Secret, arm’s length conversations in railway carriages were all very well and might prove of interest to writers of romantic short stories, but there were now far grander methods of passing messages in prospect. Although the idea of a telegraph dependent on electricity and wires had been suggested in the C18th no practical methods were devised to facilitate long distance communication. Consequently, until the 1830s, the word telegraph was usually associated with semaphore signalling devices mounted on towers in a chain. A change in the position of the wooden arms allowed transmission of information from one tower to the next and so on down the line. During the Napoleonic wars a succession of such towers linked London and Dover, these being constructed after Paris and Boulogne were similarly connected in preparation for the launch of an invasion fleet. Optical systems worked well enough on clear days but if fog reduced visibility around just one tower the speedy passage of information along the whole line could be disrupted. Nonetheless, such chains were eventually built in a number of countries as they could cut communication time enormously.
The first electric battery was created in 1800 but it was not until the 1820s that discoveries about electromagnetism raised the possibility of replacing optical telegraph chains with something far quicker. Then, in both Europe and the United States, a handful of innovators worked independently to achieve this goal. In the United States Professor Samuel Morse led the field. Morse, like Charles Hancock, was a painter of note. Curiously, he was also a descendent of an early C17th emigrant from Marlborough in Wiltshire who had left England during the Great Puritan Migration and adherence to a dissenting religious view had been passed down through two centuries, Samuel’s father being a Calvinist pastor. The professor developed an effective electrical system to transmit messages and helped create a simple but very effective code that came to bear his name. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, a proposal for a new method of telegraphy was made in 1837 by a Scotsman, William Alexander. This was within a few weeks of a partnership being formed south of the border between William Cooke, an entrepreneurial inventor, and Charles Wheatstone, a brilliant academic with a wide range of talents and interests, having, for example, held a patent for the English concertina for many years. There was a certain tension between Cooke and Wheatstone because of their different backgrounds and ambitions but, nonetheless, the partners worked well enough together initially. They quickly patented their new system, which depended on multiple wires and moving needles set on a board which received incoming messages.
In the summer of 1837 a number of British newspapers carried reports on the basis of an article initially published in Edinburgh, where Alexander was based. The name of the inventor was not given but one headline, A New and Beautiful Invention, appeared over an article asserting information might now be conveyed almost instantaneously over a hundred or a thousands miles. So great was the improvement over the optical telegraph that the gulf was compared to that between Mexican picture writing and the art of printing. As the news was digested, the innovation was occasionally dismissed as being too impractical or expensive to be widely adopted. For example, the editor of the Liverpool Mercury held that although sending a message between Liverpool and Manchester might be easy enough, to send one from London to all the towns in the country would be next to impossible as the country would have to be intersected in all directions with interminable wires, ramifying from the metropolis as the lines of cobwebs radiate from the centre. The cost, moreover, would be so enormous it was asserted it would be easier to pay off the national debt in precious metals.
Although the sceptical editor may have been regarded as a Jeremiah by some, others, especially those involved in trade and the growing railway industry, saw substantial potential benefits in an electric telegraph network whilst recognising there would be many technical obstacles in whichever system was adopted. How to properly protect the conducting wires was one and it did not prove easy to solve.
In 1830 King George 1V had been succeeded by his younger brother, who at the age of the 65 became William 1V. William 1V himself reigned for only seven years and died just at the time when information about the electric telegraph was being disseminated. As the ‘Sailor King’ left no legitimate children the crown passed to his eighteen year old niece, Victoria. When power and influence are transferred from the old there is often talk of clean sweeps and looking to the future, so it is not surprising Victoria’s coronation was planned to be a fitting start to a new era. The Crown Princess, lacking in years though she might be, certainly knew her own mind and, appreciating the work of Harriet Martineau, dispatched an invitation to the ceremony at Westminster Abbey.
