Victorian Telegraphy Before Nationalization

Simone Fari

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137406521
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This study offers an analysis of the technological and entrepreneurial features of the Victorian telegraph service, together with the companies which ran it until nationalization in 1869. It shows a historical reconstruction mainly based on original and unedited documents belonging to a variety of archives.

1

The Origins of the Telegraph Service

10 June 1837. One of William IV’s last acts was to grant a patent for Wheatstone and Cooke’s telegraph apparatus, though it took ten years before the first telegraph company was authorized by Parliament, on 18 June 1846. Four years passed and it was only when serious competition began to surface that the telegraph service really began to move. Why was it so long in the making? Why was there a ten-year gap between the patent and the establishment of the first commercial company? Why did another fourteen years go by before the public began to make any significant use of it?

The few studies that have investigated the origins of the British telegraph service are generally based on the struggles to obtain patents and exclusive rights to commercial exploitation.¹ Nevertheless, in-depth research into the beginnings of British telegraphy is indispensable for defining its long-term features, which forged not only the service at home but also throughout the Empire. The political, entrepreneurial, technological and social decisions taken during the first 15 years were to function as “constitutive choices”, destined to influence the mechanisms of development in British telecommunications right well past the end of the century.²

The period of gestation can be divided into three short but clearly defined stages. The first one of “heroic” endeavour, when the telegraph apparatus was invented, went from the early 1830s to 1837, the year of the first patent. The second stage, from 1837 to 1846, was all experimentation, when the possessors of the first patent, Cooke in particular, were involved in constructing overhead lines along the railroads, with the dual aim of showing how useful they were for controlling rail traffic, and also trying them out as a potential means of communication for the public. Finally, the last “entrepreneurial” period covered the years from 1846 to 1850, with a company now authorized to transmit telegrams, though still operating on a fairly limited level.

1.1 The heroic years

Around the mid-1830s, work began on constructing telegraph prototypes, though most of the inventors involved were neither scientists nor technicians in a strict sense. Cooke, for example, was an ex-officer of the East India Company, while Morse was a fairly well-known painter,³ Pawel Shilling a Russian diplomat⁴ and Edward Davy a doctor. This was significantly reflected in the technical aspects of the early telegraphs, which were based on one or two well-consolidated scientific principles. The first needle telegraphs, like Wheatstone and Cooke’s, followed on from Oersted’s discovery of how electricity passing through a compass needle changes its polarity and moves it to the right or left.⁵ Differently, electromagnetic telegraphs like Morse’s were inspired by Arago’s experiments with electricity passing through steel and magnetizing it.⁶ All the telegraphs invented in this period used battery-produced dynamic electricity, an electric cell invented by the Italian Alessandro Volta at the beginning of the century. In itself the telegraph was not a sophisticated or particularly innovative contraption from a purely technical point of view. Its novelty was that it deployed scientific discoveries in electricity to transmit long distance messages at great speed. Both Morse and Cooke felt a sense of shock when, in different contexts and an almost total ignorance of the principles of electricity,⁷ they realized how useful it could turn out to be for communication.⁸ They were dazzled by their discoveries, and though not being members of the scientific world, poured all their intellectual, social and economic resources into realizing their inventions and exploiting them commercially.

Cooke had his moment of enlightenment in March 1836 when he witnessed a demonstration of Shilling’s telegraph during a lecture given by Professor Muncke at the University of Heidelberg. The son of a famous surgeon, Cooke was in Germany to improve his technique of constructing wax anatomic models. He had noticed that his father needed models to explain human anatomy to students without having to resort to dissection, which was commonly felt to be a distasteful practice. On seeing Muncke’s demonstration, however, Cooke realized that the telegraph could be turned into something of enormous social utility. He immediately threw himself into the task of building a telegraph and studying all its possible applications.⁹ Sensing the high economic and social profitability of a new business, he abandoned wax models and went back to London at once to further his knowledge in matters of electricity,¹⁰ work out its feasibility and assess the possible interest of backers.

