a.] A List of Telegraph Companies 1838-68:

1. Electric Telegraph Company 1845
2. General Oceanic Telegraph Company 1845†
3. General Commercial Telegraph Company 1845†
4. General Telegraph Company 1848†
5. British Electric Telegraph Company 1851
6. English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company 1851
7. Submarine Telegraph Company between France and England 1851‡
8. Submarine Telegraph Company between Great Britain and the Continent of Europe 1851
9. European & American Electric Type-Printing Tele-graph Company 1851
10. Ocean Telegraph Company 1852†
11. Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland 1852†
12. Irish Sub-Marine Telegraph Company 1852†
13. Isle of Wight Electric Telegraph Company 1852
14. British Telegraph Company 1853**
15. International Telegraph Company 1853
16. Société du télégraphe électrique Méditerranéen 1854‡
17. Electric & International Telegraph Company 1855**
18. Universal Electric Telegraph Company 1855†
19. Mediterranean Extension Telegraph Company 1856
20. European & American Submarine Telegraph Com-pany 1856†
21. British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company 1857**
22. Atlantic Telegraph Company 1857
23. Gloucester & Sharpness Electric Telegraph Com-pany 1858
24. Levant Submarine Telegraph Company 1858
25. North Atlantic Telegraph Company 1858†
26. South Atlantic Telegraph Company 1858†
27. Poole, Bournemouth & South Coast Printing Tele-graph Company 1859
28. Isle of Man Telegraph Company 1859
29. Channel Islands Telegraph Company 1859†
30. London District Telegraph Company 1859
31. Red Sea & India Telegraph Company 1859†
32. British Transatlantic Telegraph Company 1859†
33. British & Canadian Telegraph Company 1859†
34. United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company 1860
35. Universal Private Telegraph Company 1860
36. Telegraph to India Company 1861†
37. Bonelli’s Electric Telegraph Company 1861†
38. European & Indian Junction Telegraph Company 1861†
39. London & South-of-Ireland Direct Telegraph Com-pany 1862
40. Tavistock, Princetown & Dartmoor Telegraph Company 1862
41. Oriental Telegraph Company 1863†
42. Bodmin, Wadebridge, Padstow, St Columb & New Quay Telegraph Company c.1863
43. Portadown & Gilford Telegraph Company c.1863
44. Whitworth Telegraph Company c.1863
45. Abergavenny & Crickhowell Telegraph Company c.1863
46. Yarmouth & Kingston Telegraph Company c.1863
47. South-Western of Ireland Telegraph Company 1863
48. Glasgow, Cantyre & General Telegraph Company 1864†
49. Globe Telegraph Company 1864†
50. Reuter’s Telegram Company 1865
51. West Highland Telegraph 1865*
52. Economic Telegraph Company 1866†
53. General Private Telegraph Company 1866†
54. Anglo-American Telegraph Company 1866
55. London & Provincial Telegraph Company 1867**
56. Anglo-Mediterranean Telegraph Company 1867
57. Scilly Islands Telegraph Company 1868
58. Orkney & Shetland Islands Telegraph Company 1868
59. Société du câble trans-atlantique Français 1868
60. Jersey & Guernsey Telegraph Company 1868
61. Store Nordiske Telegrafselskab A/S 1868‡
62. Indo-European Telegraph Company 1868 
 

(* a trading title of the Universal Private Telegraph Company)

(** a merger or change of name)
(† failed or abortive companies)

(‡ foreign companies)

This list summarises the companies that operated or obtained an Act of Parliament in the period of this work. Most were incorporated in Britain, although several foreign joint-stock companies have been included where they were participants in the domestic market or were organised from London. It is not complete! The Government reported in 1860 that twenty-eight companies to work electric telegraphs had been formed and that ten were still working in that year; which does not reconcile with this list. A large number of great cable companies were formed in 1869 and 1870.

 

b.] Domestic Telegraph Companies in 1868:
This lists the companies mentioned in the text and an abbreviated evolution and corporate connexions. The Electric, the Magnetic, the United Kingdom, the London & Provincial, the Universal and Reuter’s were appropriated by the Government in 1868.

1. The Electric & International Telegraph Company (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 (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 (1851, active only from 1860)

4. The London & Provincial Telegraph Company (1859 as the District Co.) formerly
• London District Telegraph Company (1859) (renamed in 1865)

5. The Universal Private Telegraph Company (1861) (with public telegraphs in Scotland and elsewhere)

6. Reuter’s Telegram Company (1865) (a foreign news agency and cable-owner)

 
Domestic Underwater Cable Company:

The Submarine Telegraph Company between Great Britain and the Continent of Europe (1854) - a Royal Charter company owning cables to Belgium and latterly to Hanover in Germany and Denmark. It worked in concert with The Submarine Telegraph Company between France and England (1851) (French) which promoted the European Telegraph Co., above, in England, and subsequently was always closely connected with the various incarnations of the Magnetic company.

 

c.] Telegraph Company Addresses
Samples from Directories and Advertisements
Atlantic Telegraph Company, 22 Old Broad Street, EC (January 1858 and 1862)
Atlantic Telegraph Company, 13 St Helen’s Place, Bishopsgate Within, EC (1868)
Bonelli’s Electric Telegraph Company, 69 Lincolns’ Inn Fields, London WC (1862) (a law office)

Bonelli’s Electric Telegraph Company, 7 Angel Court, Throgmorton Street, City, EC, 2a Victoria Street, Manchester, and 2 Dale Street, Liverpool  (1864)

Brett & Little, 140 Holborn Bars (1847) (Brett’s Furnival’s Inn Coffee House & Hotel)

Brett & Little, 3 Furnival’s Inn, London (1848) (a set of showrooms)
British Electric Telegraph Company, Central Offices, Royal Exchange, London (1851)

British Electric Telegraph Company, Exchange Street East, Liverpool (the principal station in 1852)
British Electric Telegraph Company, Central Station, 29½ Royal Exchange, London (1854)
British Telegraph Company, Chief Office, 43 Regent Circus, Piccadilly, London (1855)
British Telegraph Company, Manufactory, 29½ City Road, Finsbury, London (1855)
British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, Chief Office, 2 Exchange Buildings, Liverpool; Offices, 72 Old Broad Street, 30 Cornhill, Royal Exchange (under the Clock Tower) and 43 Regent Circus, Piccadilly (1857)

British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, Manufactory, 46 City Road, Finsbury, London EC (1862)
British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, Central Office, 57 to 59 Threadneedle Street, opposite the Royal Exchange, London EC (1865 & 1868)
Channel Islands Telegraph Company, Founders’ Court, Lothbury (1860)
Channel Islands Telegraph Company, 12–14 Telegraph Street, City, EC (1861)
W F Cooke, patentee of the electric telegraph, 1 Copthall Buildings, City (1845)
Compagnie du Télégraphe Électrique, 74 Montagne de la Coeur, Bruxelles et 1082 Place de Meir, Anvers (1846) (the Electric’s Belgian subsidiary line)

Economic Telegraph Company, 6 Lord’s Chambers, Corporation Street, Manchester (1864)
Electric Telegraph Company, 345 Strand (Chief Office, pro. tem.) (1847)
Electric Telegraph Company, 64 Moorgate Street; and Central Station, Founders’ Court, Lothbury, City (1849)
Electric Telegraph Company, Central Station, Founders’ Court, Lothbury, London (1849 - 1868)
Electric Telegraph Company, Factory, Gloucester Road north, Regent’s Park (1854)
Electric & International Telegraph Company, General Offices, 12 - 14 Telegraph Street, Moorgate Street, EC (1868)
Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland, Secretary’s Office, 2 Moorgate Street, City, and the Telegraph Office, 1 Eden Quay, Dublin (1853)
Electric-Printing Telegraph Office, 29 Parliament Street (Jacob Brett, patentee) (1849) (a showroom)
Electric Telegraph Works (Philip Woodrow, superintendent), 22 Church Row, Limehouse (1845) (next to the Blackwall railway)

English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, 1 North John Street, Liverpool (1853)
English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, Chief Office, 2 Exchange Buildings, Liverpool (1854)
English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, 72 Old Broad Street, London (1854)
English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, 6 College Green, Dublin (1854)
European (& American) Electric Telegraph Company, 30 Cornhill, London (1852) (as the Submarine company)
European & Indian Junction Telegraph Company, 250 Gresham House, Old Broad Street, City (1856)
Gamble & Nott’s Patent Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Office, 2 Royal Exchange Buildings (1847) (a showroom)
General Telegraph Company, 9 John Street, Adelphi (1849) - Whishaw’s Office (a showroom)

General Private Telegraph Company, 4 Blue Boar Court, Manchester (1866)
Globe Telegraph Company, 2 St Anne’s Churchyard, Manchester (1861)
Great Northern Telegraph Company, 7 Great Winchester Buildings, City, EC (1869)

Indo-European Telegraph Company, 16 Telegraph Street, City (1870)
International Telegraph Company, Continental Telegraph Offices, 1 Royal Exchange Buildings, London (1853)
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)

Jersey & Guernsey Telegraph Company, Hill Street, St Helier, Jersey (1870)

Levant Submarine Telegraph Company, 24 Abingdon Street, Westminster, SW (R S Newall’s office) (1860)

Levant Submarine Telegraph Company, 2 Westminster Chambers, Victoria Street, SW (1867)

London & South-of-Ireland Direct Telegraph Company, 7 Broad Street Buildings, City, EC (1862)
London District Telegraph Company, Chief Office, 90 Cannon Street, London EC (1865)
London & Provincial Telegraph Company, 101 Cannon Street, EC (1868) (same address as above, the street renumbered)
Magneto-Electric Telegraph Company, 4 New Broad Street, City (1852) (the first address of the Magnetic Co.)