On Coronation Day in June 1838, the social commentator and novelist arrived with a bag of sandwiches and a book to pass the time when nothing much was going on and found a place to sit. As she munched and read, the streets outside were thronged with large crowds of onlookers, many of whom had been brought to London on the new railroads. A fair number of visitors would have arrived at Euston Square Station, which had been open almost a year and served the London and Birmingham Railway. It was a feature of the early years of this line that once trains arrived at Camden Town, which was the last stop before Euston, the locomotive and the rolling stock were uncoupled and the carriages and the passengers were then subject to a controlled descent down an incline, which took them over the Regents Canal to the terminus. Those heading home after the celebrations would have returned to Euston where their carriages were then pulled back up to Camden Town and a waiting locomotive. This little journey must have been a pleasing finale to the day’s excursion and for electric telegraph enthusiasts (and there must have been some in the crowds) the incline would have been a source of extra comment for it was where Cooke and Wheatstone’s telegraph system had first been tried on a railway in the previous year. It had been used to prompt the starting and stopping of a stationary engine that slowed or pulled the carriages, depending whether they were going down or up.
One advocate of the electric telegraph lived not far from Euston Square. His name was Samuel Porter and, according to a letter published in a September edition of the Morning Herald, had approached the Admiralty over ten years previously with his own plans for this form of communication. Unfortunately for him he failed to make an impact but this did not dampen his enthusiasm. He took the view that a major problem with the Cooke and Wheatstone system lay with the conducting wires, which were installed underground. In his opinion they were not properly insulated as they were encased in hemp or wood. This would not do, protested Mr Porter, both are of a perishable nature; both will absorb damp and every part of the apparatus employed in electricity should be kept dry. The damp would have other effects too. Commenting on a recently mooted project to transmit messages by wires strung at a high level, the St Pancras resident said it would be a mistake to use iron conductors on this type of link due to potential corrosion and asked who would secure a poor bird that alighted on a decayed telegraph line only to be consigned to oblivion when it broke?
Those using the telegraph would probably be more concerned with the loss of their message rather than a perching bird but Mr Porter’s comments about insulation were valid. After an experimental period the Birmingham and London did not continue to use the electric telegraph, but the Great Western Railway adopted the Cooke and Wheatstone system between Paddington and West Drayton in 1839 and it was extended further west from there. A year later a railway serving the London docks and dependent on stationary engines rather than locomotives also successfully installed a Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph. In the years that followed the cobweb gradually came into being and was often linked to railways, where the interminable wires, fastened to glazed pottery insulators fixed to the side of ubiquitous telegraph poles, ran parallel to the rails.
On the other side of the Atlantic Samuel Morse had a more difficult time establishing his version of the electric telegraph, although in a number of ways it was superior to that of Cooke and Wheatstone. He found it difficult to obtain funding or generate official interest but, convinced that his invention would contribute to the happiness of millions, he pressed on despite all setbacks. One disappointment occurred when he attempted to show that a message could be sent by cable under water which would support his view that that If I can make it go ten miles I can make it go round the globe.
Like Morse, the far sighted already saw the potential of a national or even international telegraphic communication network, which would mean insulated wires would need to lie on the beds of bays, rivers, seas and oceans. The professor planned a demonstration of underwater telegraphy in New York. At the centre of the submarine cable that he was going to use was a wire a twelfth of an inch thick protected by hemp strands, pitch tar and India rubber. So light was this cable that a suitable length could be placed in a small rowing boat from which it was then possible to lay a line in New York harbour from a terminal at Castle Garden on Lower Manhattan to one on Governor’s Island. A demonstration was planned to take place soon after the cable had been sunk and crowds, informed by an editorial in the New York Times, gathered to see if the vaunted invention actually worked. For a brief moment it did but it was silenced almost immediately as the cable was raised on an anchor of a departing ship. The sailors, not knowing what it was, cut the cable and Morse’s experiment ended to the sound of laughter and jeers from some in the watching crowds.