Realizing he was not alone in having thought of a practical application of the telegraph, Cooke built a prototype in only three weeks with the use of a music box,¹¹ and turned to a watchmaker to perfection his apparatus and make it reproducible.¹² In 1836,¹³ convinced he would soon have a perfectly functioning telegraph in his hands, he drew up a proper business plan,¹⁴ in which he detailed possible applications (railways, Government, business and assistance), the low cost and efficiency as well as the technical difficulties to overcome.¹⁵ However, it turned out to be more difficult to build his instrument than he had foreseen, as the clockmaker worked slowly, and the difficulties only increased as the project went ahead.¹⁶ Cooke realized that Moore,¹⁷ the clockmaker, knew nothing about electricity and could never have finished the job in a satisfying way.¹⁸ At this point, armed with a business plan but held back by an unfinished instrument, Cooke was almost at the end of his tether.¹⁹ However, he reacted quickly and set himself two objectives: look for someone with sufficient knowledge of electricity and contact possible financial backers. In November 1836 he tried to reconcile the two needs by organizing a meeting with Michael Faraday, known in the period as “the King of Electro-Magneticians”.²⁰ He hoped that Faraday would both give him advice over his problems and introduce him into London’s scientific circles, which was a must for obtaining any financial backing.²¹ All to no avail, Faraday brushed him off, saying that the scientific principles in Cooke’s instrument were perfectly correct and that once completed, it could no doubt function, but that further experiments were needed to adapt it to distance communication.²² It was tantamount to saying that Cooke’s telegraph had a good potential, but Faraday himself was not at all interested in helping or backing it in any way.²³ Cooke did not lose heart, decided to change strategy and look for two figures, one to act as financial backer²⁴ and the other as scientific partner.²⁵

He identified a possible backer, or at least a broker, in Joshua Walker, an acquaintance of his father’s.²⁶ As a businessman and investor in railways, Walker would guarantee direct or indirect access to the world Cooke had already identified as being close to the development of telegraphy.²⁷ Thanks to Walker, in fact, in January 1837 Cooke entered into contact with the directors of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway Company, as they needed a distance signal system because convoys had to be cable hauled²⁸ near Liverpool’s Lime Street Tunnel. The company had actually already decided to adopt a pneumatic post system and stayed loyal to their first choice,²⁹ even though some were very much taken by Cooke’s presentation. Some months later, Robert Stephenson, who had been struck by the new means, gave Cooke a second chance.³⁰ Together with his father, George, Stephenson was a pioneer in building engines and setting up railways companies, and was one of the most prestigious railway and civil engineers of the times. With his kind of reputation, he was clearly an influential player in the railway world.³¹

Cooke went on looking for a scientific partner, more necessary than ever since the experiments carried out in February 1837 had confirmed the problem he had detected right from the beginning (i.e., that electric signals weakened over distance).³² Only by overcoming this limit could Cooke go on presenting the telegraph as an innovative means of distance communication. After the failure with Faraday, he turned to other scientists, until Peter Mark Roget, the secretary to the Royal Society, introduced him to Charles Wheatstone.³³ Wheatstone, who already in early youth had invented and built musical instruments, had published an essay in 1833 entitled “An account of some experiments to measure the velocity of electricity and the duration of the electric light”,³⁴ which was so original it had won him scientific renown, followed the next year by a professorship at King’s College, London. Within two years, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, a confirmation of his fame as a great expert in electricity.

When Cooke met Wheatstone, he was amazed. After having talked for months to scientists who were either uninterested in him or totally incompetent, he finally found himself in the company of an exceedingly well-informed expert³⁵ who was carrying out his own telegraph experiments.³⁶ Cooke realized at once that Wheatstone was the partner he had been trying to find for months,³⁷ while Wheatstone was in turn struck by Cooke’s entrepreneurial impetus and soon convinced that he would be the ideal manager for any commer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Origins of the Telegraph Service
• 2  Constitutive Choices
• 3  From Monopoly to Free Competition
• 4  The Duopoly
• 5  The Triumph of the Oligopoly
• 6  Nationalization
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index