Electrical telegraphy in the United Kingdom
Electrical telegraphy in the United Kingdom announced itself to the general public on the 6th of August 1844. The Times reported the birth of Alfred Ernest Albert to Queen Victoria just 40 minutes after the palace announced it. No message had ever moved so fast. Then came the case of John Tawell. He murdered a woman in Salt Hill, near Slough, and boarded a train for London believing distance would protect him. His description had already arrived at Paddington station by wire. He was arrested shortly after stepping off.
The public was paying attention. Sixty-four telegraph companies were formed in Britain between 1846 and nationalisation in 1870. Sixty-eight percent of them failed. What drove so many entrepreneurs into the telegraph business, why so few survived, and why the state that eventually took it over could never make it pay are questions whose answers run from laboratory benches in Hammersmith to the ocean floors of three continents.
Francis Ronalds stretched eight miles of iron wire between wooden frames in his Hammersmith garden in 1816, powered by high-voltage friction machines. He offered the system to the Admiralty, who were already using an optical telegraph and saw no need for a replacement. Ronalds' approach had a deeper structural problem. Static electricity generators were unlikely to sustain signals over very long distances. Even his test circuit worked well only in dry weather.
The power source that made long-distance telegraphy practical was developed by John Frederic Daniell in 1836. Earlier batteries, including the voltaic pile, dropped voltage during continuous use because hydrogen bubbles gathered around the copper electrode and insulated it. Daniell separated the zinc and copper electrodes into different electrolytes with a porous barrier between them. A sulfuric acid electrolyte consumed the hydrogen before it could interfere. In 1853, J. F. Fuller improved on the design by replacing sulfuric acid with zinc sulfate.
Edward Davy began experimenting with telegraphy in 1835. In 1837, he demonstrated his system in Regent's Park over a mile of copper wire and patented his key invention, the relay, in 1838. The relay allowed a weak incoming signal to activate an electromagnet, which closed a secondary circuit powered by a local battery and sent a fresh pulse onward. Without it, long-distance transmissions would have required human operators at intermediate stations to read and retransmit every message. Davy held an exhibition in London, but after his marriage broke down he emigrated to Australia, leaving others to build on what he had created.
William Fothergill Cooke attended a demonstration by Georg Wilhelm Muncke of a needle telegraph in March 1836 and set about building one himself. His first mechanical apparatus was complete later that year. Believing, incorrectly, that needle telegraphs required a separate wire for each needle, he initially pursued clockwork mechanisms instead. He sought advice from Michael Faraday and then from Charles Wheatstone, who recommended the needle approach. Together they patented the resulting system in May 1837. The instrument used five needles operated in pairs, each pair pointing to a letter marked on a board. The London and Birmingham Railway trialled a four-needle version in July 1837 and rejected it. So did the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
The Great Western Railway accepted the system in 1838, installing a five-needle telegraph from Paddington station to West Drayton. It was the first commercial telegraph in the world. The cables ran through an underground conduit, but the insulation failed. Cooke replaced the system with a two-needle arrangement using only the wires that remained intact. The code for two needles could not be read from a board; operators had to learn it. The profession of telegraphist had been created.
In 1843, the Great Western line was extended to Slough and converted to a single-needle system. Cooke patented a method of suspending uninsulated wires from poles on ceramic insulators, which rapidly became standard. The Great Western considered the system experimental and refused to finance the extension. Cooke funded it himself, in exchange for the right to open public telegraph offices. A flat rate of one shilling was charged regardless of message length. Many early users paid simply to watch the equipment work.
The earliest machine for sending images by telegraph is credited to Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. He patented an unbuilt design in 1843 and demonstrated a working version in 1848. Frederick C. Bakewell showed an improved design at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Bain's chemical printing telegraph used a dot-dash code similar to Morse, and the system found users in England during the 1850s. When Bain took the device to the United States in 1849, he became embroiled in litigation with Samuel Morse that broke him financially. He eventually returned to clockmaking, his original trade.
William Fothergill Cooke and financier John Lewis Ricardo established the Electric Telegraph Company in 1846, the first company formed to offer a public telegraph service. Wheatstone took no part; he and Cooke had quarrelled over credit for their joint invention, and the dispute went to arbitration. Marc Isambard Brunel argued for Cooke; Daniell argued for Wheatstone. The settlement gave both men partial credit. The company then bought out Alexander Bain's competing patents for £7,500 after he threatened to block its formation in Parliament.
