The First Electric Telegraph of 1837
Its display was so simple that it could be worked by young children
Cooke and Wheatstone’s first line was laid between Euston Square station and Camden Town station in London on the London & Birmingham Railway, a distance of about a mile, in July 1837. It was constructed to demonstrate the utility of the electric telegraph in railway signalling. Six parallel thickly-varnished copper wires were buried underground, embedded in tar-soaked wooden battens between the stations. The instruments were Wheatstone’s patent five-needle or permutating telegraph that signalled the Roman alphabet and so could be worked by anyone who could read and write in circuit with galvanic batteries. Although successfully demonstrated to the railway company’s directors and its engineer, Robert Stephenson, it was deemed unnecessarily complicated; the company did not adopt the electric telegraph.
The Great Western Railway’s Paddington station in London
As it was from June 1838 to January 1854;
the railway offices, including the first public telegraph station, were in the arches of the bridge carrying Bishops’ Road
The first permanent line of electric telegraph in England was completed on July 9, 1839 between the Paddington and West Drayton stations of the Great Western Railway (London-Paddington to Bristol), a distance of thirteen miles, having taken a year to complete and costing the railway £2,817. It was constructed at the instance of the Company’s engineer, I K Brunel, who had first met Cooke in September 1837, and who was also a friend of Robert Stephenson, for the railway company’s own use; there were no public messages. This line used the five-needle instruments from the Euston Square experiment with galvanic cells and six varnished copper wires insulated with india-rubber fabric run within a ¾ inch small-bore, iron gas-pipe. The iron pipe was fixed six inches above the ground, to be free of damp, on longitudinal rails and small wooden posts, two or three feet away from the railway, accessed for maintenance every mile or so by circular iron junction boxes.
The small-bore iron pipe was made by James Russell & Co., patent gas tube manufacturers, 69 Upper Thames Street, City, and Wednesbury, Staffordshire; the copper wire “rope”, so-called, was insulated and clothed with patented india-rubber-coated cotton by Robert Sievier’s London Caoutchouc Company, 36 King Street, City.
The second permanent line was constructed alongside of the short three-mile track of the London & Blackwall Railway. This came about through the influence of George Parker Bidder, the railway’s engineer and partner of Robert Stephenson. Bidder was to be an important advocate of and investor in electric telegraphy; a critical figure in its early development. It opened in July 1840, the circuit being constructed in six months, costing £2,338. This railway was rope-operated with each of the five stations having a single-needle instrument connected to one five-dial instrument in the rope-engine house, so as to stop and start traction. The india-rubber insulated wires were again laid in iron tubes, this time secured to the line-side walling; the railway was on a brick viaduct for much of its short length. The telegraph was used initially entirely for railway traffic control.
A code, one hundred common phrases represented by the movement of two or three deflections of each needle, printed on a wall-chart was quickly introduced during 1840 to enable railway company messages to be sent between the stations and to the rope-engine house; turning it into what the plain-speaking George Stephenson (Robert’s father) called at the time a “talking machine”. A second, parallel telegraph circuit just for “talking” was built by the partners for the Blackwall Railway in 1841.
The successful traffic control of the London & Blackwall Railway immediately inspired several other short cable-worked lines, railway lines in long tunnels and single track lines to adopt Cooke & Wheatstone’s electric telegraph for train management over limited distances, but not yet for public messages.
W F Cooke was particularly keen in this period to promote the use of the telegraph for safety and signalling on railways. He wrote the pamphlet Telegraphic Railways in 1842 recommending “block signalling” in which track, especially on single lines, was divided into blocks or sections into which only one train might enter, their movement in and out monitored electrically. He was the first to define, and to implement, a traffic management system for railways, providing for their efficient and safe operation.
The end of the first railway boom in 1841, brought about by tightening credit and world-wide foreign trade problems, had hindered the partners’ prospects. Capital for the next four years was to be applied to finishing authorised railways rather than to new projects with an unknown future, hence Cooke’s emphasis on utilitarian railway signalling.