Happily for Morse he was now on the verge of a breakthrough in gaining financial support from the United States government for the creation of a forty-mile long telegraph line but accidents involving anchors and underwater cables would occur more than once in future. However, even had the cable experiment been a complete success it may not have functioned for very long due to the insulation degrading. The search for an insulator that would fit tightly round transmission wire and be impermeable to the effects of submersion went on for, without it, telegraph networks would be limited to land use only. It was to be several years before suitable material became available but, as Morse payed out his thin cable on a moonlit night in October 1842, such a material was being investigated on a distant tropical island.
In Britain meanwhile, as the railway network expanded so to did telegraph installation, making further semaphore towers redundant. One chain of towers ran from London to Portsmouth, an important Royal Navy base. The photo to the right shows the tower at Chatley Heath, Surrey, as it is today. When the South Western Railway established a railway to Gosport, a town facing Portsmouth across Portsmouth Harbour, the Admiralty agreed to go fifty-fifty with the £24,000 cost of an adjacent telegraph line. This was built to a Cooke and Wheatstone specification, with wire suspended from poles erected at 50 yard intervals. When this was completed test messages were exchanged, one of which ran;
Have you any mackerel for to-night's goods train?
No, they cannot catch them now.
Why not?
Because the nights are moonlight, and the fish see the net.
Disappointing though this may have been for those in London hoping for mackerel at next day's dinner the government was more interested in getting rather more urgent messages directly into the Admiral's official residence on the Portsmouth side of the harbour. It would have been possible to run a line around the shore, a distance of approximately 6 miles, but a decision was made to try and install a submarine cable instead.
At the same time as reports appeared about the mackerel message another was published about an event in the United States, which might have caused some reflection in the Admiralty. It concerned the use, by Samuel Colt (later of Colt .45 fame), of the electric telegraph to blow up a ship at a distance of forty miles. As the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom was going through a sticky patch the report about Colt's experiment may have focused attention ever closer on the way to make a submarine cable secure and reliable, but some ignored the international difficulties and dreamt, like Professor Morse, of far greater things. In June 1845 the fabulously named, although regrettably rather short lived, Northern Warder and General Advertiser for the Counties of Fife, Perth and Forfar carried a letter from a correspondent who had clearly given some thought to a line to carry messages across the Atlantic sea bed. Advice was given on the metal to be used for the conductor (copper) and the methods by which separate parts should be joined (electric welding only) and it appears the proposer thought there was no need for insulation as enough protection would offered by the attachment of lead blocks to the line. The total expenditure might just be £12,000 more than the cost of the London to Plymouth link and the only real threats of it malfunctioning were underwater volcanic eruptions. Not stopping at costing the trans-Atlantic project, the anonymous correspondent also estimated the outlay needed for a submarine cable from Britain to Calcutta via the Cape of Good Hope to be £200,000 and from there on to Canton another £70,000. Afterwards, the New Zealand extension would be £120,000 but to Tahiti £200,000.
We might imagine the concoctor of this flight of fancy having a wee dram when putting pen to paper on a long, light Dundee evening. However, the city was a thriving textile producing centre that could benefit enormously from the electric telegraph and, particularly, by being linked to Calcutta, which was close to the jute producing areas of Bengal, jute being an increasingly important import for Dundee mills. Sound though the idea of the telegraphic link might be, using lead blocks as a substitute for cable protection would not prove practical, although, by 1845, there had already been some suggestions that gutta percha might eventually fit the bill. By coincidence, a quite unrelated use for the solidified gum may have recently been discovered only a few miles from the banks of the estuary on which Dundee stood.
Back to Chapter 7 On to Chapter 9
When London Became An Island
Gutta Percha comes to the Metropolis
Chapter 8 - A query about mackerel
Commanders and clippers
Portrait of Lafayette by Samuel Morse
Wooden insulation for wires used on the Cooke and Wheatstone system
Chatley Heath Semaphore Tower Its signalling arms were redundant after the opening of the electric telegraph