The Electric's lasting competitive advantage was not its technology but its access to railway land. By the time rivals emerged, it held exclusive agreements with most railway companies. Those agreements controlled the wayleaves, the rights to run wires along railway property, and locked competitors off the most economical routes. After 1848, revenues grew beyond railways. Supplying news to newspapers and stock exchange information to the financial sector proved profitable. Lloyd's of London was among the first substantial customers, having telegraph instruments installed directly in their London offices in 1851. The company's London central office eventually moved to larger premises at Great Bell Alley, Moorgate, in 1859. The eastern end of that street was later renamed Telegraph Street.
John Watkins Brett established the Magnetic Telegraph Company in 1850, initially to lay a submarine cable linking Britain and Ireland. Several early attempts failed. The Magnetic succeeded in 1853, giving Ireland its first telegraphic connection to Britain and laying what was then the deepest submarine cable placed anywhere. The company avoided the Electric's patents by using a needle telegraph developed by William Thomas Henley and George Foster, which generated electricity electromagnetically from the operator's handle rather than requiring batteries. That was the meaning of magnetic in the company's name. Henry Highton's needle telegraph, later acquired by the Magnetic, was the cheapest of all manual systems, priced at between two pounds ten shillings and three pounds.
In 1851, the Electric charged ten shillings for a twenty-word inland telegram over 100 miles. By 1855, that had fallen to four shillings, though it was still steep: a weaver in 1855 earned on average ten shillings and sixpence per week. The London District Telegraph Company, established in 1859, undercut both major companies by charging fourpence for ten words within its London service area. The District strung its wires from rooftop to rooftop rather than using poles or buried cables. Securing the necessary permissions required around seven thousand negotiations with property owners to erect just 280 miles of wire. In 1862, the company transmitted a quarter of a million messages.
By 1865, the Electric, the Magnetic, and the United Kingdom Telegraph Company had agreed a common price structure, abandoning the flat rates each had separately promoted. Between 1861 and 1866, the combined net profits of the Electric and Magnetic rose from £99,000 to £178,000. The United Kingdom Telegraph Company, founded by Thomas Allan and registered in 1850, could not raise sufficient capital to begin operating until 1860. It used the printing telegraph of David Edward Hughes, an early form of teleprinter that decoded messages automatically into plain text without an operator needing to interpret them. The Electric had been offered the Hughes machine in 1858 and rejected it.
William Montgomerie, head of the medical department in Singapore, sent samples of gutta-percha to the Royal Society in 1843. He had thought the material might replace rubber in medical equipment. Michael Faraday, on examining the samples, recognised its potential as insulation for underwater cables. Gutta-percha is a natural latex from trees of the genus Palaquium in the Far East. It hardens in air, softens in hot water, and resists salt water far better than rubber. The Gutta Percha Company, founded in 1845, began as a manufacturer of bottle stoppers. In 1848, the firm converted an extrusion machine to apply gutta-percha continuously along a copper conductor. Until 1865, it held a near-monopoly on submarine cable cores in the United Kingdom.
Charles Wheatstone had introduced plans for submarine cables in the House of Commons as early as 1840. Jacob and John Watkins Brett had been planning a channel crossing since 1847. A trial in 1849 used the ship Princess Clementine, anchored off Folkestone, to relay messages to London via the South Eastern Railway's overhead telegraph line. The Submarine Telegraph Company succeeded in connecting England to France in 1851.
After the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the need for a telegraph link to India became acute. An urgent request for military assistance had taken forty days to reach London by ship. A working cable was finally achieved in 1864, after the Indian government laid a new cable from Karachi to Fao, Iraq, connected to overland routes. At 1,450 miles, it was many times longer than any previous submarine cable that had proved a lasting success.
John Pender merged the Gutta Percha Company with Glass, Elliot and Company in 1864 to form the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, known as Telcon. He then purchased the SS Great Eastern with a consortium including Thomas Brassey and Daniel Gooch. Built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a passenger ship, it had been a commercial failure. Its size made it the only vessel capable of holding enough cable for the transatlantic route. The transatlantic connection was completed by 1866.
A submarine cable laid in 1862 ran from Queenstown in southern Ireland to St David's Head in Wales. When connected to the transatlantic landing point at Valentia Bay, it cut the onward distance from Ireland to London from 750 miles to 285 miles. Pender then created a chain of companies each assigned a section of a new route to India through international waters. The Anglo-Mediterranean Company, founded in 1868, ran from Malta to Alexandria. The Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company, founded in 1869, connected Malta to the Cornish coast. Its cable landed at a small village called Porthcurno, with intermediate stops at Gibraltar and Carcavelos in Portugal. Porthcurno would become the largest submarine cable station in the world. The British-Indian Submarine Company, founded in 1869, completed the connection from Suez via Aden to Bombay in 1870. The three companies merged as the Eastern Telegraph Company in 1872. James Anderson, who had captained the Great Eastern on its cable-laying voyages, became managing director.