Malta & Alexandria Telegraph Company, 47a Moorgate Street, EC (1860) (became a Government concern)
Mediterranean Electric Telegraph, 117 Bishopsgate Street, City, and Paris and Turin (1854) (a Société en Commandité incorporated in France) See below
Mediterranean Extension Telegraph Company, 158 Gresham House, Old Broad Street, EC (1862)

North Atlantic Telegraph Company, 61 Moorgate Street, EC (1862) (Shaffner’s America cable via Iceland)

Oriental Telegraph Company, 1 Victoria Street, Westminster, SW (1863) (Bright & Clark’s office)
Red Sea & India Telegraph Company, Offices, 62 Moorgate Street, London EC (1865)
Julius Reuter, 1 Royal Exchange Buildings, London (October 14, 1851)
J Reuter, Continental Telegraph Office, 7 Exchange Buildings, Liverpool (June 1, 1852)
Reuter’s Telegram Company, Offices, 1 Royal Exchange Buildings, London EC (1862)

Reuter’s Telegram Company, 5 Lothbury, EC (1867)
Reuter’s American News office, 2 King Street, Finsbury Square, EC (1862)

Reuter's West End News Office, 9 Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, SW (1862)
Société du câble trans-atlantique Français, Bartholomew House, EC (1868) (an English company)

Société du télégraphe électrique Méditerranéen, rue Richelieu 83, Paris (1853) became:
Société du telégraphe électrique sous-marin de la Méditerranée, rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette 10, Paris (1861)
Scilly Islands Telegraph Company, 6 Old Jewry, City, EC (1869)

South-Western of Ireland Telegraph Company, 23 Old Broad Street, City, EC (1864)

Submarine Electric Telegraph Office (Julius Reuter, agent), 1 Royal Exchange Buildings, City (1853) (alternate title for Reuter’s business)
Submarine Telegraph Company (France & England), 9 Moorgate Street, later 30 Cornhill (1851)
Submarine Telegraph Company between France and England, 10 Place de la Bourse, Paris (1852)
Submarine Telegraph Company between France and England, 10 Place de la Bourse, Paris (and 30 Cornhill) (1854)
Submarine Telegraph Company, 58 Threadneedle Street, London EC (1865) (same as the Magnetic)

Telegraph to India Company, 62 Moorgate Street, City EC (1864)

United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company, 18 Cannon Street, City (1853)
United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company, 101 Gresham House, Old Broad Street, EC (1860)
United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company, Central Offices, 237 & 247 Gresham House, Old Broad Street, EC (1862 - 1868)
Universal Electric Telegraph Company, Offices, 5 Ludgate Hill, London (1853)
Universal Private Telegraph Company, 448 West Strand, W (1859) (i.e. the Electric Telegraph Company’s Charing Cross office)
Universal Private Telegraph Company, 4 Adelaide Street, Strand, W (1861) (i.e. adjacent to the Electric’s Charing Cross office)

Universal Private Telegraph Company, 4 Adelaide Street, Strand, W; and 11 St Vincent Place, Glasgow; 52 Brown Street, Manchester; and Printing Court Build-ings, Akenside Hill, Newcastle (1864)
Watson’s General Telegraph Association, 83 Cornhill, City (marine telegraph) (1841)

This list illustrates the connection between the several companies through their common offices; and particularly the proximity of the International Telegraph Company offices in Royal Exchange Buildings to Julius Reuter, and to Nott & Gamble’s office.

All of the public telegraph companies’ chief offices were adjacent to the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange in the City of London, the financial centre of the country. The Royal Exchange, Royal Exchange Buildings and Gresham House were essentially horizontal blocks of small offices in multiple occupancy.
Post Codes (EC, W, WC, etc) came to London in 1857.

 

d.] Domestic & Foreign Cables
This is a list of underwater cables with British circuits laid between 1850 and 1869, the owning company and the main contractor for armour; the Gutta-Percha Company made virtually all the insulated cores. Immediate failures are not noted.

1851 Dover – Calais STC - 25 miles, RSN, England to France

1852 Hurst Castle – Sconce Point IoW - 1 mile, SWS, England to Isle of Wight
1853 Dover – Ostend STC - 76 miles, RSN, England to Belgium
1853 Port Patrick – Donaghadee EIM - 25 miles, RSN, Scotland to Ireland
1853 Orfordness – Scheveningen ITC - 119 miles, RSN, England to Holland
1853 Tay Estuary ETC - 1 miles, RSN, Scotland
1853 Forth Estuary ETC - 5 miles, RSN, Scotland
1854 Port Patrick – Whitehead BET - 26 miles, RSN, Scotland to Ireland
1854 Holyhead – Howth ETC (duplicated in 1855) - 73 miles, RSN, North Wales to Ireland
1858 Orfordness – Haarlem EIT - 130 miles, GEC, England to Holland
1858 Cromer – Emden STC - 280 miles, GEC England to Hanover
1858 Weymouth – Alderney CIT - 69 miles, RSN, England to Channel Isles
1858 Alderney – Guernsey CIT - 18 miles, RSN, Channel Islands
1858 Guernsey – Jersey CIT - 15 miles, RSN, Channel Islands
1859 Cromer – Heligoland – Tonning STC - 376 miles, GEC, England to Denmark
1859 Folkestone – Boulogne STC - 24 miles, GEC, England to France
1859 Liverpool – Anglesey  MDH - 25 miles, GEC, (marine telegraph)
1859 Point Cranstal – Saint Bees IoM - 36 miles, GEC, England to Isle of Man
1859 Jersey – Pirou STC - 21 miles, GEC, France - Channel Islands
1861 Beachy Head – Dieppe STC - 80 miles, GEC, England to France
1862 Cork Harbour& Blackwater - 5 miles, WTH, (Irish marine telegraph)
1862 Abermawr – Wexford LSI - 63 miles, GEC, South Wales to Ireland
1862 Cape Clear – Greencastle - 2 miles, GEC, (Irish marine telegraph)
1862 Lowestoft – Zandvoort EIT - 130 miles, GEC, England to Holland
1865 South Foreland – Cap Griz Nez STC - 25 miles, IRG, England to France
1866 Lowestoft – Norderney Reuter - 224 miles, TCM, England to Hanover
1866 South Foreland – La Paune STC - 47 miles, WTH, England to Belgium
1866 Valentia – Heart’s Content ATC (two cables) - 3,748 miles, TCM, Ireland to Newfoundland
1868 Newbiggin – Sondervig DNE - 342 miles, RSN, England to Denmark
1869 Peterhead – Egersund GNT - 375 miles, WTH, Scotland to Norway
1869 Lands End – St Mary’s SIT - 27 miles, IRG, England to Scilly Isles

Owners: ATC – Anglo-American Telegraph Co. BET - British Electric Telegraph Co. CIT – Channel Islands Telegraph Co. DNE – Dansk-Norske-Engelske Telegrafselskab. ETC – Electric Telegraph Co. EIT – Electric & International Telegraph Co. EIM - English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Co. GNT – Great Northern Telegraph Co. IoM – Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Co. IoW – Isle of Wight Electric Telegraph Co. ITC – International Telegraph Co. LSI – London & South-of-Ireland Direct Telegraph Co. MDH – Mersey Docks & Harbour Board. Reuter – Reuters Telegram Co. STC – Submarine Telegraph Co. SIT – Scilly Isles Telegraph Co.

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

e.] Personalities – The Company-Men
Cooke and Wheatstone have had several biographers over the years, as have many other scientific innovators to electrical progress. I have here included background detail on some of the minor, unsung characters, and also some not so minor. However, little information exists about many of the most important contributors to electric telegraphy in Britain; James Sealy Fourdrinier, Robert Grimston, Nathaniel John Holmes, Edward Highton, William Reid, George Saward and Henry Weaver, to name the most eligible.

William Andrews (fl.1855-1880) – electrical engineer and later General Manager of the United Kingdom Telegraph Company from 1861. An American, he devised resin-coated-wood insulators for pole telegraphs in 1860 whilst working as Engineer to the Submarine Telegraph Company, and later new galvanic batteries for the United Kingdom company. When the Government took over the domestic companies he became Secretary of the Indo-European Telegraph Company in 1871, and a Director of the West Indian cable companies. More ought to be known about Andrews.

Alexander Bain (1811-1877) – electrician and inventor, he has his own chapter in this work.
John Watkins Brett (1805-1863) – The son of Henry Brett, a London gin distiller and hotel owner. He and his brothers Jacob and Alfred were involved in promoting electric telegraphy from the early 1840s. They obtained several telegraphic patents, and acquired others, including those of the Americans R E House and G Little. However John Watkins Brett became justly famous for his advocacy and successful introduction of submarine telegraphy in England, France, Italy and America. He was promoting companies to further underwater electrical communication as early as the Railway Mania Year of 1845, going on to create the pioneering Submarine Telegraph Company and manage it to success. Brett founded the Atlantic Telegraph Company but died as the first intercontinental cables were being laid.
Jacob Brett (1808-1897) – The younger brother of John Watkins Brett, was an electrical engineer whose name appears on several telegraphic patents in the 1840s and 1850s. His story is unrecorded, but there was “an appeal in favour of pecuniary assistance” for him in 1882.

Charles Tilston Bright (1832-1888) – He was employed by the Electric Telegraph Company in their electrical department for five years, before joining the British Telegraph Company for a short period. He became Engineer to the Magnetic Telegraph Company, as it then was, in 1852 and remained until 1860 inventing, among other devices, the Bell telegraph. After forming a partnership with Edwin Clark (q.v.) in 1861 he remained as Consultant Engineer to the Magnetic company until 1868. His achievements for the Magnetic included the first successful Irish cable (after two previous attempts) in 1852 and his acoustic Bell telegraph was widely used in its circuits from 1855 onward. He was also, and famously, Engineer to the Atlantic Telegraph Company from 1856 and contributed to the success of the laying of the Atlantic cable in 1865. He was Consulting Engineer to and promoter of the early cables in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and the West Indies between 1861 and 1873 and may be regarded as the father of the intercontinental cable. Bright was Member of Parliament for Greenwich between 1865 and 1868, and was knighted in 1858.

Edward Brailsford Bright (1831-1913) – The older brother of C T Bright, he was also an electrical engineer, and was Secretary and General Manager of the Magnetic Telegraph Company in Liverpool from 1851 until 1868. Latterly he was an historian of the telegraph industry.
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. Engineer to the Electric Telegraph Company from August 1850 until 1860. He obtained several patents for improved telegraph apparatus and for suspending wire. He was also an accomplished hydraulic and dock engineer. 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.
(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 as Engineer in 1860, a post he held until 1870. He devised improvements in resin coating of underground wires in the 1850’s, the Electric company’s first standard pole insulator, the Clark cell for electric batteries, and a pneumatic message-transfer system. Subsequently he was engineer to the intercontinental cable companies.

William Fothergill Cooke (1806-1879) – John Monro provided a concise biography of him in ‘Heroes of Telegraphy’ in 1891 to which all are recommended. Latimer Clark summarised in his obituary; “none but those who were engaged in the early struggle of the English telegraphists know the energy, determination and patience” of W F Cooke.

