A 'HUNDRED YEARS OF TELEGRAMS
By E. T. S. DUGDALE
AT the dinner at Mr. Puffington's Mr. Soapey Sponge, having swindled Mr. Pacey into buying his chestnut horse, Multum in Parvo, grandly said " That he certainly had not intended parting with his horse, though one more or less was neither here nor there, especially in these railway times, when a man had nothing to do but take a half-guinea's worth of electric wire, and have another horse in less than no time."
Surtees published Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour in 1852. It was not so many years earlier (1837) that William Cooke and Professor Charles Wheatstone, of King's College, had taken out the first patent for Electric Telegraph Alarums, and a year later Cooke was granted one for " improvements in giving signals and sounding alarms at distant places, by means of electric currents transmitted through electric circuits."
In the days before the application of electricity the " telegraph " denoted what we now call a semaphore. Lines of towers on high ground transmitted messages from one to another. One of these towers, Watson's Telegraph to the Downs (the part of the Channel off Deal), stood close to the Church of St. Olave, south of the Thames. It had two masts,. each with two semaphore arms, and was in full use till 1843, when it was burned to the ground. The new invention was therefore the " Electric Telegraph " in common parlance ; but, as time went on, people forgot that the Telegraph had ever been anything but electric.
The newspapers of the 'forties are bestrewn with instances of the amazing performance of the new invention. Here is one taken from the Illustrated London News of 1843: " The velocity of Wheatstone's messenger has reached a maximum which can safely be said of but few human beings, and we ought to be satisfied, as we know that the speed is about 120,000 miles per second. . . . The bells of the House of Commons are rung by electricity, and its uses are extending."
For the first twenty years of its career the telegraph was in the hands of private companies: The first and principal one, the Electric and International Telegraph Company, was founded in 1846. Ten years later twenty-eight were in existence, all in such keen competition that their employees would damage the wires and plant of a rival concern. By 1860 ten were still in operation, and by 1867 only three were left. The railways were among the first to realise the advantages of the new invention. Lardner's Electric Telegraph Popularised, a work which explains the science, as far as it has advanced in 1854, in a really readable form, describes the elation its application produced on the railways.
" All the station-masters, so far as relates to the move- ment upon the line, are endowed with a sort of omnipresence ; so conscious are they of the possession of this power and its value, that their language is that of persons who actually see what is going on at vast distances from them. Thus they are in the common habit of saying : I just saw the train pass such and such a station,' fifty miles distant perhaps, when in reality all they saw was the deflection of the needle of the telegraph."
The rolling stock of the railways at that period was not of a very heavy description. Lardner relates two tales, one of pre-telegraph days, which he compares with one of an event after the telegraph came into use. The first is of a first class carriage, blown by the wind out of its shed for twenty-one miles. Fortunately this happened during the night when there was no traffic to collide with it, so the railway people slept in peace and ignorance. The other too has its comic side. On New Year's Day, 185o, a train collided with something, and the driver jumped to the ground to investigate. The train, freed from control, started forward, and at the headlong speed of 15 miles per hour, advanced with the inexorable force of matter without mind towards London. Telegraphic warnings kept the line clear, whilst the superintendent of the line boarded a light engine and started in pursuit accompanied by an extra driver. The errant train was caught up, and the driver climbed on to the last carriage and ran along the top of the train till he arrived at the engine, and so gained control, a bare two miles from the metropolis. The race started at Woolwich and did not end until twelve stations had enjoyed the excitement of this contest of man against matter.
Business men took to the telegraph easily enough, but to private people it was an instrument to be used only on momentous occasions and for purposes of extreme emergency. The opening chapter of Trollope's BarchesterTowers (published in 1857) gives the wording of a message in which Dr. Grantly informed the outgoing Prime Minister that the Bishop of Barchester, his father, was dead. He hoped to succeed his father in the bishopric, but in order to remove the appearance of indecent haste on his part, he signed it with the name of the Rev. Septimus Harding. To this gentleman he said : " There, just take that to the telegraph office at the railway station, and give it in as it is ; they'll probably make you copy it on to one of their own slips ; that's all you'll have to do ; then you'll have to pay them half a crown."
The earliest record in the Record Department of the G.P.O. (to which I was courteously admitted) of the charges made by the companies refers to 1850. Then the Electric Telegraph Company charged id. per word up to zo miles, then Id. up to 5o miles, and id. for each mile further. The .next year shows a great advance in the price : viz., zo words for 5o miles .25. 6d., up to ioo miles 5s. Thus when Dr. Grantly handed half a crown to Mr. Harding, he must have known that at least five out of the twenty-five words of the message he had written out would be deleted by the telegraph clerk as excess. Telegraphing in London was very cheap. The London District Telegraph Company, in 1859, charged 4d. for io words, 6d. up to 20, and for prepaid replies at half rates.
A passage in Lardner's work shows that the species of mechanical intelligence required for the work was rather a new thing : " Different telegraphists have very different powers as to celerity. These powers depend on practice as well as on natural ability and aptitude, and on manual dexterity. Not only is it necessary to transmit the signals in quick succession, but to do so with such distinctness that they shall be readily interpreted, and such correctness as to render repetitions unnecessary. . . . The relative ability of telegraphists is partly mental and partly mechanical, depending as much on quickness of intelligence, attention, and observation, as upon manual dexterity and address."
Private codes, when used, of course increased the trouble as regards accuracy tenfold. Finally in 1867 the Government decided to take a hand, and the next year the Telegraph Act transferred from the three existing companies to the General Post Office all the business of telegraphy in the United Kingdom and Ireland. That was seventy years ago. Since then we have seen the electric telegraph supplemented by the electric telephone—first operated by a company and then taken over by the State—and Mr. Soapey Sponge's electric wire largely superseded by wireless transmission. But with it all Cooke and Wheatstone retain their place in history as pioneers.
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