The British-Australian Telegraph Company, founded in 1870, extended the network from Hong Kong to Port Darwin, Australia, via Java. That was the starting point of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line, which ran 2,000 miles to Port Augusta in South Australia. Australia was connected to New Zealand in 1876. The network Pender assembled, through companies eventually merged into the Eastern and Associated Cable Company, became the largest multinational of the nineteenth century.
In October 1902, the All Red Line was inaugurated: a worldwide telegraph network comprising some 100,000 miles of undersea cables, all routed through British territory. The name came from the convention of colouring British territories red or pink on maps. By 1928, British cables still dominated world telecommunications, but radiotelegraphy was taking share. The Eastern Telegraph Company and the Marconi Wireless Company merged in 1934 into a new entity that took the name Cable and Wireless Ltd. The cable station at Porthcurno remained open for exactly one hundred years, closing in 1970. The building where cables came ashore is now the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.
Thomas Allan argued for nationalisation as early as 1854, believing a unified Post Office network was the only entity that could offer a flat one shilling rate for twenty words regardless of distance. John Lewis Ricardo, co-founder of the Electric Telegraph Company, arrived at the same conclusion by a different path. In 1861, Ricardo sent a memorandum to William Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He argued the telegraph was too important an instrument of government to remain in private hands. Lord Stanley, the postmaster general, publicly backed nationalisation in 1865. Post Office reformer Frank Ives Scudamore led the practical campaign, noting that many telegraph offices were inconveniently placed at railway stations, that some towns were entirely unserved, and that rival companies had sometimes set up side by side in the same street.
The Telegraph Act 1868 did not mandate nationalisation. It gave the Post Office the right to establish telegraph services and to purchase existing companies through commercial negotiation. What neither the act nor Scudamore's estimates accounted for was the railway companies. When the railway companies understood the Post Office intended to take over telegraph networks running across their land, they insisted on separate compensation. New chancellor George Ward Hunt was unprepared. The government moved quickly, fearing that rising share prices would add to the cost of any delay.
The total paid to nationalise the inland telegraph was £5.9 million. Scudamore's original estimate had been £2.5 million. By 1876, when acquisitions and extensions were combined, the figure exceeded £10 million. The complete telegraph network across continental Europe had cost only £4 million. Parliament was told, somewhat speculatively, that a new British system could have been constructed from scratch for £2 million. The gap stemmed mainly from unbudgeted railway payments. Companies were compensated at twenty years' net profits, even when their railway leases had far fewer than twenty years to run. Arbitration cases over those arrangements continued for a decade after nationalisation.
The actual transfer took effect on the 1st of January 1870. Post Office Telegraphs occupied the Electric Telegraph Company's old building in Telegraph Street, with the slogan "The ever open door" above the entrance. London's telegraph offices increased from 95 in 1869 to 334 in 1870. By the end of 1870, over 90 percent of telegrams were sent from post offices. By 1872, the network had 5,000 offices and carried roughly 12 million messages per year. By 1875, the Telegraph Street central office was the largest telegraph centre in the world, with 450 instruments working across three floors.
The Post Office standardised on Morse telegraphy, the international standard since 1865, as it sought to unify equipment inherited from many different companies. The service never turned a profit. Government policy required the network to serve every post office issuing money orders, regardless of traffic volumes. Frank Ives Scudamore left the Post Office in 1873 under investigation for drawing on other Post Office budgets to cover the telegraph's mounting unforeseen costs, anticipating Parliament would approve more funds. He subsequently went to Turkey, where he was hired to modernise the post and telegraph of the Ottoman Empire.
The Magnetic Telegraph Company was among the first to employ women as telegraph operators. The Electric Telegraph Company began doing the same from 1855. For unmarried women in mid-Victorian Britain, the position was unusually attractive. The Electric paid between ten shillings and thirty shillings per week; the Magnetic's starting rate was ten shillings. A seamstress working at home in the same period earned approximately threepence per day. The work took place in clean, respectable surroundings and required a level of education that marked it out from most other available options.
New recruits served an unpaid training period of typically six weeks. At the end, the Magnetic expected a minimum transmission speed of ten words per minute; the Electric's minimum was eight. Those who fell short were dismissed. Women were paid less than male operators doing the same work, and the companies were explicit about why: lower wages were the primary economic motive for employing them, alongside the fact that they were not members of unions. Adolescent boys were also employed in some roles, but night shifts were reserved for men.
After nationalisation in 1870, the Post Office continued employing women telegraphists on the same economic grounds. A secondary consideration was social class. Women recruited into the role typically came from middle-class backgrounds with a level of education the Post Office could not otherwise obtain at the same wage. Internal records noted that only men from what was described as an inferior class could be hired at equivalent pay.