George Edward Dering (1831-1911) - Apparently tutored by the telegraphic pioneer Henry Highton (q.v.) at Rugby School, he was a landowner with an estate at Lockleys, Welwyn, England, and was an inventing dilettante. He acquired twenty patents in Britain between 1850 and 1881 relating to telegraphy, chemistry, iron- and brick- making. His single needle telegraph of 1850 was used experimentally after 1852 on some railways, by the Bank of England and by the Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland. Dering developed in 1853 theories that were said to anticipate radio transmission, although none of his other telegraphic inventions were successful.
Robert Grimston (1816-1884) – Most noted as a gifted amateur sportsman, excelling in cricket between 1833 and 1855, as well as being a boxer, at Harrow School, Oxford University and with the Marylebone Cricket Club, Grimston abandoned the practice of law to join the board of the Electric Telegraph Company in 1852. He succeeded Robert Stephenson as Chairman on his death in 1859 and remained so until 1868. Latterly the guiding management personality for the Electric company, he joined the board of the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1867, and was Chairman of the Indo-European Telegraph Company from 1868; remaining until his own death in 1884. Grimston had represented the Electric’s interests on domestic cable companies’ and other boards before the Government took over. Little is known about this important individual.
William Henry Hatcher (1821 – 18??) – professional manager, civil engineer and telegraph patentee. After a period at King’s College, London, Wheatstone’s campus, he was employed by the Electric Telegraph Company as Secretary on its formation until1 1848. He joined the board of the British Telegraph Company when it was created in 1850. He encouraged the Hancock family, then developing india-rubber, to use gutta-percha as a cable insulator in 1847. He also patented an early dial telegraph and the mercury trembler switch. Hatcher wrote widely on engineering and technical matters in the late 1840s and early 1850s.

William Thomas Henley (1814-1882) – electrician. From being a maker of electrical apparatus he introduced the magneto-electric telegraph without galvanic batteries and pioneered underground cables. He patented a wide range of telegraphic apparatus and tools; metallic troughs, pole insulators, chemical telegraphs, improvements in magneto-electric machines and, latterly, magneto- and galvanic-dial telegraphs for private circuits. From being an instrument maker in the early 1840s Henley became a major telegraph contractor erecting Cooke & Wheatstone lines for the South Eastern Railway in 1846. He was the main promoter of the English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company in 1850. Henley provided materials for the Magnetic company and later for the United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company. In the 1860s his firm was manufacturing galvanometers to his design in quantity, as well as military telegraphs for the Army. He expanded his equipment factory into a joint-stock company for producing electrical and submarine cable equipment in 1868. Henley was an inventor not a manager; the works only flourished after he had left them in 1876. Edward Highton (1817-1859) – an electrician and company promoter, along with his father, the Reverend Henry Highton, and son Edward, Jr. Henry Highton devised the gold-leaf telegraph. His son Edward patented a simplified, inexpensive needle telegraph using keys (tappers) rather than commutators, and made several innovations in overhead wire telegraphy, as well as being an early advocate of resin-insulated subterranean circuits. Edward Highton, having been a civil engineer, was telegraph superintendent of the London & North-Western Railway between 1846 and 1848. The Hightons founded the British Electric Telegraph Company to work their patents in 1850 but were disappointed by its slow growth and sold-out to others. Edward Highton’s single-needle telegraph was one of the most widely used in Britain; but the family’s contribution to telegraphy remains largely unrecognised.
Nathaniel John Holmes (fl. 1847-1883) – an electrical engineer. He was Manager of the Electric Telegraph Company’s Central Telegraph Station in 1847 having designed its electrical circuitry, leaving in 1848. Holmes became one of principal electrical engineers in domestic and submarine telegraphy in the 1860s, working closely with Charles Wheatstone and the American navigator and inventor, Matthew Maury, in London. For Maury he developed and patented electrically-detonated torpedoes for the Confederate States. Holmes was electrical engineer to the Universal Private Telegraph Company, to many domestic cable companies and later became engineer to the Great Northern Telegraph Company of Copenhagen. In the 1870s he formed the “Holmes Marine Life Protection Association” to market air horns and signal lights. Always interested in acoustics, he was in the 1870s famous for his organ music.
William Henry Preece (1834-1913) – an electrical engineer, from submarine electrician of the Electric Telegraph Company his first post of authority was as Telegraph Superintendent of the London & South-Western Railway between 1860 and 1870. He developed an electrical railway signalling system there. In 1870 Preece initially became the superintendent of and then shortly after was appointed the chief engineer of the Post Office telegraphs. Although he did little to advance technology in that job Preece’s lasting claim to fame was his work at the end of his life with Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless telegraphy.
William Reid (fl.1836-1860) – a philosophical and scientific instrument maker whose firm dated from 1820, and the first ever telegraph contractor in Britain. He constructed many of the early instruments for Cooke and Wheatstone, and subsequently for the Electric company, becoming a major line-building contractor in the early days of both the Electric and Magnetic companies. He was involved with the laying of the first submarine telegraph cables across the Channel and patented several widely-used improvements in subterranean cable-laying to protect the resin insulated wires; his firm continuing in business as electrical instrument makers until 1922. His history and that of his very substantial telegraph contracting company is obscure.  

(John) Lewis Ricardo (1812–1862) - Son of the financier, Jacob Ricardo, and nephew of the economist, David Ricardo. An athlete in his youth he intended to join the Army but the early death of his father caused Lewis Ricardo to take over the family mercantile firm with his brother Samson. He became Member of Parliament for Stoke-upon-Trent, an industrial constituency, as a Liberal in 1841; a seat he retained until his death. Ricardo was an active Free Trader, campaigning for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts that restricted trade. As well as being Chairman of the Electric Telegraph Company for over ten years he was a director of the North Staffordshire Railway, the Norwegian Trunk Railway, the Metropolitan Railway and the London & Westminster Bank. He was fortunate to inherit, through his wife’s family, a large estate in Scotland. When he resigned as Chairman of the Electric the staff presented him with one thousand books for his library in recognition of his stewardship of the company. Then, when he died in 1862 after an eight month illness, the offices of the Electric, Magnetic and District Telegraph Companies closed for a day in commemoration.
The Electrician magazine was to write in 1862; “There can be no question that it was Mr Ricardo who succeeded in establishing the electric telegraph on a firm and successful footing in this country”.
George Saward (180?-1877) – professional manager. He was Secretary (business manager) successively to the British Telegraph Company, the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company and to the Atlantic Telegraph Company. The success of these concerns owes much to the determination of Saward; another unsung stalwart of telegraphy.
Cromwell Fleetwood Varley (1828-1883) – Electrician. Born in Kentish Town, London, to a family of artists and engineers. The family were of the Sandemanian spiritualist sect, of the same congregation as Michael Faraday. He joined the newly-founded Electric Telegraph Company in 1846, becoming Electrician for the London region by 1852 and for the entire Company by 1861. He was appointed on the advice of W F Cooke. Varley was appointed to the Board of Trade committee to investigate the failure of the first Atlantic cable in 1858, which led to his appointment as honorary Chief Electrician to the Atlantic Telegraph Company, as well as to the Electric company. Varley devised several major electrical improvements: the ‘killing’ of wire, removing bad parts and preventing springing; perfecting the ‘loop test’ - the localisation of faults in submarine cables; and the ability to make cables “self-repairing”; inventing the double coil relay, the translating (relay) system for very long distance traffic, as well as, more prosaically, the Company’s last standard insulator. The “Varley Unit” (c. 23.5 ohms) was the Company’s measurement of electrical resistance. He was long associated with Charles Wheatstone. Varley was an astute businessman and he latterly went into partnership with William Thomson and Fleeming Jenkin to develop their telegraphic patents, which proved highly profitable.
His brother Samuel Alfred Varley (1834-1921) was employed as electrical engineer by the Electric Telegraph Company from 1852 to 1861. He devised the chronopher for accurate time-transmission, and made many other electrical innovations.
Charles Vincent Walker (1812-1882) – Electrician to the South Eastern Railway Company from 1845 until his death in 1882. Prior to this he had been a member of the experimental London Electrical Society from 1838, becoming secretary to that group in 1843. He was editor of the short-lived ‘Electric Magazine’ in 1845 and 1846. With the South Eastern Railway he made several improvements in Cooke & Wheatstone’s instruments, in railway signal telegraphy and in transmitting time-signals. In January 1849 he laid a two-mile lightweight gutta-percha insulated submarine cable, the first “ocean” cable, off a steamer from Dover into the English Channel. C V Walker was one of the few involved in the new industry to realise the need for a public record of its achievements, co-operating fully with journalists and historians.

Charles Samuel West (fl.1840-1865) – telegraph cable engineer.  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. 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 including one in 1848 to cross the English Channel. Working with S W Silver & Company he perfected a machine for insulating wire with caoutchouc. Known 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.

 

f.] Telegraphic Suppliers 1836 - 1870

There were relatively few specialist suppliers of telegraphic materials, apparatus, insulators, and so on, in this period. This is a fairly complete list:

Alexander Bain & Company, 43 Old Bond Street, London – This was the showroom for Bain’s electric clocks in 1852 and 1853; from these premises he offered private telegraphs with single-needle instruments. Bain had previously manufactured telegraphic apparatus at 11 Hanover Street, Edinburgh, between 1844 and 1847. He reportedly later had offices in Old Broad Street, City; but in 1860, just before he emigrated to America, he was living in Perceval Street, Clerkenwell Green, among the clock- and instrument-makers.

Joseph Bourne & Son, 126 London Wall & No 4 Wharf, south side, Paddington Basin, London, and Denby Pottery, Derbyshire – stone bottle and jar manufacturers. They were one of earliest, largest and most enduring makers of stoneware insulators for the telegraph industry, commencing in this from before 1850. Patentees of the three-chamber kiln for stonewares, most notable for making bottles for blacking, inks, ginger beer; as well as teapots and jugs, in large volumes.  
British Telegraph Manufactory, 172 Great Portland Street, London W, later 374 Euston Road, London NW – a partnership formed to manufacture Charles Wheatstone’s universal telegraph, automatic telegraph, exploder, clock and other instruments in 1870, as well as his original magnet-and-bell signal. It initially took over the workshops of Cornelius Ward, a renowned maker of musical wind instruments, before moving to the Euston Road in 1879. As the Government appropriated the universal telegraph its principal product was Wheatstone’s Magnetic Clock. It became a joint-stock company in 1874 with a capital of £30,000; Wheatstone owning 1,010 of the 3,000 £10 shares on which £5 10s was paid-up. Latterly it produced the Gramme dynamo-electric machine and varieties of telephones. The manufactory closed in 1881. Robert Sabine, to be Wheatstone’s son-in-law and executor, was manager, having been employed in Siemens & Halske’s factories in Berlin since 1860, and Augustus Stroh, was its engineer.

