The performance of the intercontinental telegraph was vividly illustrated on Saturday, December 21, 1867. At a banquet to celebrate Charles Wheatstone at the Polytechnic in Regent Street, London, the chairman, the Duke of Wellington, sent a message of fifty words to the American President, Andrew Johnson, in Washington. It took just nine minutes and thirty seconds to cross the Atlantic and arrive at his residence. The President’s reply of fifty-nine words took twenty-nine minutes to transmit back to Regent Street and was received as the assembly were still at dinner. After these formalities were over the assembled scientists sent a message of twenty-two words from the Polytechnic in London to the telegraph station at Heart’s Content in Newfoundland. It was sent at nine o’clock; the reply of twenty-four words was received at ten past nine!  

When the Electric company’s former secretary, Henry Weaver, took over management of the Anglo-American Telegraph Company he eliminated minimum message length, charging simply by the word in 1871. One word messages were then possible. The other cable companies immediately adopted his price model.  

 
On the dissolution of the telegraph companies in 1868 many, if not most, of the best managers, electricians and engineers, and even the more adventurous clerk-operators, left to serve the underwater cable telegraph firms in Britain and overseas rather than take employment with the Post Office. Technical direction of the new national telegraphic system was to be left to a railway signal engineer. 

The Telegram Agency

With the coming of the intercontinental cables, and more especially after the establishment of the state telegraph monopoly, a new species of business appeared to manage the messaging business of large mercantile concerns. Firms engaged in distant foreign trade soon became aware of the immense costs that regular telegraphic correspondence incurred.

The telegram agency, as their name implies, acted as intermediary between the message sender and the telegraph company owning the lines. Its purpose, essentially, was to save the sender money. It required little or no capital to set up, needing little more than a rented office and stationery.

From the foundation of his firm in 1851 Julius Reuter had managed the messages of private subscribers in London, on the continent of Europe and eventually, after 1870, in all corners of the world. His offices in London, Liverpool and Manchester advertised from 1853, “Messages forwarded with rapidity and correctness of translation, to every part of the continent”. In the 1860s Reuter was handling diplomatic traffic for many embassies and plenipotentiaries in London. The private message business remained a significant part of Reuters’ Telegram Company, underpinning its news and intelligence products, for many decades. Several other, much lesser, concerns entered the public telegram agency business from the mid-1860s, broadening their customer base to the general public.

The nature of the telegram agency was consolidation;

• The first task was the assembly of a Register of clients, whose names and addresses were then reduced to a single word for telegraphic messages.

• The second task was the creation of a network of Agents abroad, in all the centres of business throughout the world, able to accept messages and to use the Register. These would accept and forward messages as part of their other business on a commission.

• The third task was the taking plain language text from subscribers and Encoding or rather abbreviating it by the use of proprietary code books into a few words.

• The fourth task was Packing all the subscribers’ encoded texts into as few as possible messages for each foreign destination.

• The fifth task was passing of the packed messages to the cable company for actual transmission to their destination, usually once or twice a day.

The key operational element was the reduction of ordinary language into as few telegraphic “words” as possible. For business there were to be introduced an immense range of code books that reduced common (and more complex) phrases and instructions into single words; these covered many hundreds of alternatives in volumes of up to a thousand pages. Of course, many firms settled on the common code for their trade and undertook their own encoding. This was done, it should be said, not for reasons of confidentiality, but for those of economy.

As regards ‘packing’, the consolidation of several foreign messages into one, this was condemned by the telegraphic world, in particular by the International Telegraph Conventions of Vienna (1868) and Rome (1871). In Britain the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, the Indo-European Telegraph Company, and the Eastern Telegraph Company Limited, that monopolised intercontinental traffic and operated a price cartel, also complained bitterly to the General Post Office regarding the practice of ‘packing’. However the legitimate use of codes by many of their main users, by and large, concealed any ‘packing’. The telegram agency, in addition to this hostility, had to work a cash business as no telegraph company would grant it credit or allow it an open account.

The first independent ‘packer’ was the General Telegram Agency, a trading title of Messrs Pope, Rée and McLean, of 11 Throgmorton Street, City, and 2 Circus Place, Finsbury Circus, in 1869. This had evolved into McLean’s Telegraphic Bureau by 1874, specialising in public and news messages to America, with offices at 39 Lombard Street. Eventually James McLean concentrated on news, and his agency became the London correspondent of Associated Press of New York by 1877.

One of largest of this new category of communication business was the Oriental Telegram Agency. This was the initiative of Robert Valentine Dodwell, who had a long history as a telegraph engineer with the Magnetic Telegraph Company in Manchester and Liverpool and on his own account in the north-of-England. In 1872, along with George Ager, Dodwell published ‘The Social Code’, in 230 pages, one of the first code-books intended for use by ordinary travellers, emigrants and tourists. By early 1873 the Oriental Telegram Agency had a central office at 140 Leadenhall Street, City, and branches at 35A Moorgate Street, City, London; 61 Prince’s Street; Manchester; Batavia Buildings, Hackins Hey, Liverpool; and 29 Waterloo Street, Glasgow, a new branch was opened at 45A Pall Mall, St James’s, in January 20, 1874. Dodwell, as managing director, had previously created a network of corresponding agents in India, China and Australia. He recruited a former colleague at the Magnetic Telegraph Company in Manchester, George Hine, as company secretary and manager.

The Oriental Telegram Agency’s public tariff for May 1873 was Annual Subscription 5s 0d; messages to India, 5 words 15s 0d, 10 words £1, each additional word 1s; to China, 5 words £1 1s, 10 words £1 10s, each additional word 2s, and to Australia, 5 words £2, 10 words £3, each additional word 3s. It would have different rates for mercantile clients. Later it offered free registration of addresses in Britain and overseas.

The comparative message rate for the Eastern Telegraph Company, operating the cable between London and India, and for the Indo-European Telegraph Company, working the land-line across Europe to India, was for 10 words, £2, for each additional word 4s 3d.

To expand their business, the proprietors of the Oriental agency looked west and established the separate Antilles Telegram Agency in 1873 at the same addresses it used in Britain. It recruited Agents in the West Indies, extending quickly through Central and Latin America, and, for a period, to North America, wherever the new telegraph cables touched.