1947 and sowed the seed of the international
telex
The telex network is a station-to-station switched network of teleprinters similar to a Public switched telephone network, telephone network, using telegraph-grade connecting circuits for two-way text-based messages. Telex was a major method of ...
network that developed from 1970 onwards. Telex, standing for "telegraphy exchange", was a switched network of teleprinters using automatic exchanges. It was originally a trademark of
Western Union
The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company chang ...
, which set up a telex system in the United States in 1962, but soon became a generic name for the worldwide network. The advantages of telex over telephone were that an operator was not required to staff the station to receive messages, and a printed message provided a permanent record. While the telegram service was declining post-war, in the same period business use of telegraph private wires and telex was growing. Most press traffic was also now on telex or private wires so the increase in the press rate on the public telegram system was of little concern to them. The British military also used telex to link military installations through the
Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
period. Their Telegraph Automatic Switching System was used from 1955 until well into the 1980s.
As office computers became commonplace in the 1980s, telex switched to a new telegraph code,
ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...
, which aided integration with computers. ASCII is a 7-bit code, compared to the Baudot 5-bit code, which means it has enough codes to represent both
upper and lower case whereas Baudot machines printed in upper case only. Teleprinters could then be used in conjunction with
word processor
A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features.
Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices ded ...
programs for instance. Increased use of fax machines on telephone lines drove down telex traffic, a change that was precipitated by the
postal strikes of 1971, and most especially
those of 1988.
Email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
and the
internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
mostly superseded Telex in the 1990s. The number of subscribers in the UK fell from 115,000 in 1988 to 18,000 in 1997. One of the last groups using the telex service was solicitors, who used it for
exchange of contracts in
conveyancing
In law, conveyancing is the transfer of legal title of real property from one person to another, or the granting of an encumbrance such as a mortgage or a lien. A typical conveyancing transaction has two major phases: the exchange of contracts ...
amongst other things. Conveyancing can be done by post or telephone, but telex has an immediacy that the former does not and provides a written record that the latter does not. Conveyancing can also be done over the internet, but in the 1990s there was some concern over its security.
[Walker, p. 492]
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A university press is an academic publishing hou ...
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Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and ...
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Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in England that publishes books and academic journals. Its parts include Taylor & Francis, Routledge, F1000 (publisher), F1000 Research or Dovepress. It is a division of Informa ...
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Dover Publications, also known as Dover Books, is an American book publisher founded in 1941 by Hayward and Blanche Cirker. It primarily reissues books that are out of print from their original publishers. These are often, but not always, books ...
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Brill may refer to:
Places
* Brielle (sometimes "Den Briel"), a town in the western Netherlands
* Brill, Buckinghamshire, a village in England
* Brill, Cornwall, a small village to the west of Constantine, Cornwall, UK
* Brill, Wisconsin, an un ...
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Adlard Coles Nautical is a nautical publisher, with over 300 books in print. The company publishes books on topics of interest to sailors and motorboaters and also ‘landlubbers’ with an interest in the sea. Their list includes almanacs, cruis ...
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''New Scientist'' is a magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organisation publishe ...
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Wiley may refer to:
Locations
* Wiley, Colorado, a U.S. town
*Wiley, Pleasants County, West Virginia, U.S.
* Wiley-Kaserne, a district of the city of Neu-Ulm, Germany
People
* Wiley (musician), British grime MC, rapper, and producer
* Wiley Mill ...
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The University of Chicago Press is the largest and one of the oldest university presses in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including ''The Chicago Manual of Style'', ...
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The Johns Hopkins University Press (also referred to as JHU Press or JHUP) is the publishing division of Johns Hopkins University. It was founded in 1878 and is the oldest continuously running university press in the United States. The press publi ...
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MacMillan, Macmillan, McMillen or McMillan may refer to:
People
* McMillan (surname)
* Clan MacMillan, a Highland Scottish clan
* Harold Macmillan, British statesman and politician
* James MacMillan, Scottish composer
* William Duncan MacMillan ...
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David & Charles Ltd is an English publishing company. It is the owner of the David & Charles imprint, which specialises in craft and lifestyle publishing.
David and Charles Ltd acts as distributor for all David and Charles Ltd books and cont ...
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Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and ...
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Johnson Matthey is a British multinational speciality chemicals and sustainable technologies company headquartered in London, England. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
History Early years
...
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Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. (GPG), also known as ABC-Clio/Greenwood (stylized ABC-CLIO/Greenwood), is an educational and academic publisher (middle school through university level) which is today part of ABC-Clio. Established in 1967 as Gr ...
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The Johns Hopkins University Press (also referred to as JHU Press or JHUP) is the publishing division of Johns Hopkins University. It was founded in 1878 and is the oldest continuously running university press in the United States. The press publi ...
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Temple University Press is a university press founded in 1969 that is part of Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). It is one of thirteen publishers to participate in the Knowledge Unlatched pilot, a global library consortium approach t ...
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Ticknor and Fields was an American publishing company based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded as a bookstore in 1832, the business would publish many 19th century American authors including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, ...
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The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962.
History
The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...
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Simon & Schuster () is an American publishing company and a subsidiary of Paramount Global. It was founded in New York City on January 2, 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. As of 2016, Simon & Schuster was the third largest publ ...
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Bloomsbury Publishing plc is a British worldwide publishing house of fiction and non-fiction. It is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index. Bloomsbury's head office is located in Bloomsbury, an area of the London Borough of Camden. It has a U ...
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The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Intern ...
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Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press
A university press is an academic publishing hou ...
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Michael O'Mara Books
Michael O'Mara Books is a small, family-run, privately owned publishing house in the United Kingdom. Established in London in 1985, by an American expatriate, Michael O'Mara, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and his British wife, Lesley, ...
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Duke University Press is an academic publisher and university press affiliated with Duke University. It was founded in 1921 by William T. Laprade as The Trinity College Press. (Duke University was initially called Trinity College). In 1926 Du ...
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History of the telegraph
History of telecommunications in the United Kingdom
General Post Office