The trains of the 20 mile single-track line of the Yarmouth & Norwich Railway were controlled by Cooke & Wheatstone’s telegraph from May 1, 1844. This had a complex and unique arrangement using a large five-dial railway signal instrument with single-needles, similar to that on the Blackwall railway, at each of the five stations on the line, and a separate two-needle message circuit. Though effective, maintenance of such a complicated system with eight wires was excessive; so the five-dial instruments were soon replaced by single-needle telegraphs in series. The Yarmouth & Norwich was to be absorbed into the Eastern Counties Railway.
Cooke & Wheatstone’s Five-dial Railway Telegraph 1844
It was used uniquely on the Yarmouth & Norwich Railway with
a two-needle message telegraph
Cooke’s earliest pipe-conduit-and-post method of conducting wire circuits was to be used on the Blackwall, Leeds & Manchester and Edinburgh & Glasgow railways, as well as on the original West Drayton circuit on the Great Western Railway.
Pursuing their foreign interests Cooke and Wheatstone obtained a patent in the United States on June 10, 1840 based upon their original English brevet. They then sold a half-share to three American citizens.
It the same year, 1840, they acquired their second English patent which introduced the dial telegraph; in which the letters of the alphabet were indicated on the edge of rotating disc, the rotation past an index being electrically dictated by a miniature capstan at a distant station. The first dial telegraph had the disc driven by clockwork with an electrical escapement, and used the power of galvanic batteries to release the escapement.
The earliest arrangements of the electric telegraph were based on the railway company acquiring a licence of the patentees and commissioning the partners to build a line of wire at a rate per mile; requiring Cooke & Wheatstone to purchase materials in advance of full payment. Licenses and the profit from construction were the principle sources of income. Regarding licences; the London & Blackwall were charged £100 a mile on four miles of line; the Edinburgh & Glasgow £100 a mile for a one mile circuit for a tunnel, and the Yarmouth & Norwich £110 a mile for 40 miles. The London & Croydon Railway resisted a demand for a £70 a mile licence; and the Leeds & Manchester rejected outright a licence payment, although both had the telegraph installed by Cooke.
In all of these negotiations on behalf of the patentees and the subsequent project management W F Cooke was the principal, he also engaged – independently of Wheatstone - to manage the construction of the works and purchase materials. Usage of the wire was at the discretion of the railway; until 1843 this did not include general public access.
Whilst Cooke was so active with managing and promoting the patents, with astonishing prescience on February 6, 1840 Wheatstone laid before the House of Commons’ Select Committee on Railways his proposal for an underwater telegraph between England and France. This comprised a cable of seven conductors insulated with yarn saturated with tar and protected by iron wire. It was comprehensive; he presented the design of the cable, the cable-making machine, a profile of the sea-bed, depth soundings between Dover and Cap Griz Nez, the machinery for laying the cable and its installation in a barge. In 1844 Wheatstone was to be found laying an experimental submarine cable in Swansea Bay, South Wales. With his eye for business Cooke complained when Wheatstone would not patent these innovations.
The partners, despite their continual arguments, were granted a new patent in 1842 defining a simpler, much more economic telegraph system.
Cooke & Wheatstone’s Telegraphic System - In January 1843, Cooke renegotiated the agreement with the Great Western Railway, extending the line a further four miles to the more important Slough station. The five-needle telegraph instruments were replaced by a two-needle apparatus that used cipher; and the gas-pipe conduit was replaced by overhead suspension of just two wires secured to glazed pottery insulators pinned to the sides of tall poles. This arrangement of two-needle instruments and the overhead suspension of wires was to be “Cooke & Wheatstone’s Telegraphic System” for the next fifteen years - protected by their patents of 1838 and 1842.