Telegraph clerks in Manchester formed the Telegraphers' Association in 1871, the first active union in the British public service. Scudamore demanded the clerks resign from the association; those who refused were dismissed. A strike followed, demanding reinstatement. Scudamore then blocked telegraphic transmission of news of the strike to national newspapers. The press's protests led to his official censure. Wages were increased in 1872 and a formal staff structure was introduced. The terms did not hold the workforce: more than 2,300 out of 6,000 clerks left the Post Office between 1872 and 1880.
Lord Kelvin produced a mathematical description of the problem called retardation in 1854, making precise what telegraph engineers had observed but could not fully explain. Oliver Heaviside gave the complete theoretical analysis in 1881 and, by 1887, had proposed a solution: adding the right amount of inductance to a line would remove the dispersion effect entirely. The Post Office declined to act on this. Heaviside's long-running dispute with Post Office chief electrician William Preece had made him an outsider in official technical debates. The practical solution was eventually implemented in the United States, when George Ashley Campbell added loading coils to a telephone line for the first time in 1900.
On the first transatlantic cable of 1858, the retardation problem was severe enough that transmission speeds fell to minutes per word rather than words per minute. A telegraph pulse contains multiple frequency components that travel at different speeds through insulated cable. As the components separate, the pulse spreads over time and adjacent pulses smear into each other. Operators had to slow their sending rate to restore separation. Telegraph engineer Wildman Whitehouse believed a higher voltage would correct the fault. He applied one and permanently destroyed the cable. The loss to the Atlantic Telegraph Company was nearly £2 million.
William Preece, whose resistance to Heaviside's proposals had shaped Post Office telegraph policy, also introduced the telephone to Britain. He exhibited a pair brought from America in 1877. Private telephone companies formed quickly, including the Lancashire Telephone Exchange Company in Manchester in 1879. The Post Office argued in court that telephone messages counted as telegraph messages under the Telegraph Act 1869. In 1880, the Post Office won that case. The new Postmaster General Henry Fawcett immediately began building Post Office telephone exchanges, using instruments made by the Gower Bell Telephone Company.
Special greetings telegrams, introduced in 1935, proved popular and slowed the decline in usage. By 1970, telegram volume had fallen to its lowest level since nationalisation. British Telecom, separated from the Post Office in 1981 and privatised in 1984, ended the inland telegram service in 1982. International telegrams could still be sent by telephone and were delivered by ordinary letter post. Private wire telegraphy and telex persisted among a shrinking group of users. Most moved to internet alternatives in the 1990s.
In 1868, the MP Charles Monk introduced a private member's bill extending the vote to Post Office workers and other civil servants. It became law despite opposition from Benjamin Disraeli's government and without support from Gladstone. Parliament had feared that organised workers could have an undue influence on Members of Parliament. The concern never materialised, and the franchise the telegraph clerks secured in 1868 outlasted the industry that had prompted it by more than a century.
Common questions
Who invented the first commercial telegraph in the United Kingdom?
William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone developed and patented their telegraph system in May 1837. The Great Western Railway installed a five-needle version from Paddington station to West Drayton in 1838, making it the world's first commercial telegraph.
When was the British inland telegraph nationalised and what did it cost?
The inland telegraph was nationalised on the 1st of January 1870 under the Telegraph Act 1868. The total cost was £5.9 million, far exceeding Frank Ives Scudamore's original estimate of £2.5 million; by 1876, combined acquisition and extension costs had exceeded £10 million.
What material made submarine telegraph cables possible in the United Kingdom?
Gutta-percha, a natural latex from trees of the genus Palaquium in the Far East, provided the insulation that made submarine cables viable. William Montgomerie sent samples to the Royal Society in 1843, and the Gutta Percha Company, founded in 1845, held a near-monopoly on submarine cable cores in the United Kingdom until 1865.
Who was John Pender and what was his role in global telegraphy?
John Pender created the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company in 1864 by merging the Gutta Percha Company with Glass, Elliot and Company. He founded a chain of companies that laid submarine cables connecting Britain to India, Australia, and other parts of the empire; these were merged as the Eastern Telegraph Company in 1872.
When did the United Kingdom end its inland telegram service?
British Telecom ended the inland telegram service in 1982. International telegrams could still be sent by telephone after that date and were delivered by ordinary letter post.
What was the All Red Line telegraph network?
The All Red Line was a worldwide telegraph network inaugurated in October 1902, comprising some 100,000 miles of undersea cables routed entirely through British territory. The name came from the convention of colouring British territories red or pink on maps of the era.
All sources
2 references cited across the entry
- 1Kieve (1973) p. 166Kieve — 1973