Elliott Brothers, 268 High Holborn, London - Around 1804 William Elliott opened a scientific instrument shop in London. The firm became Elliott Bros. in 1853, and survived as a joint-stock company until 1966. Elliott Bros. supplied the Admiralty, Ordnance, India Board, and Board of Trade. William Elliott had specialized in drawing instruments. Elliott Bros. offered a wide range of mathematical, optical, and philosophical apparatus. After absorbing the firm of Watkins & Hill, in 1857, they increasingly focused on electrical instruments. 
W M Foxcroft’s Telegraph Case Manufactory, 54 Compton Street, Clerkenwell. Single and double needle instrument cases, disc cases, Morse boards and Bell cases in stock. Also teak clock cases. This is a small example of the division of labour in mid-nineteenth century technology.
Glass, Elliot & Company, East Greenwich, London, were initially created as Heimann & Küper, Grand Surrey Canal Basin, Camberwell, manufacturers of wire rope, in 1841 to work the patent of John Baptist Friedrich Wilhelm Heimann. As Heimann was a merchant in partnership with John George William Küper, it is likely that the patent for “untwisted wire rope” was a communication from Germany. They were one of the first manufacturers of wire rope in Europe, however the firm was declared insolvent in November 1846. New capital to continue the business was then provided by George Elliot and Richard Atwood Glass. It then traded as Wilhelm Küper & Company, with wire rope works still at Grand Surrey Canal Basin, Camberwell. Just after the Great Exhibition of 1851 the firm became Glass Elliot & Company, 115 Leadenhall Street, City, with works at Camberwell and new premises at Morden Wharf, East Greenwich, as a partnership between Richard Atwood Glass, Ralph Glass and George Elliot. It began to cover the resin-insulated conducting wire for submarine telegraph cables with the ‘armour’ of iron wire in 1854, starting with a circuit from Denmark to Sweden. In the same year it undertook to make the long cables of French Mediterranean Telegraph Company of J W Brett. The cables it subsequently armoured proved to be remarkably long-lasting, not least because it introduced anti-corrosive compounds to coat the finished cable during the later 1850s. The firm merged with the Gutta-Percha Company in 1864 to form the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company; Richard Glass became its managing director.

Gutta-Percha Company, High Street, Stratford, then 18 Wharf Road, City Basin, London. Founded on February 4, 1845, proprietors of the patent machinery to coat wire with resin, which they acquired of Charles Hancock. In 1849 it supplied Siemens & Halske with hundreds of miles of wire insulated with “sulphuretted gutta-percha” for the Prussian Government telegraph lines. It had a monopoly on insulating underwater cables until the 1860s when vulcanised india-rubber was applied for a period by other concerns. The Gutta Percha Company manufactured a huge range of resin products, not just covering for telegraph wires, including “pump buckets and valves, tubing for conveying messages (Whishaw’s principle), and for water, gas, oil, &c., driving bands, soles for boots and shoes, bowls, buckets, picture frames, brackets, mouldings, surgical instruments, vases, cups, inkstands, balls, &c.” Its manager in its early years was Charles Bewley who, it is claimed, fraudulently displaced the Hancock family interests to acquire the whole company. The Hancocks went on to found the neighbouring West Ham Gutta-Percha Company; the family were anyway better known and far more successful in the rubber industry devising most of the common techniques and equipment, including the ‘masticator’ and ‘vulcanising’, before merging with the legendary Macintosh to become the competitors in Britain of the Goodyear interests. The Gutta-Percha Company’s chief personality in the 1850s was its superintendent, Samuel Statham. On his death in 1861 he was replaced by John Chatterton, whose Chatterton’s Compound was to be vital in preserving underwater cables.
W T Henley’s Telegraph Works Company, 27 Leadenhall Street, London EC, and North Woolwich (next to Silvertown), London - A joint-stock company succeeding William Thomas Henley’s smaller works in the Minories in Stepney and his larger instrument factory at St John Street Road, Clerkenwell, all in London. William Thomas Henley was an electrician, telegraph patentee and company promoter from the 1850s. He contracted for building overhead and underground lines for the South Eastern Railway and then for the Magnetic, London District and United Kingdom Telegraph Companies. The works commenced at Enderby’s Wharf, East Greenwich, in 1857 and moved to North Woolwich in 1859. By the latter year Henley had constructed 5,000 miles of underground wire and 280 miles of submarine cable. The works manufactured instruments, insulators, metallic pipes and cables, contracting to build public and private circuits, and became a joint-stock company in 1874. The company was to become a leading maker and layer of submarine cables until it failed in 1876. The firm was reconstructed and continued to prosper under the same title well into the next century.
Hooper’s Telegraph Works Company, 31 Lombard Street, London EC, and Millwall. William Hooper improved vulcanised india-rubber in 1859 and applied it to cable insulation in 1870, when he founded his cable-making company. Hooper’s was a successful insulator of oceanic cables, working latterly with the Great Northern company in Europe and China in the 1870s and 1880s.
India Rubber, Gutta-Percha and Telegraph Works Company, 100 Cannon Street, City, and Silvertown. Founded in 1864, a joint-stock company, it was an opportunist merger of several firms in the rubber and gutta percha trade; not all connected with the telegraph industry. It included the original patentees of the wire-coating machine and their West Ham Gutta-Percha Co, and was led by Stephen William Silver. S W Silver & Company, of 66 Cornhill, City, founded by Stephen Winckworth Silver as makers of rubber-coated waterproof garments since the 1840s, gave their name to the company town in east London. Silver & Co had previously patented and provided caoutchouc insulation for the aerial cables of the Universal company, the caoutchouc insulation for the Southern Irish cable and patent “ebonite”, vulcanised india-rubber, insulators in the early 1860s. The India-Rubber Company became an important supplier of insulation to the international submarine cable industry during the nineteenth century. It became British Tyre & Rubber in the 1930s and still survives (just).

Henry Izant & Company, 408½ Oxford Street, London and 24 Grosvenor Place, Queen Street, Pimlico. Telegraph Engineers, established in 1850, makers of all manner of electrical instruments, including detectors, American printers, double-needle, single-needle, and bell telegraphs, batteries, poles, arms, insulators, wire, brackets, shackles, tools and other stores. Izant was the principal maker of Spagnoletti’s railway telegraph.
London Caoutchouc Company, 36, King Street, Cheap-side, London - 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. 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.
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 - apparently due to the light weight of their armour. The firm left the submarine cable business with the failure of the 1858 Atlantic and Red Sea cables. Siemens Brothers acquired the good-will of their telegraphic cable business during 1860; although Newall returned to cable-making briefly in 1870.
William Reid & Company, 25 University Street, London, makers of scientific instruments from 1820, who became telegraph engineers, manufacturers of telegraph instruments, underground troughs, and so forth, in 1836 - the oldest telegraphic engineering firm, and one of the largest such, in Britain. The firm manufactured the initial commercial instruments for W F Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, subsequently providing equipment for the Electric, European, Submarine, Magnetic and other telegraph companies in Britain. Reid also manufactured electric clocks and chemical telegraphs to Alexander Bain’s patents. The firm had become Reid Brothers by 1862, comprising William Jnr, James and Robert Nichol Reid, prospering as electrical engineers for another sixty years. The firm had works in several locations, concentrating eventually at 12 Wharf Road, City Road, London NW, manufacturing electrical instruments and equipment in large quantities until they failed in January 1922.  
John Sandys’ Electric Telegraph Works, 72 Upper Whitecross Street, London, a maker of electrical instruments from c.1850 until 1862. Sandys was one of the first instrument suppliers to concentrate on telegraphy, employing fifty to sixty men in manufacturing clocks, needle telegraphs, time-transmitters, galvanometers, batteries and wire work. More needs to be known of him.

Siemens Brothers, 3 Great George Street, Westminster SW and Greenwich, London, telegraph engineers and contractors. This partnership was the British arm of the Prussian electrical firm of Siemens & Halske who had pioneered the telegraph in Europe since 1849 and introduced gutta-percha insulation into Prussia, Denmark and the smaller German states. On the failure of its gutta-percha insulation system in 1851 the firm was excluded from the Prussian market for over ten years and from then concentrated on its works in Britain and Russia. In these countries it successfully introduced their improved American ‘writer’, their dial telegraphs, relays and current-reversing keys; in Germany its business was confined to water-metering equipment. Starting in London as an agency in 1851 represented by William Siemens, it became a joint-stock manufacturing firm as Siemens, Halske & Company in 1858. It latterly went into submarine cable works, which Halske thought too risky and the firm was reorganised as Siemens Brothers in 1865. The firm in the period described had disputes with the Elkingtons, M H Jacobi, Wheatstone, the Hancocks and others over electro-plating, telegraphic and insulation patents and origination of ideas. Siemens Brothers became involved in steel-making as well as having immense successes in electrical equipment and cable-making in Britain until 1935. 
Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company, 54 Old Broad Street, City, and its wire-core works at Wharf Road, London, and armour works at East Greenwich – a joint-stock company, a merger of the Gutta-Percha Company and Glass, Elliot & Company on March 17, 1864. This company became manufacturers and layers of the majority of the world’s oceanic submarine cables, totalling 250,000 miles, commencing with the Atlantic cables of 1865-6, when it provided much of the capital for the near-bankrupt Anglo-American Telegraph Company. It survived until 1935 as TELCON.

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 and developed 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, alarums, and galvanometers. The firm flourished and was eventually absorbed into Elliott Brothers in 1891.

Tupper & Company, Galvanized Iron Works, 6 Berkeley Street, Broad Street, Birmingham, and at Limehouse, Regent’s Canal, London. Formed by Charles William Tupper in 1844 as the ‘Galvanized Iron Company’ with offices at 3 Mansion House Street, London, to work a patent protecting iron plate and iron wire with a zinc coating. W F Cooke was a partner-shareholder. Tupper & Co were the original manufacturers of galvanized iron wire for telegraphy, and continued to do so for several decades. In the 1860s the London office was at 61A Moorgate Street, City. C W Tupper was to be a founding director of the Atlantic Telegraph Company.
William Marston Warden & Company, 27 Great George Street, Westminster SW and Edgbaston Street, Birmingham - electric telegraph contractors, manufacturers of wire, instruments, batteries and all kinds of telegraphic apparatus and stores. Latimer Clark and John Muirhead Jnr were the firm’s technical advisors. Cited here as a typical general supplier of the 1860s.