Slough telegraph station on the Great Western Railway 1843
Cooke had experimented with twisted copper wire rope attached to poles on the Great Western line before settling on simple, inexpensive galvanized iron wire as the conductor. He had first used iron wire previously in the year 1843 when the telegraph was introduced into Ireland on the 1½ mile long Dalkey branch of the Dublin & Kingstown Railway. He became a member of the Galvanized Iron Company, which was formed by C W Tupper to work H W Craufurd’s patent of 1837 for coating iron and copper with zinc by hot dipping to prevent corrosion. This patent was a communication from the original inventor the French engineer, Stanislas Sorel. Although called “galvanized” it was not a galvanic or electrical process. The iron company’s main product was thin galvanized plate for corrugating, wire was a subsidiary item.
Cooke reported in the press during 1843 that the gas-pipe conduit and rubber-coated copper wires had cost £287 per mile; compared with his new system of overhead-suspended iron wires and pottery insulators at £149 per mile, both net of contractor’s profit and contingencies. Insulation was considerably improved.
Wheatstone, as an academic, did not wish to engage in the increasingly involved management of the patents; and he also, quite probably, wished to reduce his relationship with the argumentative Cooke. On April 12, 1843 he assigned his patent rights to Cooke, exchanging his share in any profits from licenses and contracting for making the works for a one-off royalty on every mile of telegraph laid, on a sliding scale from £15 to £20. The royalty payments that he received under this agreement show the slow progress of the telegraph; in 1844 it was £444 and in 1845, when 175 new miles of line were completed, £2,775. However in this assignment he retained rights to use his latest dial instruments for circuits less than one mile in length; these were intended for domestic and other purposes.
Wheatstone also retained rights to sell licences in the continent of Europe, excepting Austria and Russia. In pursuit of this he commissioned F O Ward, a former medical student at King’s College, to act as his agent abroad on January 21, 1846. Wheatstone was to have a royalty of £3 a mile on each mile that he facilitated. It was an abortive agreement; Ward remained in Britain and became well-known as a “sanitary agitator”.
First Public Access - On May 16, 1843, the circuit between London and Slough was opened for messages by Cooke & Wheatstone’s agent, Thomas Home: this was Britain’s first public telegraph service, albeit an exercise in generating publicity. Slough was convenient for the Royal residence at Windsor and the Queen’s household and her Government were soon patronising the electric telegraph in mutual, widely-reported, exchanges. There were eventually six electric telegraph stations on this early line on the Great Western Railway – Paddington, Ealing, Hanwell, Southall, West Drayton and Slough. The flat rate charge was 1s 0d for a message of any length between any station, delivery by messenger or cab was extra; there was also a 1s 0d entry fee to the offices for mere spectators.
As well as introducing the two-needle instrument for public telegraphy in 1843 Thomas Home also announced demonstrations of what he called "Prof Wheatstone’s electro-magnetic telegraph" in the lengthened Great Western Railway circuits. Unlike the Cooke & Wheatstone two-needle instruments this indicated individual letters and numbers by turning a circular dial and used electricity produced by a rotating magneto device without batteries of cells! At the time it was used only to generate publicity; members of the public could send their own messages with this device by turning a hand-sized wheel to send pulses of electricity to move the disc of the dial telegraph.
The First Long Line in Britain
From London to Southampton, completed in 1844
The momentum for real expansion came at last in August, 1844 when W F Cooke negotiated with the Board of Admiralty for the erection of a long private line of electric telegraph between Whitehall in London and the naval headquarters at Portsmouth alongside of the London & South-Western Railway – replacing a redundant naval semaphore apparatus with Cooke & Wheatstone’s new Telegraphic System of two-needle instruments and overhead wires. The Admiralty were to pay £1,200 per annum to use the circuit. As part of this deal he obtained rights for parallel wires for railway messages and for public messages which extended over the entire system of the London & South-Western company – in particular to the port city of Southampton, the gateway to the Mediterranean Sea and India. This, the first long-distance circuit in Britain, opened from Nine Elms, London through to Southampton and Gosport in January 1845 and cost in total £24,000.
