1. The Electric & International Telegraph Company

    (Founded 1845, a merger in 1855) including:

•  Electric Telegraph Company (1845) (to Electric & International)

•  Compagnie du Télégraphe Électrique (1846) (an Electric subsidiary line) (Anglo-Belgian)

•  Irish Sub-Marine Telegraph Company (1852) (rights passed to the Electric 1852)

•  International Telegraph Company (1852) (an Electric subsidiary) (Anglo-Dutch) (1855 to Electric)

•  The Isle of Wight Electric Telegraph Company (1852) (for the Electric)

•  The Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company (1859) (for the Electric)

•  The Channel Islands (Electric) Telegraph Company (1859) (for the Electric)

•  London & South-of-Ireland Direct Telegraph Company Limited (1862) (for the Electric)

•  South-Western of Ireland Telegraph Company (1863) (for the Electric)

•  The Scilly Islands Telegraph Company (1869) (for the Electric)

2. The British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company

    (Founded 1850, a merger in 1857) including:

•  British Electric Telegraph Company (1850) (was known as the British Telegraph Company by 1853)  

•  English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company (1851)

•  European & American Electric Type-printing Telegraph Company (1851) (1853 to British)

3. The United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company

    (Founded 1851, active only from 1860)

4. The London & Provincial Telegraph Company

    (Founded 1859 as the District Co.) formerly

•  London District Telegraph Company (1859) (renamed in 1865)

5. The Universal Private Telegraph Company

    (Founded 1861) (with public telegraphs in Scotland and the north-east of England)

6. Bonelli’s Electric Telegraph Company

    (Founded 1861, inactive until 1863) (One public line made, but inactive by 1866)

7. The Economic Telegraph Company

     (Founded 1864) (One public line made, but no public circuits by 1868)

8. Reuter’s Telegram Company

     (Founded 1865) (a foreign news agency and cable-owner)

Anglo-Mediterranean Telegraph Company, 76 Palmerston Buildings, Bishopsgate Street Within, EC (1868)

British Indian Submarine Telegraph Company, 66 Old Broad Street, London, EC (January 1869)

Cape of Good Hope Telegraph Company, 25 Poultry, London EC (1867)

Compagnie du Télégraphe sous Marin, 98 Gracechurch Street, London (September 1850) (see also Submarine Telegraph Company)  

Gamble & Nott’s Patent Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Office, 2 Royal Exchange Buildings (1847) (a showroom) see also Nott & Gamble

General Commercial Telegraph Company, 1 Bond Court, Walbrook, City (1845)

Gisborne & Forde, 6 Duke Street, Adelphi, London, WC (1861) (office of  the telegraph engineers to HM government, Lionel Gisborne and Henry Charles Forde)

Gloucester & Sharpness Electric Telegraph Company, Commercial Road, Gloucester (1863)  
Great Northern Telegraph Company, 7 Great Winchester Buildings, City, EC (1869)

International Ocean Telegraphic Company, 32 Charing Cross, West Strand, WC (1864) (William Rowett’s French cable to Canada)

Irish Channel Submarine Telegraph Company, 15 Great Bell Alley, Moorgate Street, City (1852) (predecessor of the Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland)
Irish Sub-Marine Telegraph Company, 38 Parliament Street, Westminster, and Dublin & Drogheda Railway, Amiens Street, Dublin (1852)
Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company, 64 Atholl Street, Douglas, Isle of Man (1860 and 1863)

Liverpool District Telegraph Company, 95 Islington, Liverpool (1866) 

Mediterranean Electric Telegraph Company, 2 Hanover Square, London W (1859) (John Watkins Brett’s house)

J Reuter trading as ‘S Josaphat’, Continental Telegraph Office, 7 Exchange Buildings, Liverpool (June 1, 1852)

J Reuter trading as ‘S Josaphat’, Continental Telegraph Office, 33 & 34 Exchange Arcade Buildings, Manchester (July 1, 1853)

South Eastern Telegraph Office, 1 South Eastern Arcade, London Bridge, SE (1859)

The components of the largest of the cable concerns, the Eastern Telegraph Company, the Falmouth, Gibraltar & Malta, the Anglo-Mediterranean, the British Indian Submarine, the British Australian and the China Submarine companies, were all located at 66 Old Broad Street, City, EC, by 1870.

Contractors: Binks – Binks & Stephenson. GEC – Glass, Elliot & Co. WTH – W T Henley. IRG – India Rubber, Gutta Percha & Telegraph Works. RSN – R S Newall. Reid – Reid Brothers.  SWS – S W Silver. TCM – Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Co.