Watkins & Hill, 5 Charing Cross, London - scientific and philosophical instrument makers. Established in 1747, by the 1830s it was a partnership between Francis Watkins and William Hill who both died in 1847, leaving their workshops to be managed for their families by Abraham Day. Watkins & Hill made the experimental models of Wheatstone’s early needle and dial telegraphs in their small workshop of between four and six craftsmen. In addition the firm made and sold all manner of optical and electrical apparatus, miniature steam engines, hydraulic presses, magneto-electric machines, theodolites and cameras, utilising nearly sixty outworkers or sub-contractors. They were taken over by Elliott Brothers in 1857, who continued and expanded their electrical and magnetic instrument business.
Welch & Berthan, Eden Works, 306 Euston Road, London NW – electricians, telegraph engineers and contractors. Manufacturers of dial telegraphs as well as electric bells for domestic and engine purposes, electric bells to protect against thieves for doors, windows, gates and closets self-acting against burglars, ringing secretly with secret switches, and electric thermometers against fire or frost. This seems to be a typical middle-sized firm that also supplied iron piping, brass work and bicycle velocipedes in the 1860s.
West Ham Gutta-Percha Company, Abbey Road, West Ham, Stratford, Essex, and then, from 1858, West Street, Smithfield, London. Manufacturers of telegraph wire covered with gutta-percha using Charles Hancock’s patent wire-covering machine of 1848, as well a range of gutta-percha products. It was formed when Hancock left the original Gutta-Percha Company. John Branscombe was manager from 1856. It eventually became a component of Silver’s Telegraph Works Company when that firm was created in 1864. 

This list of the major telegraphic suppliers is drawn from contemporary articles and advertisements up to 1870. Incidentally, the major potters in England all produced earthenware or ‘porcelain’ insulators for the telegraph companies.

 

g.] Telegraph Companies in Great Britain incorporated by Special Act of Parliament – this is a complete list, including the intercontinental cables, from official records of Parliament contained in the Index to the Statutes up to 1871 with additional commentary by the writer and explanations of obvious omissions. The necessity for Special Acts in forming companies is explained in detail in Appendix m;

Anglo-American Telegraph Company
(see Atlantic Telegraph Company)
Atlantic Telegraph Company
Incorporation of Co. 20 & 21 Vic. cap. cii 1857
Preference Capital 21 & 22 Vic. cap. cxlviii 1858
Borrowing Powers 22 & 23 Vic. cap. xxiii 1859
Additional Capital 30 & 31 Vic. cap. xxviii 1867
Dissolution of Company and merger with Anglo-American
33 & 34 Vic cap. xcix 1870
A company formed to lay the cable between Ireland and Newfoundland: its several Acts primarily affected its ability to raise additional capital. Its cable rights were transferred subsequently to the circuits financed and laid by the Anglo-American company.
Bonelli’s Electric Telegraph Company
Acquisition and working of patents
24 & 25 Vic. cap. xcii 1861
Powers of Co., &c. 26 & 27 Vic. cap ccxii 1863
A domestic company formed to work Gaetano Bonelli’s printing telegraph, which though then inactive, was appropriated by the Government under the Telegraph Acts.
British & Canadian Telegraph Company
Incorporation 22 & 23 Vic. cap. cvi 1859
Further Powers 29 & 30 Vic. cap. xciv 1866
A company formed to lay the so-called “Northern Line” to America in a chain of cables from the mainland of Britain to the mainland of Canada by way of the Orkney & Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland. It was rendered superfluous by the success of the Atlantic Telegraph Company’s lines of 1866.
British Electric Telegraph Company
Regulation, 13 & 14 Vic. cap. lxxxvi 1850
Working of patents, &c. 16 &17 Vic. cap. clix 1853
A domestic company formed to purchase and work the patents of Edward Highton; it altered its title to the British Telegraph Company on receiving a Royal Charter in 1853. It united with the European company in 1853, and with the Magnetic company in 1857 to create the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company. As the Joint-Stock Limited Liability Acts from 1855 generally regulated capital powers no further Special Acts were required.
Economic Telegraph Company
Re-incorporation and powers, 29 & 30 Vic. cap. clxxxv 1866
A company re-incorporated from a previous, abortive registration. It did not function but was still acquired under the Telegraph Acts as a possible competitor.
Electric Telegraph Company
Formation, &c.
9 & 10 Vic. cap. xliv 1846
14 & 15 Vic cap. lxxxvi 1851
(both repealed by the 1853 Act)
Additional Powers 16 & 17 Vic. cap. cciii 1853
17 & 18 Vic. cap. cciii 1854
Consolidation of stock with the International Telegraph Co.’s capital stock
18 & 19 Vic. cap. cxxiii 1855
The original and by far the largest domestic telegraph company, formed to work the master patents of Cooke & Wheatstone, by which it had a monopoly of public telegraphy between 1845 and 1851. The subsequent Special Acts were to increase and reorganise its capital-raising powers. The 1851 Act divided its £100 shares into four £25 shares. The Act of 1855 authorised a merger with its foreign subsidiary, the International Telegraph Company, which had cables to Europe.
Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland
Formation, &c.
15 & 16 Vic. cap. cxxiii 1853
A company, unconnected with the original Electric concern, formed to make a line from Dumfries in Scotland to Belfast and Dublin in Ireland. Although it completed many of its land lines its underwater cable failed and it was wound-up in 1856, the works being abandoned.
(Note: the coincidental “chapter” numbers for the above two companies’ 1853, 1854 and 1855 Acts are just that, coincidences! It confused the compiler of the Index to the Statutes as well as this writer)
European & American Electric Printing Telegraph Company
Incorporation, &c. 14 & 15 Vic. cap. cxxxv 1851
A domestic company ostensibly formed to acquire and work the patents owned by Jacob Brett (i.e. the printing telegraph of Royal Earl House). It was in fact a creation of the Submarine Telegraph Company between England and France, a French concern having the cable concession for France, to allow it to connect its cables with lines to British cities and towns. Its capital and business was acquired by the British Telegraph Company in 1853.
European & Indian Junction Telegraph Company
Incorporation, &c. 20 & 21 Vic. cap. xc 1857
The sole foreign overland, rather than underwater cable, telegraph company authorised by Parliament was formed to connect planned (but never laid) submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea at Seleucia across the Ottoman Levant to the East India Company’s cables in the Persian Gulf at Kornah. The Special Act allowed a subsidy from the Treasury. There was an abortive railway covering the same route and it did not build its line either.
Globe Telegraph Company
Powers 27 & 28 Vic. cap. cl 1864
The Globe was an abortive domestic concern formed to work Henry Wilde’s electro-magnetic dial apparatus. It was unrelated to John Pender’s Globe Telegraph & Trust Company of 1873, a long-lasting investment vehicle for financing foreign cables.
International Telegraph Company
See Electric Telegraph Company
Magnetic Telegraph Company
Incorporation, &c. 14 & 15 Vic. cap. cxviii 1851
A domestic company formed to acquire and work the patents of W T Henley; it subsequently acquired other patents, particularly those owned by C T Bright. It altered its title on receiving a Royal Charter in 1852 to the English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company. It laid the first domestic cable between Britain and Ireland in 1853. It merged with the British Telegraph Company in 1857 to form the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, the country’s second largest domestic company, and the principal advocate of submarine telegraphy.
Red Sea & India Telegraph Company
Incorporation 22 & 23 Vic. cap. iv 1859
Amendment of preceding Act
24 & 25 Vic. cap. iv 1861
Arrangements with Treasury 25 & 26 Vic. cap. xxxix 1862
A cable company formed to lay a series of inshore submarine wires from Suez around Aden to the Persian Gulf, connecting the British governments’ Malta and Alexandria cable with India. Its Special Acts allowed a subsidy of the Treasury. The cables failed after a short period in 1861; as the circuits had actually worked for a period the Act compelled the subsidy to continue even though the circuit was dead, causing a minor political scandal.
Submarine Telegraph Company
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 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 assets.
United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company
Purchase of Patents 14 & 15 Vic. cap. cxxxviii 1851
Power to carry on business
25 & 26 Vic. cap. cxxxi 1862
A domestic company originally formed to acquire and work the patents of Thomas Allan; it was dormant for ten years until revived in 1861, when it abandoned, without use, Allan’s apparatus for the American telegraph, which it continued to use in many of its circuits to the end. It famously adopted the type-printing telegraph of David Hughes in 1862 for its longest, busiest lines. Vigorous opposition from the existing companies required a second Special Act for it to lay wires alongside of public roads without challenge.
Universal Private Telegraph Company
Incorporation, &c. 24 & 25 Vic. cap. lxi 1861
A domestic company formed to acquire and work patents granted to Charles Wheatstone and to use such apparatus to connect private subscribers. It had powers to work public telegraphs so was appropriated by the Government.

h.] Telegraph Companies in Great Britain incorporated by Royal Charter on the advice of the Board of Trade and the Colonies

The charter allowed these companies joint-stock limited liability for their capital but few powers within Britain.

The Submarine Telegraph Company between Great Britain and the Continent of Europe
Charter granted on April 14, 1851 – for the cable between England and Belgium
The English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company
Charter granted on April 5, 1852 – primarily altering the name of the Magnetic Telegraph Company
The Irish Sub-Marine Telegraph Company
Charter granted on May 15, 1852 – for a cable between North Wales and Ireland. The hyphen is deliberate
The British Telegraph Company
Charter granted on June 13, 1852 – giving limited liability to the shareholders in the British Electric Telegraph Company and changing its name
The International Telegraph Company
Charter also granted on June 13, 1852 – for the cable between England and Holland

