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WELCOME TO DISTANT WRITING
Electric Telegraphy in Britain - Some Lines from the Past
Distant Writing is a chronology of the growth and performance of all of the domestic public telegraph companies formed in Britain from 1838 to 1868, as well as of their associated cable companies. It tries to put their remarkable, largely unrecognised, achievements and developments into the context of the time; and to demonstrate - surprisingly- how their enterprise is once again reflected in the way we communicate now. A plan for an electric telegraph in every home was just one of the schemes successfully introduced by the companies - until the Government took over... Their working practices, employment policies, pricing structures, their influence on time and weather, and their relationships with the news media during the period are dealt with in some detail; as is the electrical technology that is inextricably and unavoidably linked to their development. Readers will find a great many rare contemporary engravings of most of the instruments and many telegraphic features of the period throughout the text and in the Instrument Gallery. It is hoped that all of this detail will encourage others to investigate and publish works regarding the electric telegraph in the nineteenth century; the innovation of which led directly to our electronic age.
The Universal Telegraph
“The wire of one friend may be placed in communication with that of another.
It may be that the friend may well dwell in another part of the kingdom, in which case, before sending a message, it would be necessary to have his wire placed in connection with a public telegraph, and this again at its terminus with the friend’s wire.”
“By combining beforehand different lines in this manner, two different persons may converse together across the island, sitting in their own drawing rooms; nay, by only extending the connection of these lines with the submarine cables across the sea, a person may converse with his friend travelling day by day at the other end of the globe.”
“This may appear to be an idle dream, but that it will certainly come to pass we have no manner of doubt whatsoever.”
Andrew Wynter M D, 1861 This was a prediction that, amazingly, was being implemented and was well on the way to becoming true in Britain one-hundred-and-forty years ago in 1868... To follow this story and that of all the electric telegraph companies in Britain just click through each of the chapters in the side bar on the left.
| History The Distant Writing website was started in April 2007. It has been extensively added to, with additional text and many new drawings, over the months. More is yet to come! It is published on the web as a free resource for those interested in early communications technology, in the incredibly rapid development of telegraphy and its effects in the mid-nineteenth century. The text is available as a PDF file from the Download page in the side bar. Distant Writing was previously part of the excellent, authoritative and hugely compendious Atlantic Cable website: all who are interested in telegraphy are recommended to: www.atlantic-cable.com Contributions Comments, questions and corrections are truly welcome; please email: stevenroberts@distantwriting.co.uk
| About the Writer As someone who has worked in communications for many years I have been fascinated by how man and technology have interacted and then how history and organisation have developed in similar cycles over the centuries. It seems that Nothing is New, it is only accellerated! I started to write about the electric telegraph about ten years ago when I assembled a pile of notebooks with small pieces of information drawn from nineteenth century newspapers and magazines. To this I have added many more nuggets of information drawn from works republished on the internet - appropriately the great-grandchild of the electric telegraph. In 2006 inspired (and annoyed) by the lack of historical perspective on the importance of the public telegraph companies in Britain and their contribution to technology, as much as by many errors of fact, I finally got round to putting that research into a single resource. This is the result.
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