In February 1845 the Queen’s Speech on the annual opening of Parliament was transmitted from Nine Elms in London to Portsmouth, at eighty-eight miles the longest circuit then possible in England. The speech contained 3,600 letters and took two hours to transmit, at the rate of 300 letters a minute.
Wheatstone's Electro-Magnetic Dial Telegraph
No batteries needed
Wheatstone’s new alphabet-indicating dial telegraph was tried experimentally in this long circuit on both the Admiralty and the public wires in 1845. However an ‘on-line’ chess tournament on April 12, 1845 between London and Portsmouth to publicise the dial telegraph had to be undertaken on the two-needle apparatus. At this stage of development the dial instruments proved unreliable and were difficult to synchronise.
In May 1845 Cooke reported to the press that, under his management, the electric telegraph extended over the following routes:
1. London & South-Western Railway – for the Government, from the Admiralty at Whitehall to Portsmouth, 90 miles
2. London & South-Western Railway – for commercial use, Nine Elms to Southampton, 77 miles
3. London & South-Western Railway – for commercial use, Southampton to Gosport, 21 miles
4. London & Dover (South Eastern Railway) - Tunbridge to Maidstone (single line), 15 miles
5. London & Croydon Railway (an atmospheric line), 9 miles
6. South Devon Railway – Exeter to Plymouth (in part an atmospheric line), 52 miles
7. London & Blackwall Railway (cable), 3 miles
8. Great Western Railway - London to Slough, 18 miles
9. Yarmouth & Norwich Railway (single line), 20 miles
Cooke also noted at this time circuits he had laid between April 1843 and December 1845 alongside parts of the Manchester & Leeds Railway, that company’s Oldham branch, the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway, the Dalkey branch (an atmospheric line) of the Dublin & Kingstown Railway in Ireland, the Northampton to Peterborough branch (single line) and the relaying of the very first line between Euston Square and Camden of the London & Birmingham (soon to become the London & North-Western) Railway. There were then about 250 miles of Cooke & Wheatstone’s telegraph, granted on local licences of the patentees to the relevant railway company controlling the route. None were contiguous.
Cooke recorded that he had provided thirty-six patent telegraph instruments in this time.
A further 300 miles were planned to connect London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Holyhead, the ferry port for Dublin, Ireland, alongside of the tracks of the newly amalgamated London & North-Western Railway and its allies.
As his part of their agreement Wheatstone had successfully negotiated concessions abroad, introducing their electric telegraph into France in 1842, Germany in 1843 and Belgium in 1845, all with circuits built alongside of railways.
On the South Devon Railway in the far west of the country, Cooke & Wheatstone, in the autumn of 1844, contracted to install the telegraph on its whole fifty-two mile length at £160 per mile, linking the passenger stations. However by January 1848 atmospheric working was used on just twenty miles; the eight pump-engine houses initially, and to the detriment of atmospheric operation, did not have direct access to the telegraph, which was located in the ticket offices.
During January 1846 the Eastern Counties Railway commissioned Cooke to install the telegraph over its 186 miles of track and 55 stations. By mid-year 180 miles of telegraph line were completed, worked by sixty instruments. For a great many years this was the most intense use of the electric telegraph by a railway company, with more lines and instruments per mile of rail than any other. As well as for signalling it was used extensively for public messaging. This level of innovation is remarkable in that the Eastern Counties Railway was ridden with financial scandal from its beginning; teetering on bankruptcy for half-a-century.
The contract for building the original Eastern Counties Railway line, and latterly many of its subsidiaries and branches, was let to Morton Peto. In 1846 he was already a great builder and was shortly to become one of the largest contractors for public works in Britain. By 1850 one-third of all the rails in England had been constructed by Peto, a figure of controversy in his financial affairs. However he was to be the saviour of the electric telegraph in the hard times to come, and was to be active in its development for many years.