Frederick Collier Bakewell (1800-1869) – a scientific writer, inventor and patent agent. His family came from Wakefield, Yorkshire, and established Bakewell & Company, 13 Tavistock Row, Bedford Square, soda-water manufacturers, in the 1820s.  In March 1832 F C Bakewell patented an ingenious “portable apparatus for the production of aerated waters” which continued in production until the 1850s. By the 1840s he was well-known as a writer of books and articles on scientific matters, especially electricity, living at Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, London. In 1847 he was editing a magazine and was in communication with Alexander Bain (q.v.). In 1848 F C Bakewell patented the “copying telegraph” using Bain’s chemical principles to produce the first distant facsimiles of writing and drawings. This was shown to approbation at the Great Exhibition of 1851 but was never used commercially. He latterly continued as a successful writer and commentator on telegraphy, with a sideline in practising as a patent agent.

Edwin Clark (1814-1894) – the elder brother of J Latimer Clark (q.v.). He worked with Robert Stephenson on the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits between Wales and Anglesey for the London & North-Western Railway. He was Chief Engineer to the Electric Telegraph Company from August 1850 until 1854, managing its construction and mechanical works; being retained subsequently as Consultant Engineer. He obtained several patents for improved telegraph apparatus, railway signalling, the Electric company’s first standard pole insulator and for suspending wire. He was also an accomplished hydraulic and dock engineer, to which profession he reverted in the partnership of Clark, Stansfield & Clark.

(Josiah) Latimer Clark (1822-1898) – younger brother of Edwin Clark (q.v.). He was originally a chemist and later a railway surveyor during the Railway Mania of the 1840’s, and worked for Robert Stephenson on the great railway bridge across the Menai Straits. He became Assistant Engineer to the Electric Telegraph Company in August 1850, and succeeded his brother Edwin as Chief Engineer in 1854, responsible for its mechanical works, especially cable-laying, a post he held until 1861 when he became its Consultant Engineer. From that time he was also Engineer to the Atlantic Telegraph Company. He devised improvements in resin coating of underground wires in the 1850’s, the Clark cell for electric batteries, a new insulator and a pneumatic message-transfer system. He went into partnership as a Consulting Engineer with C T Bright (q.v.) from 1861 until 1868. Clark then formed a partnership with Forde and Taylor in that year as cable engineers and together they engineered submarine cables in the Mediterranean, in the Far East, around Africa and across the South Atlantic.

Maria Craig (1823-188?) – Lady Superintendant or ‘Matron’ of female clerks for the Electric Telegraph Company. Mrs Craig, a widow, was born in Dublin in 1823, and lived in Streatham, South London, with her five children, relying on her elder sister, Margaret, to manage her household. Mrs Craig was responsible for recruiting, training and supervising all women télégraphistes, numbering several hundred, employed by the Company from around 1856 when she came to London, until 1868. She personally trained each new female recruit and saw to their welfare. Two of her sons and one of her daughters were to be employed by the Company as clerk operators. She went on to be senior ‘Matron’ with the Post Office Telegraphs, “growing grey in their service”. A pioneer in management.

Robert Valentine Dodwell (1831-190?) – An interesting career; born in Vauxhall, London; a telegraph clerk in Liverpool in 1851, married in 1857; a very active District Manager for the Magnetic Telegraph Company, Manchester, in 1859, rebuilding the circuits of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway and marketing Henley’s dial telegraph; lecturer and writer on telegraphy, 1861-62; engineer to Bonelli’s Telegraph Company, Manchester, in 1863; patentee of insect repellent, 1863; bankrupt in September 1863; commission agent to the Universal Private Telegraph Company, Manchester, July 1864; compiled ‘The Social Code’, a telegraph code book, 1874; managing director of the Oriental Telegram Agency, Leadenhall Street, London, 1875, which used his abbreviating code to correspond with agents in India, China, America, Australia and Europe on behalf of subscribers; electrical engineer, 1876, on the agency’s failure until he died in Vauxhall with his wife and grown-up children in the 1900s.

(Johannes Matthias) Augustus Stroh (1828-1914) – a mechanician and inventor. Born in Frankfurt-am-Main, coming to London in the Exhibition year 1851. Worked for Charles Wheatstone from then until the 1875, making models and manufacturing apparatus; perfecting his universal telegraph in 1863 and his automatic telegraph in 1866. Stroh had workshops at 42a Hampstead Road, London NW in the 1860s, employing fifty-four men and ten boys, then was engineer to the British Telegraph Manufactory until 1881, after which he worked for the Post Office. Like many in telegraphy he was interested in acoustics, devising the disc sound recorder in 1892 and the “phonographic violin” in 1900.