 

i.] Government Acts affecting the Telegraphs

7 & 8 Vic. cap. lxxxv 1844
Clauses in this Act obliged railways companies to allow access to and permit laying of electric telegraphs alongside of their lines, with priority for Government service, subject to payment; otherwise to treat all public messages over these circuits on equal terms.
Enacted before the creation of telegraph companies, until 1863 this was the only legislation affecting telegraphy. Its only actual affect was to compel the companies to carry Government messages in emergency; but the state had to pay for the service, the cost of which, apparently, came as a shock.
Telegraph Act, 1863
Regulating powers and works 26 & 27 Vic. cap. cxii 1863
This Act applied to all future and existing telegraph companies authorised by Special Act, except as far as it countered any existing Special Act.
1 It gave general authority for telegraph wires underground, overhead and over or under buildings and by roads, railways or canals, with restrictions as below.
2 The companies might alter gas and water mains but only with permission and superintendence.
3 It required the laying of underground wires in the Metropolis or towns over 30,000 population where the public authority so insisted, and that notice be given to the street or road authority and the sewerage and drainage authority of any such works.
4 It required notice be given to the street or road authority and to occupiers of adjacent parks or mansions where overhead wires were to be erected.
5 The companies might open-up public roads and streets but only with notice and under superintendence of the authority, except in emergency, and make-good and maintain the work for six months.
6 The companies might affect private land or buildings (access or over-running) only by consent. Poles might not be set-up within 10 yards of such without consent of the occupier (not owner). The companies must publish notice of intent of work.
7 Subsequent alterations to roads, buildings, etc., affecting the wires required the company to move or remove the wires once given notice.
8 The companies might not place any work under, in, upon, over, along or across any railway or canal without consent, except when following a public road or street. 9 The companies might not place work along any seashore without consent, and without notice to the Board of Trade.
10 The lines of the companies must be open to all messages without preference; the sale of a company or its works was prohibited without consent of the Board of Trade, except for the privately-used works of the UPTC and other company’s on lease.
11 The Government was to have powers for message preference. The Queen was to have the telegraph for her exclusive use provided at cost.
12 The Government was to have powers to take possession of the works in emergency by authority of the Secretary of State.
As with other statute-regulated utilities the annual dividend was limited.
Telegraph Act Amendment Act, 1866
Additional minor regulations 29 & 30 Vic. cap. iii 1866
This Act gave authority to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to take possession of works. The powers of 1863 Act now applied to all incorporated companies. Railway companies might erect and work private telegraphs between coal-pits, ironworks, factories, warehouses and offices in connection with the stations of the company or over their line.
Telegraph Act, 1868
Enabling the Postmaster General to acquire, work and maintain electric telegraphs as a monopoly
31 & 32 Vic. cap. cx 1868
As this Act determined the final moment of the public domestic telegraph companies it is appropriate here to record the précis published in Bradshaw’s Railway Manual, Shareholders’ Guide, and Official Directory for 1869 of what it termed the Telegraph Purchase Act 1868:
“This Act, which received the royal assent on July 29, 1868, carries out in twenty-four sections, and sets forth the recital in the preamble that the means of communication within the United Kingdom are insufficient, that many districts are without it, and that it would be attended with great advantage to the State as well as to merchants and traders, and to the public generally, were a cheaper, more widely extended, and more expeditious system of telegraphy established, and to that end the Postmaster-General is empowered to work telegraphs in connection with the administration of the post- office.”
“The uniform rate, subject to regulation, of message throughout the United Kingdom, and without regard to distance, is to be at a rate not exceeding 1s for the first 20 words and not exceeding 3d for each additional five words or part of five words. The Postmaster-General is authorised, with the consent of the Treasury, ‘out of any moneys which from time to time may be appropriated by Act of Parliament, and put at his disposal for that purpose, to purchase for the purpose of this Act the whole or such parts as he shall think fit of the undertaking of any company’. Telegraph companies are empowered to sell their undertaking, under certain conditions specified, with a provision as to the appointments of their servants by the Government, or compensation by way of annuity.”
“The Postmaster-General is to enter into contracts with certain railway companies mentioned in the Act, and very specific directions are given as to such acquisition.”
“The Postmaster-General is to transmit to their destination all messages of a railway company in any way related to the business of the company in the United Kingdom free of charge. All matters of difference between the Postmaster-General and the railway companies are to be settled by arbitration.”
“The sums to be received by the directors of Reuter’s Telegram Company are to be applied in the first instance to the payment of the debts and liabilities of that company.”
“There are provisions in the statute to enable the Postmaster-General to acquire the right of way over canals.”
“Special agreements may be made with newspaper proprietors and with the occupiers of news-rooms, club, or exchange-rooms, to transmit messages at a rate not exceeding 1s for every 100 words between nine o’clock a.m. and six o’clock p.m., and a special use of a wire to be obtained under regulations, without undue priority or preference; messages having priority are to be specially marked, and all telegraphic messages are to be paid by means of stamps, and such stamps are to be kept for sale to the public at offices under the control of the Postmaster-General, to be appointed for that purpose.”
“It is constituted a misdemeanour in any person having official duties to disclose or to intercept messages.”
“Copies of all contracts and agreements made under the Act are to be laid before Parliament.”
“In the schedule annexed to the Act thirteen agreements with railways and telegraph companies are referred to, subject to the approbation of Parliament, and it declares it to be expedient that agreements should be made with other railways set forth, including the Metropolitan District. Three months’ notice is to be given by the Postmaster-General to the companies.”
“By the statute the Postmaster-General, with the approbation of the Treasury, can purchase the undertakings of telegraph companies, but no purchase or agreement to purchase is to be binding, unless the same has been laid for one month on the table of both Houses of Parliament without disapproval. The concluding enactment is to the effect that if no Act be passed in the next session of Parliament placing at the disposal of the Postmaster-General such moneys as may be requisite for carrying into effect the objects and purposes of the Act, then the agreements made to be void, and the Postmaster-General to pay the expenses incurred.”
Telegraph Act, 1869
Authorising expenditure for purchase of telegraphs
32 & 33 Vic. cap. lxxiii 1869
The Government omitted to include any financial clauses in the Act of 1868, so had to return to Parliament the following year for a money Act.

The Schedule attached to the Telegraph Act 1869 contained the following amounts that the Post Office anticipated paying to create a telegraph monopoly:
Electric & International Telegraph Company - £2,938,826 9s 0d
British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company - £1,243,536 0s 0d
Reuter’s Telegram Company - £726,000 0s 0d
United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company - £562.264 9s 11d
Universal Private Telegraph Company - £184,421 10s 0d
London & Provincial Telegraph Company - £60,000 0s 0d
Total: £5,715,048 8s 11d
These were the only figures presented to Parliament for approval. The detail of the odd pence in these costs contrasts with the blithe absence of any costs applicable to buying out the public telegraphs owned and worked by railway companies, or for the wayleaves or rights-of-way on which the telegraph depended.
Telegraph Acts Extension Act, 1870
Purchase of domestic cable companies
33 & 34 Vic. cap. lxxxviii 1870
By this Act the Government acquired all the separate companies owning the domestic cables to Britain’s offshore islands. It had already authorised the consolidation of the ownership of the many British continental cables into the existing Submarine Telegraph Company, now a regulated monopoly, deferring the purchase of that concern until 1890 when its French and Belgian concessions finally expired.

 

j.] Significant Patents
This is not comprehensive; it only lists the important apparatus used by the telegraph companies and their most important material suppliers in Britain and any significant alternatives.
English patents were numbered consecutively until October 1852, when the number series restarted annually. Until that year separate, differing patent regulations applied in Scotland and Ireland.

Cooke & Wheatstone’s Patents
Patents assigned to the Electric Telegraph Company on its establishment in 1845.
Patent 7,390/1837 - electric telegraph
Patent 7,614/1838 - electric telegraph
Patent 8,345/1840 - electric telegraph
Patent 9,022/1841 - electric telegraph
Patent 9,465/1842 - electric telegraph
Patent 10,655/1845 - electric telegraph
Alexander Bain’s Patents
Patent 8,783/1841 - electric clock
Patent 9,204/1841 - printing telegraph
Patent 9,745/1843 – chemical telegraph, clocks
Patent 10,450/1844 - clock, log, depth sounder
Patent 10,838/1845 - clocks and telegraphs
Patent 11,480/1846 – chemical telegraph
Patent 11,584/1847 - electric clocks
Frederick Collier Bakewell’s Patent
Patent 12,352/1848 - copying telegraph
Gaetano Bonelli’s Patent
Patent 861/1860 – typo-telegraph
Jacob Brett’s Patents
Patent 10,939/1845 – printing telegraph
Patent 12,054/1848 – printing telegraph
Edward Highton’s Patents
Patent 12,039/1848 – electric telegraph
Patent 12,929/1850 – electric telegraph
Patent 13,938/1852 – electric telegraph
David Edward Hughes’ Patents (UK)
Patent 938/1858 – printing telegraph
Patent 241/1863 – printing telegraph
Charles Tilston Bright’s Patents
Patent 14,331/1850 – magneto telegraph
Patent 2,103/1855 - bell telegraph
Patent 2,610/1858 - double shed insulator
George Edward Dering’s Patents
Patent 13,427/1850 – intelligence by electricity

Patent 1,909/1853 – electric telegraphs
Charles Hancock’s Patent
Patent 12,223/1848 – gutta-percha insulation
William Thomas Henley’s Patents
Patent 12,236/1848 – magneto telegraph
Patent 185/1853 – magneto telegraph
William Reid’s Patents
Patent 11,974/1847 – electric telegraphs
Patent 14,166/1852 – troughs for cables
Ernst Werner Siemens Patent
Patent 13,062/1850 – galvanic dial telegraph
Charles William Siemens Patent
Patent 512/1859 – magneto dial telegraph
The above are just two of more than 200 patents obtained by the Siemens in Britain.
H A & S W Silver’s Patents
Patent 951/1859 – india-rubber insulation of wire
Patent 3,331/1862 – electrical insulation
Cromwell Fleetwood Varley’s Patents
Patent 371/1854 – double current & key relay
Patent 1,318/1855 – translator relay
Charles Wheatstone’s Patents
Patent 1,239/1858 - automatic telegraph
Patent 1,241/1858 - universal telegraph
Patent 2,462/1860 - telegraph, aerial cable
Patent 220/1867 - electric telegraph
Patent 2,897/1870 - automatic telegraph

Francis Whishaw’s Registered Designs (not Patents)
Design 1,454/1848 – Telekouphonon
Design 3,046/1851 – Telekouphonon

 