In July 1846 the telegraph on the Eastern Counties connected London with Norwich and Yarmouth, with Ipswich in the east of the country, and most of the railway’s intermediate stations. It also had a circuit from Ely to Peterborough which opened a connection to Birmingham and Rugby, along the Peterborough branch of the London & North-Western Railway, anticipating the new telegraph to Liverpool. The wire on its branch to Blackwall allowed public messages to and from there for the first time; the London & Blackwall Railway Company’s old circuit was still “for the use of the Company alone.” It was the intention of the Eastern Counties’ board to place the electric telegraph on all of its important branches.
The instruments on the Eastern Counties were worked by its station-masters except where business necessitated a dedicated clerk.
During September 1845 Cooke announced the extension of the telegraph over the entire system of the South Eastern Railway. For the first time the works over the 124 miles of its main line from London to Dover and all of its branches were undertaken by an independent contractor commissioned by the railway company, W T Henley, not by Cooke, and completed in July 1846. This was Cooke’s last major contract as sole manager of the Cooke & Wheatstone patents. To continue with the expansion of telegraphy a large capital was needed.
The Railway Connection - As can be seen, all of the small number of lines of telegraph the partners’ organised were alongside of railways, where the rights of way between centres of population were already under single ownership.
Of these lines, the long city-to-city circuit alongside of the London & South-Western Railway was the most vital, demonstrating to the public the importance of the electric telegraph. Of the others, most used the telegraph for traffic control, either for single line working or because they did not use locomotive engines at all and required signals to stop and start stationary engines. As noted, the Blackwall railway was worked by cable and the Croydon, South Devon and Dalkey lines used the so-called atmospheric system, the trains being drawn by a piston in a vacuum tube between the rails with large line-side air pumps (a process that George Stephenson acidly dubbed “a rope of air”).
Such public access to the electric telegraph as existed between 1841 and 1844 was confined to offices within a very limited number of railway stations, with no interconnecting or long-distance traffic or common tariff. Public use of the telegraph was, in fact, scarcely considered in that period.
The intimate connection between railway companies and the electric telegraph was established almost immediately the Cooke & Wheatstone patent was granted and continued for the next thirty years. The railway connection was for the most part invisible to the public and, perhaps surprisingly, also to the Government. The owners of the telegraph line, whether Cooke & Wheatstone or their corporate successors, through this co-operation had the immense advantage of having to deal with one landholder, the railway company.
Not that this connection was straightforward: for by 1867 there were to be 476 different railway companies in the three kingdoms (the maximum achieved in Britain and Ireland), each company having been debated and authorised by Parliament, owning 14,247 miles of rails; frequently merging and floating-off subsidiaries.
The competitors to Cooke & Wheatstone that appeared once their patents expired had to find other ways to connect populations.
Growth of the Railways 1800 -1850
Knight’s Cyclopaedia 1851
Year………Acts of Parliament………Miles Authorised……..Miles Open
By 1840…………..299………………………..3,000
1841………………..19………………………….14 ……………………….1,100
1842………………..22…………………………67
1843………………..24…………………………91
1844………………..48…………………………797
1845………………..20…………………………2,888
1846………………..270…………………..….4,790
1847………………..184…………………..…..1,668
1847………………..83…………………………300
1849……………..…85…………………………c50
1850………………..30…………………………c50
Total……………….1,140……………………..13,700………………..6,621
Each line of railway required an authorising Act of the British Parliament, not just in establishing the concern but for every branch and alteration.
There had been a Little Mania for railway building in 1836 as well as the great speculative Mania throughout 1845 and 1846, which required the debating of 574 new Acts of Parliament to create railway companies.
Unlike in the United States or in wilder parts of Europe there were no major cross-country telegraph lines. The telegraph in Britain was to follow the rails, the roads and, eventually, the canals to connect cities. Also unlike in the United States there were few ‘point-to-point’ telegraphic concerns – in Britain the overwhelming majority of the several enterprises that were soon to be created to develop domestic telegraphy were, or at least intended to be, ‘national’ in coverage.