Henry (Edward) Weaver (1825-1893) – One of the most important managers in British telegraphy. Clerk-in-charge at Hull for the Electric Telegraph Company in 1854, he transferred to become managing clerk at The Hague and then the Amsterdam offices of the International Telegraph Company in the Netherlands, rising to the position of secretary to the International company and, simultaneously, District Superintendent for London for the Electric company in Britain in 1856. In January 1864 he became Secretary and Chief Manager to the Electric Telegraph Company, leaving in 1868 to become Secretary of the Indo-European Telegraph Company. In 1871 he became General Manager of the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, latterly he was Managing Director. He also joined the board of the West India & Panama Telegraph Company.  He married in 1853 and had three children, one of which was born in Amsterdam. His eldest daughter was to marry a Hollander.

Charles Samuel West (fl.1840-1865) – telegraph cable engineer. Originally an author, reporter and proprietor of a railway magazine, he advocated india-rubber insulation of electrical wire from 1838. In 1845 he laid the first successful underwater cable, which lasted over fifteen years, in Portsmouth harbour. He gained concessions in England and France along with the Electric Telegraph Company for a circuit from Dover to Calais in 1847, but negotiations were prolonged and the Brett family pre-empted the works. He also successfully laid india-rubber insulated wires in several railway tunnels, including that at Box on the Great Western Railway. Bankrupt as a “manufacturer of insulated wire for electric telegraphs” in July 1850, he became engineer to the Irish Sub-Marine Telegraph Company and several speculative cable concerns. His cables comprised a copper core insulated with india-rubber, protected by a thin cotton and shellac outer, and armoured with plaited iron wire. One such was made to connect England with the Isle of Wight in 1853 for the Electric Telegraph Company. Working with S W Silver & Company (q.v.) in 1859 he perfected the machine for insulating wire with caoutchouc. Known pejoratively as “India-Rubber” West by his peers, he believed that his pioneering of submarine telegraphy was inadequately acknowledged. Another telegraphic mystery.  

Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) – His personality may be summarised; “Sir Charles Wheatstone was small in feature, childlike to a degree, shortsighted and with a wonderful rapid utterance, yet seemingly quite unable to keep pace with an overflowing mind.” Otherwise the reader is referred to ‘Heroes of the Telegraph’ of 1891 by John Munro for a fine biographical article.

Francis Whishaw (1804-1856) – a civil engineer who had minor roles in several railway projects in the 1830s. In 1836 he developed and publicised a hydraulic telegraph, using a pipe filled with water. He wrote the classic description of the railways of Great Britain in 1840. He became secretary to the Royal Society of Arts & Sciences for a short period, where he presented papers on Cooke & Wheatstone’s apparatus and introduced William Siemens to gutta-percha, before joining the Electric Telegraph Company from 1846 until 1848, creating their message department. He established the General Telegraph Company as contractors and engineers in 1849 where he marketed electrical, mechanical, hydraulic and speaking telegraphs, and fire and burglar alarms; becoming a consultant to the Gutta-Percha Company at about the same time. His advice was sought on introducing the telegraph to India in 1849. Although an engineer, Whishaw’s forte was in publicity and lobbying; organising exhibitions, writing articles for the press and public speaking. He wrote widely on electric telegraphy from 1840 until his death, and was an early and vociferous advocate of underground circuits insulated with gutta-percha.

J & T Forster, india rubber and gutta-percha manufacturers, Streatham Common, Surrey. Working in concert with C V Walker, W H Hatcher and the eminent civil engineer, W H Barlow, John and Thomas Forster originated the first successful process for covering copper wire with gutta-percha resin for insulation. This involved hot-pressing together two narrow sheets or fillets of gutta-percha, cowrie gum and sulphur through several rollers, compressing copper wires between them; the fillets being trimmed by the rollers and wound on to reels. It was patented on April 28, 1848, and the rights acquired by the Electric Telegraph Company, used by them and the South Eastern Railway in underground and underwater circuits. Forsters abandoned the cable-making business early in the 1850s when a more efficient process evolved, but continued to be successful in the resin business until the 1930s.  