For comparison:
Cooke & Wheatstone’s Patent (US)
Patent 1,622/1840 – electric telegraph
This was W F Cooke’s and C Wheatstone’s one and only patent in America; they sold-off a half-interest. The Western Union Telegraph Company was to acquire the rights to Wheatstone’s automatic telegraph in 1874.
Alexander Bain’s Patents (US)
Patent 5,957/1848 – chemical telegraph
Patent 6,328/1849 – fast telegraph
Patent 6,837/1849 – chemical telegraph
Patent 7,406/1850 – chemical telegraph
The first and third of these Bain patents in the United States were as his English patents of 1843 and 1846. The patent of 1850 was in the name of Henry J Rogers and introduced the disk receiver, the commonest Bain telegraph. Although all of these were challenged by the Morse Syndicate they were confirmed by the US Supreme Court.
S F B Morse’s Patents (US)
Patent 1,647/1840 – telegraph
Patent 3,316/1843 – wire in pipes
Reissue 79 in 1846 of 1840 patent
Patent 4,453/1846 – telegraph
Reissue 117 in 1848 of 1846 patent
Patent 6,420/1849 - chemical telegraph
The technical elements of Morse’s 1840 patent were never used commercially, but his general claims were used in an attempt to establish a monopoly in the United States. A provisional patent was also obtained in France on October 30, 1838, two years before that in America; no other country recognised his original claims. Morse’s patent of 1846 was the first to detail the elements of the enduring American telegraph, the key, the register or recorder and the relay, which was used world-wide. The 1849 patent was a cynical device to counter Bain.
Royal Earl House’s Patents (US)
Patent 4,464/1846 – printing telegraph
Patent 9,505/1852 – printing telegraph
R E House was obstructed in his patent applications by the Morse Syndicate. Jacob Brett had already patented House’s initial apparatus in England during 1845. The second instrument, “the most ingenious and beautifully constructed printing telegraph” (Marshall Lefferts, 1856), was in use on major circuits in America by 1850.
David Edward Hughes’ Patents (US)
Patent 14,917/1856 – printing telegraph
Patent 22,770/1859 – printing telegraph
Hughes was born in London of Welsh decent but lived his early life in the United States before returning to live in England in 1857. The Hughes apparatus was successively improved by Gustav Froment in France and Werner Siemens in Germany. Although adopted world-wide during the 1870’s it was scarcely used in the United States.

k.] Comparison - America

The Morse Telegraph System – In the United States the period before the creation of the Western Union Telegraph Company was dominated by the Morse Syndicate, a small group of lawyers, financiers and legislators that acquired and managed telegraph patents. S F B Morse, by profession a portrait painter with little technical education, was merely a figurehead to this aggressive organisation and, somewhat unfortunately, grew to believe the myths and legends propounded by the Syndicate.
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 Syndicate bought out the owners of the Bain patents, Henry J Rogers & Company and the North American Telegraph Company, immediately the US Appeals Court found in Bain’s favour in 1852. When Henry O’Reilly, who, ever combative, had become the main House licensee, was also bought out, Royal House and David Hughes both protected their interests by selling their patents in November 1855 to the Commercial Printing Telegraph Company, a concern owned by the Associated Press of New York, who used these instruments on their leased press circuits. The Syndicate, in response, encouraged the manufacture of a so-called combination apparatus that only they used, alongside of the key-and-register.
The Morse Syndicate survived only to the end of the patents’ extended life in 1858. It had engineered the creation of the American Telegraph Company, which controlled the public telegraph system on the whole East Coast by gradually buying-out the major point-to-point concerns in the area, including those using the House Telegraph, and latterly the Commercial Printing Telegraph Company, with their House and Hughes type-printers.

The ‘renegade’ telegraph companies in the western states that escaped its net formed, in 1856, the Western Union Telegraph Company and in 1866 that concern absorbed American Telegraph, which had been sorely tried by the necessities of civil war.
In 1850 the United States possessed 15,835 miles of line worked under the Morse Syndicate’s rights; 2,200 miles under House’s patents and 2,012 miles under Bain’s. No reliable information exists as to the number of stations opened or messages worked in the fragmented system. There were then 953 miles of telegraph line in British North America.
At the moment in 1866 when the Western Union company acquired the last of its major competitors, the American Telegraph Company and the United States Telegraph Company, its line mileage across the continent had grown to an immense 37,380 miles, with 2,250 stations.
Technically the great difference between the electric telegraphs was that in Europe the circuits used non-continuous current with weak sources (batteries of cells); and in America the circuits worked a continuous current and consequently required much stronger electrical sources. In the United States the line of wire was always live.
Although its citizens introduced the advanced and effective House and Hughes type-printing apparatus (but then quickly suppressed them) the rough-and-ready nature of telegraphy in America can be judged from the lack of any sort of galvanometer or detector, automatic telegraphy or even switch-boards in its circuits until the 1870s.
A remarkable American innovation almost wholly ignored in Europe for many years was the Fire Alarm Telegraph of 1852, and its development the Messenger Telegraph, by which services, a fire-engine or a parcel carrier, could be summoned by the public from remote call-boxes in major cities.
W F Cooke and C Wheatstone secured the first patent for electric telegraphy in the United States on June 10, 1840, ten days before S F B Morse. One half of their patent rights were bought by three American partners.

Comparison - Europe
The electric telegraph was introduced to France by Cooke and Wheatstone alongside of the Paris & Versailles railway in 1842; circuits by the Paris & Rouen railway in May 1845 and the Paris & Lille railway in July 1846 followed. The lines were soon absorbed into the administration of the telégraphe aérien, the Bonaparte-era optical system that only worked Government messages; it eventually open-ed its circuits to the public on March 1, 1851. After the brief experiment with Cook & Wheatstone’s two-needle apparatus the state circuits used the Foy-Breguet instrument that copied the indications of the aerial telegraph, but by 1852 the American telegraph, the key-and-register, was being used in all public French circuits.
The Cooke & Wheatstone two-needle system was the initial public telegraph in Belgium. A patent had been obtained on October 28, 1840 with the assistance of Wheatstone’s friend Adolphe Quetelet, director of l’Observatoire Royale in Brussels. The partners obtained a concession from the Belgian Government on December 23, 1845 to erect a line of telegraph alongside of the Brussels – Antwerp railway. This concession passed, along with all their other rights, to la Compagnie du Télégraphe Électrique, as the Electric Telegraph Company was known in Belgium, and continued until September, 1 1850 when it reverted to the state.
In 1843 Wheatstone, working with the German engineer Hannibal Moltrecht, installed a short, and short-lived, experimental two-needle telegraph line between Aachen and its suburb of Ronheide, alongside the track of the Rheinische Eisenbahngesellschaft, the Rhine Railway Company. However there had been many telegraphic experiments in the German states before this by others.
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. It replaced an optical system. Later Gerke was to adapt the instrument’s cipher to European needs, creating the worldwide or Continental Morse Code.
During 1853, in Holland the Electric company’s subsidiary, the Internationale Telegraaf Compagnie of London acquired a twenty-year monopoly concession for cable and overhead circuits between London and Amsterdam, using, initially, Cooke & Wheatstone’s two-needle instruments.

The Electric Telegraph Company also created circuits in Norway and Denmark, alongside of railway lines built by the contractor, Morton Peto, one of its directors, during 1853 and 1854.
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 Königliche Preussische Telegraph, 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.
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.
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.
In Austria the telegraph was first introduced between the capital, Vienna, and Brunn in Bohemia during December 1846, extended to Prague in September 1847. This used the I & V device of Alexander Bain, modified to work as an acoustic telegraph; and retained in service until 1870. After experimenting with Bain’s chemical writer, using sensitized tape, the American telegraph was introduced into Austria between Vienna and Budapest in 1850.

Away from Europe, in British India, the East India Company’s, and latterly the government’s, circuits 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 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.

 

Comparison - Statistical
The following statistical comparison is drawn from the information on the world-wide state of telegraphy tabulated in 1869 by George Sauer for S F B Morse. The raw information that was gathered through US Embassies varied greatly in response and quality, so only a partial guide to development was possible.
The Austrian Empire and the Electric & International Telegraph Company did not bother to reply.

Belgium 1851 *
257 miles; 10 offices; 14,025 messages
Belgium 1867 *
2,424 miles; 374 offices; 1,293,870 messages
France 1851 *
1,325 miles; 17 offices; 9,014 messages
France 1867 *
23,090 miles; 1,486 offices; 3,213,995 messages
Norway 1855 *
471 miles; 22 offices; 22,916 messages
Norway 1866 *
2,205 miles; 73 offices; 269,375 messages
Prussia 1852 *
2,070 miles; 48 offices; 48,751 messages
Prussia 1867
13,364 miles; 857 offices; 2,582,460 messages
Russia 1857
4,840 miles; 79 offices; 133,538 messages
Russia 1864
21,119 miles; 308 offices; 838,653 messages
Switzerland 1851 *
1,000 miles (est.); 34 offices; 2,876 messages
Switzerland 1867
2,395 miles; 333 offices; 708,974 messages
United Kingdom 1850 (Company sources)
2,215 miles; 257 offices; 64,734 messages
United Kingdom 1868 (Government returns)
16,879 miles; 3,381 offices; 6,438,392 messages
Sauer’s Miscellaneous Returns
Australia 1865 - 3,100 miles; 79 offices
Austria 1851 - 2,175 miles; 45 offices (author)
Denmark 1867 - 950 miles
Egypt 1867 - 1,747 miles
Holland 1867 - 1,447 miles; 194 offices
India 1866 - 13,390 miles; 174 offices
Italy 1869 - 9,927 miles; 1,065 offices
Spain 1867 - 6,670 miles
Sweden 1867 - 3,519 miles; 257 offices
Turkey 1863 - 4,032 miles; 52 offices
Turkey 1867 - 17,087 miles; 310 offices

 
Miles here refers to miles of line. The * indicates an operating loss. Twenty-five per cent of messages in the French telegraphic system were on behalf of the Government; forty per cent of Belgian messages were ‘transit’ traffic from other countries.
Most of the continental state telegraphs at this time had a zone (distance) tariff for a standard message (either fifteen or twenty-five words, with five word increments), charging as well for addresses and for delivery outside of the destination town. A one hundred word limit was commonly imposed on public messages.
Every sort of Government traffic, even the most trivial, had priority over the public. In France and Russia all messages had to be inspected before transmission by an official for “objectionable” matter.
In many Continental countries there were railway telegraphs working public traffic to and from their passenger stations outside of the main Government systems, mostly using dial equipment rather than the American telegraph. The largest of these was probably La Grande Société Russe des Chemins der Fer, an Anglo-French company founded in 1857, which owned 2,693 miles of railway in Russia by 1868, and worked the Siemens magneto-electric dial telegraph throughout its system.
As well as the Rijkstelegraaf in Holland in this period there also existed two small regional joint-stock companies, carrying 6% of public message traffic in 1860, compared with the state’s 92%; the balance was borne by the railway telegraphs.
In 1869 the Weiner Privat-Telegraphen-Gesellschaft was formed in Austria with a capital of 200,000 florins to work wires and instruments for private subscribers; as the Universal Private Telegraph Company had done in Britain, but with Siemens magneto apparatus.

l.] British Legal Context:

The Statutory Company - The majority of the companies mentioned here were each created under a Special Act of the British Parliament that defined their capital, structure, activities and legal powers. The use of the Special Act procedure was necessary for several reasons: 1] until 1856 this was the principal way in which joint-stock shareholder limited liability, where the proprietor was liable in extremis only to the nominal value of their share, could be acquired and 2] that the powers these companies required affected the public domain to which Parliament had to assent to and regulate. The procedure gave statutory companies considerable legal powers, particularly over property. They were granted, in effect, the power of Parliament to override private and municipal interests. With such security these companies were the only ones enabled to raise mass capital. The powers granted were contended in Parliament, although the legislature had no further effect on their management.
Many hundreds of statutory companies were created and directly regulated by Parliament in the 18th and 19th Centuries, occupying an enormous amount of legislative time. Railways, Canals, Gasworks and Waterworks were the principal statutory incorporations, as well as public trusts for turnpike or toll roads. Insurance, Cemetery and companies to work various Patents were among the others.
Where capital has been mentioned in this text generally it refers to the amount authorised by Parliament for issue to shareholders. Until 1855 the maximum amount was fixed and could only be altered by further application to Parliament. In addition to this sum statutory companies were commonly authorised to issue debentures (bonded debt) up to one-third of the value of the issued share capital.
The capital raised could only be used for the authorised purpose - which was rarely varied by Parliament. A company authorised to build a railway, for example, could not expend the money it raised on ships, gasworks or public telegraphs.
The statutory companies did not have common constitutions apart from a selection from some standard clauses inserted from those previously authorised. Financial reporting was basic. Essentially each company had to have two auditors and hold one annual general meeting for its proprietors. Information for shareholders and the public was generally limited to a statement of account from the auditors without detail or commentary. The statement was not to a format and even the account categories varied from year to year (i.e. as the auditors changed) – making real comparison of performance (and honesty) difficult. The statutory general meetings were an opportunity for shareholders to obtain answers from the board of directors; but the press were often excluded. Information from companies regarding performance generally became available when they were about to go to Parliament for permission to raise further capital or in answer to some crisis publicised in the press.
The company was controlled by a Board of Directors elected by all of the shareholders; directors retired in rotation year by year but were eligible for immediate re-election. They were responsible for every matter, however trivial; authorising, at least in theory but often in practice, every expenditure and every appointment. The directors were usually the largest shareholders in the company. The decisions of the Board were communicated by the Secretary, the most important salaried official. All other management appointments and their tasks were at the whim of the Board.
The Charter Company – Some proprietors might apply to the Government, actually to the Board of Trade & Colonies, for a grant of a Royal Charter for their enterprise. This gave certain privileges – in particular joint-stock limited liability - to the proprietors. Commercially the grant of a Charter was most often granted to “trading” concerns, shipping firms and colonial companies whose work did not require particular powers in Britain or otherwise need protective legislation. A Charter was also used to secure charitable and academic institutions with substantial capital; with the advent of general limited liability for companies in 1855 this became the primary use of the privilege.
Five public telegraph companies each obtained a Royal Charter; the Submarine, the English & Irish Magnetic, the Irish Sub-Marine, the British, and the International.
The Joint-stock Company – Although joint-stock companies with unlimited liability for the proprietors had been permitted since 1828 it was only in 1844 that the Government obtained an Act for their registration and regulation. Until then they had been organised as very large common partnerships executed under a variety of deeds of trust with little or no protection for their members. All of the companies mentioned here were registered under the 1844 Act, which made lawful the dividing of capital into shares and gave a slight degree of security to investors in identifying the promoters and in mandatory regular financial reporting, but still with unlimited liability.
It was not until 1855 that general limited liability for proprietors of joint-stock shares was permitted in Britain by simple registration of its articles of association. Even subsequent to the Limited Liability Act 1855 the individual capital sums raised were relatively small compared with the enormous amounts raised by statutory companies.
Concerns formed under the 1855 and later Company Acts, but not the statutory incorporations, had to include “Limited” after the word “Company” in their title. That necessity has been assumed throughout this work, though not applied.
Patents – In most countries the patent or brevet was an administrative process that gave legal recognition to an invention or improvement. It had to be a tangible or material innovation, carefully described in a written specification and with, if appropriate, accompanying drawings and submitted to a government official to prove its originality. It was a costly process, consuming much time in its drafting, and requiring substantial fees to the Government over its lifetime. Once granted it gave the owner or owners of the patent, twelve or less in number in British law, the sole right to use the invention for a period of time, or to assign use of it to others under licence.
In England patents were granted for a period of four-teen years without right of renewal. As monopolies in trade had been illegal since James I, major variations to a grant of patent (i.e. apart from a simple license) had to go before Parliament: this was particularly so where a body of capitalists originally of more than five persons wished to acquire and work a patent and form a so-called Patent Company, actually identical to a Statutory Company. The number of individuals permitted to own a patent was increased to twelve in May 1832. With isolated exceptions each domestic telegraph company mentioned here was formed to acquire and work, by permission of Parliament, particular patents relating to electric telegraphy. Each patent gave the company sole rights to use the components of the patent for a period of time to the exclusion of all others.
Registered Designs – By an Act of Parliament of 1838 and subsequent Acts in 1842, 1843 and 1850, the appearance of manufactures could be recorded to establish legal priority and prevent copying. The Act was meant to apply to works with aesthetic merit and other visual properties, falling between copyright and patents, but was also used as a cheap method of protecting inventions from imitation.  

 

 

m.] Glossary:
Spelling and usage throughout this paper is contemporary with the period. Special care has been taken over the accuracy of personal names and company titles and their evolution.
Currency - £. s. d. or Libra, Sesterce, Denarius, the currency used throughout this paper is the pound sterling, the ‘£’ or ‘L’, then divided into twenty shillings, the ‘s’, each of twelve pence, the ‘d’. So the pound equalled 240 pence. To give some idea of relative value average individual male earnings were about £24 per year.
The pound in the mid-nineteenth was worth twenty-five French francs, ten Austrian florins, ten Russian roubles, seven Prussian thalers or five United States’ dollars. These values held true for most of the century as systemic inflation of currency had yet to be invented.
Armour – a sheath of iron wire bound around tarred, resin-insulated wires as a protection against the effects of sea-water and sea creatures to make a ‘cable’
Cable – an armoured and resin-insulated underwater copper wire (or wires) or a subterranean resin-insulated wire or group of wires with a fabric sheathing
Code - With the exception of the original Wheatstone five-needle telegraph and the type-printing telegraphs of House and Hughes virtually all other public telegraphs, needle and acoustic, of the period transmitted code, actually cipher, in which movements or sounds are interpreted to represent characters, numbers and symbols. The original “Morse” code of 1835 had 36 characters; there was also a different, extended Austro-German code that evolved into a European-wide Continental Morse code in 1851 with 44 characters; and a particular Russian Morse code that had 30 characters as well as numbers to suit an abbreviated Cyrillic alphabet. (See also Telegraphs, Dial)

The China Submarine Telegraph Company solved the problem of telegraphing the 50,000 characters of the written Chinese language. It reduced its messages to several thousand common names and phrases and had each office provided with small numbered wooden printing blocks for each. The sender selected the appropriate phrases and the clerk transmitted their numbers. On receipt the appropriate numbered blocks were printed on to the outgoing message form. The Great Northern Telegraph Company compiled a “dictionary” giving numeric equivalents to Chinese characters for transmission in its China and Japan circuits in 1871; this caused some offence as its construction and the selection by clerks was arbitrary.
Duplex – the ability to send two messages through a single circuit was discovered by Dr Wilhelm Gintl, an Austrian, in 1853 but only perfected by Joseph Stearns in America during 1868 as the third generation of electric telegraph technology. It was introduced to general service in the 1870s.
Galvanic – using batteries of chemical cells to produce electricity. During the period 1836 to 1870 and for long after virtually all telegraphs were ‘galvanic’ (but see also Magneto).
Insulators – In overhead or pole telegraphs an earthenware (often called “porcelain”), glass or hard-resin device used to insulate each of the overhead wires from the supporting pole.

Key – In Britain during the 1850s and 1860s a Key, Private Key or Telegraph Key commonly referred to a code used for concealment in messages. The mechanical “key” used on the Highton, Bright and American telegraphs was hence known as a “tapper”
Magneto – using the local mechanical generation of electricity. In the period discussed only Henley’s needle telegraph of 1849, Wheatstone’s Universal telegraph of 1858 and Siemens dial telegraph of 1859 used ‘magneto-electricity’ rather than batteries of cells
Messages – the record for public traffic breaks down into domestic and foreign, and ought to exclude company or “service” messages, as well as news and railway-related traffic
Miles of line – unduplicated route miles (i.e. 100 miles from London to Birmingham)
Miles of wire – absolute length of wire in circuit (i.e. 100 line miles of line by four wires = 400 miles)
Overhead (or Pole) telegraph – an iron wire or wires suspended above ground between wooden or iron poles

Relay or Repeater – an electro-magnetic device that received a weak incoming signal and retransmitted it using its own battery so amplifying its strength and increasing the length of the circuit without manual input. These instruments saw great development, causing them to be wholly automatic, to work two directions without switching and increasing their sensitivity.

The relay had several alternate titles in Britain, varying in dignity from “pecker”, through repeater and translator, to the grand “perænode”, all performing the same basic function
Resin-insulation – a copper-wire conductor coated with an insulator of tar, india-rubber or (after 1848) gutta-percha and covered with a protective, anti-abrasive cotton outer for underground or underwater telegraphy

Telegraph, Acoustic – an instrument in which code is communicated by sound rather than visually by needles or in print. The earliest was Wheatstone’s magnet and bell of 1841, with a magneto worked by a lever. The American and needle galvanic telegraphs could also receive by sound alone as they made distinctive “dot” and “dash” or “left” and “right” noises. Bright’s Bell of 1858 and the American sounder of about the same date were specifically designed to receive acoustically
Telegraph, American – this bears little resemblance to the apparatus originally patented in the United States by S F B Morse in 1840. The real, hugely-successful American telegraph, of the key, register and relay, was only patented in 1846 and owed all of its elements to Morse’s collaborators. Alfred Vail devised the “register” in 1844; this was the essential and most original element of the American telegraph. One of the first two Vail registers still survives at Cornell University, but only because Vail took extraordinary precautions to keep it out of S F B Morse’s hands. Morse somehow managed to ‘lose’ its companion. Outside of Britain this was the world-wide “telegraph system” after 1850. It was also used, it must be said, throughout the British dominions overseas
Telegraph, Automatic – the second generation of electric telegraphy, utilising a division of labour to multiply message rates by at least a factor of five. Messages were punched in code into paper tape and the tape fed into a clockwork-driven transmitter and received distantly by a clockwork-driven receiver that printed the code on to tape. The initial version ran at 100 words a minute, subsequently increased to 600 and 800 words a minute. This is Wheatstone’s system of 1858