No history of electric telegraphy can ignore Alexander Bain. He was a Scottish watchmaker by profession and a prolific inventor active at the same time as Cooke and Wheatstone. His principal contributions to telegraphy were his improvements to the electric clock and to the chemical telegraph. By all accounts he was a difficult man to negotiate with and according to some a ferocious drunk. He was addicted to litigation; having disputes with Wheatstone over clocks, with Bakewell over copying telegraphs and with Shepherd, another patentee of clocks, as well as with the Morse Syndicate in America. Bain died in relative poverty and is generally portrayed as a martyr impoverished by class prejudice.

 

His principle character weakness was an inability to collaborate with his peers; a plain mechanic, he never found a scientific or technical mentor. Bain never found a professional partner to work with to channel his ideas into consistent reality. He seems to have gone out of his way to give offence to potential allies.

Bain’s first original accomplishment was the electric clock, which he patented in 1841 with the London watch- and clock-maker John Barwise, of 25 St Martin’s Lane, Charing Cross. This used an electrically-regulated pendulum to propel the time-keeping movement. It was the first of many missed opportunities; the partnership failed and Barwise went on to found the British Watch Company in 1843, the first attempt to factory-make timepieces in volume.

An electric register clock used in the telegraph stations

of the Electric Telegraph Company

 

Bain devised a number of mechanical signal and printing telegraphs, some of such complexity as to be best described as contraptions, before his chemical telegraph patent. He did not invent the principle of the chemical telegraph, in which paper or cloth is treated to make it sensitive to electric current; in England this originated with Edward Davy’s patent of 1838, but Bain made the principle practical in his English patent of 1843.

The chemical telegraph consisted of a finger pedal to make and break the circuit and a roll of electrically-sensitive paper fed by clockwork between a brass roller and a metal feeler as part of the circuit. The current caused a mark to be made on the paper in a series of dots and dashes interpreted into the Roman alphabet in so-called “Bain Code”. 

Bain also devised an ingeniously simple instrument in 1843, the so-called I & V telegraph, using a single wire circuit. In this an armature worked left (I) or right (V) within two horizontal semi-circular electro-magnets in the low, flat mahogany case of the “indicator” as the polarity of the current was altered by metal connectors attached to the wooden double-keys of the sender or “communicator”. The code for this device was based on numerical combinations of 1 and 5, the Roman I and V. It was included as an afterthought to his patent for the chemical telegraph and was widely used in Austria, as well as briefly between Edinburgh and Glasgow. He improved the I & V telegraph in his patent of 1845 by substituting a drop-handled commutator for the keys, so that it looked more like a common single-needle instrument, and legally protected the I & V code.

 

In December 1844 Bain patented a complex device for registering the direction and distance travelled by ocean ships. The “Bain Navigator” consisted of a magnetic compass and a speed and distance log, electrically monitored and recording data constantly on a paper tape moved by clockwork. It was never perfected.

The Bain chemical telegraph was purchased by the Electric Telegraph Company in Britain and used between 1848 and 1862 on its longest and busiest circuits, and for the intense traffic between its West End office in the Strand and its Central Station at Founders’ Court. He improved this apparatus during 1848 to create the fast telegraph - where the ‘finger pedal’ was replaced by a small manual hole-punch and strips of paper that were fed into a rotary transmitter. The Company also used his ‘Bain code’ in these circuits, and bought his clock patent, intending to manufacture them for sale.

 

He had previously licensed the entire French rights for the chemical telegraph to William Boggett, a button manufacturer, of 50 St Martin’s Lane, Charing Cross. Although tried over ever longer distances and at remarkable speeds it was not adopted in France.

Although it was extremely sensitive, requiring relatively little galvanic energy in its circuits, the chief disadvantage of the chemical telegraph was the need for the marking paper to be kept damp in use, which made it frail and malodorous. It was also vulnerable to disruption by ‘atmospheric electricity’. When used in America Bain’s chemical-paper rolls were replaced by more durable flat disks of treated paper on a metal plate, twenty-inches in diameter, rotated by a clockwork-driven roller, and the receiving wire caused to move spirally across the disk on a metal arm from central spindle in the manner of a gramophone needle.

The Bain chemical telegraph was used in the Electric’s busiest domestic circuits until replaced by the American telegraph in 1862 and later by Charles Wheatstone’s automatic telegraph. Both of these substituted more stable electro-magnetic ‘writers’ using ink on a plain-paper tape for chemical elements.