London Caoutchouc Company, 36, King Street, Cheapside, London with works in Holloway and Tottenham - a ‘patent’ company formed to work Robert William Sievier’s processes for rubberising fabrics in 1836, caoutchouc being the original name for india-rubber. They were large-scale manufacturers of elastic driving bands for machinery, rope for mines, waterproof cloths and garments, and waterproof canvas, as well the first rubber-insulated wire used by Cooke and Wheatstone. It also made the first telegraph “cable” for Cooke in 1841. The Caoutchouc company was superseded in the later 1840s by the Hancock and Macintosh rubber interests, and their patent machinery. Its india-rubber cloth interests seem to have passed to S W Silver & Company of Cornhill, the rubber works in North London passed to and were continued by William Warne & Company.
R S Newall & Company, 130 Strand, London and Gateshead, makers of wire-rope, and then for a period a major, if controversial, manufacturer of wire ‘armouring’ for submarine cables. Newall created the first successful underwater cable for the Submarine Telegraph Company between England and France in 1851. He claimed to have invented wire rope (untrue) and the submarine cable-laying apparatus. Although the first was an enduring success several of the many Newall cables subsequently failed, including those in the Channel Islands and the Levant - apparently due to the light weight of their armour. There were also criticisms of Newall’s financial affairs. The firm left the submarine cable business with the failure of their 1858 Atlantic and Red Sea cables, and with the start of a court case over the sabotage of a competitive cable.  Siemens Brothers acquired the good-will of their telegraphic cable business during 1860, after having been electrical advisors to the firm since 1858; although Newall returned to cable-making briefly in 1870.

Christopher Nickels & Company, 2 Guildford Street, 20 York Road and 17 York Street, Lambeth; and a warehouse at 13 Goldsmith Street, long-standing india-rubber manufacturers and patentees from the early 1830s.  Nickels owned a share of Hancock’s gutta-percha wire-covering machine and provided his first gutta-percha insulated telegraph wire for the South Eastern Railway Company in 1852, in a large quantity; it failed after two years. Nickels then manufactured underground (and, probably, submarine) gutta-percha insulated two core cables for the Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland whilst trading as the ‘Gutta Percha Company of Lambeth’. By 1855 the 17 York Street site in Lambeth (on the river Thames) had become the ‘old’ Electric Telegraph Company’s Stores, when the firm appears to have merged into the original Gutta Percha Company.

S W Silver & Company, 4 Bishopsgate Street, London, EC, and Silvertown – india-rubber manufacturers. The firm was founded in 1840 as waterproofers, making clothing, tents and paulins, mainly for emigrants and travellers. They acquired a new works at North Greenwich in 1852 and subsequently extended their india-rubber interests, becoming involved in electric telegraphy. Silvers’ were the first to manufacture wire insulated with india-rubber in quantity. H A Silver perfected and patented in 1859 the process devised by Charles West in which three thin coverings of warmed, spiral-wound india-rubber were applied to the copper core to create the insulation; as part of their patent Silver’s treated the copper wire with a gum lacquer to prevent any reaction with the india-rubber. The active partners by 1860 were Stephen William Silver and Hugh Adams Silver. John Fuller, who had previously been a junior engineer responsible for the Electric Telegraph Company’s cables in London, was their manufacturing superintendent, telegraph engineer and electrician. The firm became the India Rubber, Gutta Percha & Telegraph Works Company in 1864 (q.v.).

M W Theiler & Sons, 156 Barnsbury Road, Islington – telegraph and scientific instrument makers. Meinrad Wendel Theiler had been employed in managing the Swiss state telegraph workshops. In 1854 he visited London to patent a new type-printing telegraph and stayed to develop an improved American telegraph for the Electric Telegraph Company, which he patented. Encouraged by this Theiler returned with his family in 1861 and set up a manufactory in north London. Here he and his sons, Richard and Meinrad Jnr, produced portable single-needle instruments, American inkers, American embossers, keys and relays, alarms, and galvanometers. The firm flourished and was eventually absorbed into Elliott Brothers in 1891.

Although the promoters lodged a Bill in Parliament to raise £200,000 in April 1851 for a circuit from England to France it was abandoned on June 2, 1851 and the ‘French’ company proceeded without an Act. The second or ‘Belgian’ Submarine Telegraph Company obtained a Royal Charter, an administrative rather than legislative process. They worked as one concern, with continental cable-landing concessions that eventually expired in 1890, when the government acquired its remaining assets for a small sum.

Charter granted on June 13, 1852 – giving limited liability to the shareholders in the British Electric Telegraph Company, changing its name and authorising the laying of cables to Ireland

Thomas Allan’s Patents

Patent 13,352/1850 – electric telegraph

Patent 1,889/1853 – light cable

Edwin Clark’s Patent

Patent 13,336/1850 – metallic-shed insulator

Latimer Clark’s Patent

Patent 2,831/1856 – bell insulator

Charles Shepherd’s Patent

Patent 12,567/1849 – working clocks by electricity

Meinrad Wendel Theiler’s Patents

Patent 1,110/1854 - type-printing telegraph

Patent 2,453/1857 - direct printing telegraph

Patent 2,147/1861 - improved type-printing telegraph

The assets on which the Syndicate depended were S F B Morse’s patents 1,647 of 1840 and 4,453 of 1846. The 1840 patent was used to effect a monopoly of rights to all forms of electric telegraphy, even though the apparatus, the purpose of a patent, was never used. The 1846 patent protected the rights to the American telegraph, with the lever-key, the dot-and-dash marking register and the local relay. None of the three essential elements were devised by the patentee but were “borrowed” from the work of others. For example, the register had been devised and made by Alfred Vail in 1844, who also created the dot-and-dash code that it used.

Morse’s name was attached to no other innovations in electric telegraphy, nor to any useful contributions to science.  

 
The Syndicate was created to make money and not to operate telegraphs. It granted licences to companies and individuals to work the several patents it controlled on a basis of $30 per mile of line and 50% of the stock of the company. It also used its considerable influence in Washington to have the patents renewed for ever longer periods and to gain verdicts in the courts against competitors. Its litigation against Henry O’Reilly (one of its disaffected licensees) and the competitive patents of Royal House and Alexander Bain revealed to the American public a network of agents and interests of mafia-like proportions.

The American apparatus was introduced into Europe on the Hannoversche Staatsbahn, the Hanover state railway, on its marine telegraph between Hamburg and Cuxhaven in July 1848 by Friedrich Clemens Gerke. The Elektro-Magnetische Telegraphen Compagnie, a firm of Americans, replaced an optical system with the electric telegraph. Later Gerke was to adapt the instrument’s cipher to domestic needs, creating “Hamburg Alphabet”, better known in Britain when it was adopted in 1855 as the “European Alphabet”. It was to become the continental or worldwide telegraphic code.

The first public telegraph in Prussia was constructed by Siemens & Halske between Berlin and Cologne in May 1849, replacing the old optical telegraph. The optical and electro-magnetic apparatus worked in concert as the königlich preussischen Telegraphen-Direktion, the Royal Prussian Telegraph Administration. It used Siemens galvanic dial telegraph, devised by M H Jacobi, and resin-insulated underground circuits on this long line. By 1852 these had been replaced by the American telegraph and overhead lines.

The first public telegraph in Russia was also constructed by Siemens & Halske, an underground line laid from St Petersburg to Viborg, Helsingfors and Abo in Finland, completed in June 1855 with galvanic dial telegraphs. The Prussian firm had by then contracted to put St Petersburg in circuit with Reval, Riga, Warsaw, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and Sebastopol, as well as connecting to Prussia at Gumbinnen and Austria at Myslenitz, over many hundreds of miles, an immense undertaking for a single commercial company.

The Electric Telegraph Company also created circuits using Cooke & Wheatstone’s apparatus in Norway and Denmark, alongside of railway lines built by the contractor, Morton Peto, one of its directors, during 1853 and 1854. These were the first telegraphs in Norway.

The electric telegraph for public service, rather than for experimental or railway use, was introduced in Europe in the following order: Britain 1846, Austria 1849, Prussia 1850, Bavaria 1850, Belgium 1851, France 1851, Baden 1851, Holland 1852, Switzerland 1852, Papal States 1853, Sweden 1853, Wurttemberg 1853, Norway 1854, Denmark 1854, Spain 1855, Russia 1856, Greece 1859, Portugal 1861 and Roumania 1863.

The situation regarding the other Italian states prior to 1865, when a unified telegraph authority was imposed, is unclear. According to ‘Annales télégraphiques’ the following are the dates of introduction: Tuscany 1847, Lombardy-Venice (then Austrian) 1850, Duchies of Modena, Massa, Carrara and Lucca January 1852, Sardinia (Turin) April 1852, Parma May 1852, the Two Sicilies (Naples) July 1852, Papal States September 1853, and the Two Sicilies  (Sicily) 1856.

As well as Cooke and Wheatstone, many European countries had their own telegraphic innovators. There were in the late 1840s the short-lived instruments of Foy, Breguet, Siemens, Fardely, Gloesener, Lippens, Kramer and Stockriss, mostly dial telegraphs developed from Wheatstone’s. All of these were to be swept away by the American telegraph, which became the European standard from Portugal to Russia by 1852.

Away from Europe, in British India, the East India Company’s, and latterly the government’s, circuits, and then the Australian states adopted the American telegraph in 1855, and the American “sounder” shortly afterwards. However the thousands of miles of British- owned and built railways in India, and many in Australia, adopted Cook & Wheatstone’s more sophisticated double- and single-needle instruments for traffic control and for internal messaging; just as their iron relatives did in Britain.