It is commonly averred that Bain invented the facsimile machine; one version of his chemical telegraph was indeed enabled to copy solid metallic type. But it was Frederick Bakewell who patented his copying telegraph in 1848 to transmit hand-writing or a drawing over distance and perfected it in 1851. Bain, however, had some sort of business relationship with Bakewell; he acquired part of a patent the latter obtained for a soda-water making machine.

The Electric Telegraph Company paid Bain £7,500 for his initial clock and telegraph patents in Britain and allowed him £2,500 contingent on his services to the firm in 1846. He became a director of the Company for a short while. When he patented the fast telegraph in 1848 the Company purchased the rights for Britain for £13,250, half in cash, half in shares. Bain was also scrupulous in simultaneously patenting his clock and telegraphs throughout Europe and America.

 

The electric clocks were extremely expensive, selling for £16 16s for ‘master’ timepieces and £10 10s for each ‘slave’ dial. Running costs were high, too: 1d a week using a single small Smee zinc-silver cell, which lasted just fourteen days.

 

The Electric company had severe financial problems in the late 1840s and was unable to proceed with the manufacture of electric clocks. It is likely that Bain was disillusioned with this; but he had also failed to use his period with the Electric to build any peer relationships. The company’s engineers, rather than Bain, had to adapt the fast telegraph into an effective device.

Bain left England in 1848 for New York after commuting his payment from the Electric Telegraph Company, receiving instead the residual rights to the electric clock patent and the chemical telegraph rights for British North America. The Company also lent him £1,000 at 4% interest. On his arrival he licensed his American patent for the chemical telegraph to Henry Rogers & Company of Baltimore, Maryland, to be used in a 250 miles line between New York and Washington, by way of Philadelphia and Baltimore, challenging the Morse Syndicate over that route. Shortly after Bain entered into another licensing agreement with Henry O’Reilly, who had been previously a Morse licensee, who undertook to make 800 miles of telegraph line a year working his patents. Bain was to receive $30 per mile and 25% of the paid-up stock of these new main lines, and 10% of the stock for all branch circuits. O’Reilly constructed six Bain lines; 1] from Boston to New York; 2] from Buffalo to New York; 3] from Boston to Portland, Maine; 4] from Boston to Burlington in Vermont; 5] from Louisville, Kentucky, to New Orleans, Louisiana; and 6] minor lines in Massachusetts and Vermont.

 

 

This wrote Bain Code spirally on to a damp paper disk

On the unusually ornamental table are, from the left, the receiving disk and writing arm, the large clockwork mechanism to turn the disk, the sending

press-key to the front, and Bain's glass-disk alarm on the right

Used only in the United States from 1850 to 1868

 

Henry O’Reilly was driven into bankruptcy by the Morse Syndicate in 1851 and his interest in the Bain patents and his 2,000 miles of line in the United States passed to Marshall Lefferts. Not long after this Lefferts came to an agreement with the Syndicate to merge their competing interests.

Outside of Britain and America Bain’s earlier I & V telegraph had been adopted by the k.k. Staatstelegraph, the Austrian Imperial and Royal State Telegraph, and was used for public service between 1846 and 1850. It was retained in railway service until 1870.

Alexander Bain returned to London in 1852 and acquired a fine shop at 43 Old Bond Street, Mayfair, London, to retail his patent electric timepieces. It was, interestingly, just a few minutes walk from Wheatstone Brothers, musical instrument makers, at 20 Conduit Street, Mayfair. At this time he still possessed valid patents in British North America, France, Belgium and Austria for the chemical telegraph; in England for a musical instrument and for the electric ship’s log; and in France for the electric clock.

Bain also claimed to possess 100 shares in the Mississippi & Illinois Telegraph Company, 1,354 shares in the People’s Telegraph Line (Louisville to New Orleans), 100 shares in the Ohio, Indiana & Illinois Telegraph Company, 225 shares in the Vermont & Boston Telegraph Company and 71 shares in the New York State Telegraph Company; all of value in America.

Yet on April 4, 1853 Alexander Bain was bankrupt, owing £8,044 to unsecured creditors with just £932 in assets. He appears to have very quickly squandered a substantial fortune.

After tinkering with odd, non-telegraphic contrivances in the clockmaking district of Clerkenwell in London Bain settled once again in America in 1860, and developed there, among other things, a new galvanic dial telegraph that worked with a pierced rotating dial much like that on the later mechanical telephone, before turning to plumbing.

 

Bain returned to Scotland in the late 1860s. He died in 1877 whilst living on the charity of former employees of the telegraph companies, having sadly lost all of the opportunities that his electric clock, his chemical telegraph and his I & V telegraph had offered.