| NON-COMPETITORS
To complete the picture of the telegraph industry in the mid-nineteenth century it is necessary to hark back to some predecessors. The semaphore or optical telegraph was introduced into England for the Admiralty in 1796. It was first established between London and Dover, and then from London to the naval station at Portsmouth. It, in its developed state, used a system based on a vertical mast set above station-houses on high ground within sight of each other over its course; requiring constant, eye-straining vigilance by the signallers in the daylight hours. The most important semaphore telegraph, between the Admiralty in London and Portsmouth, ran over 72 miles and cost latterly between £3,000 and £3,500 a year to work. In addition to this substantial sum it was, allegedly, only fully operational for one-fifth of the year; being interrupted regularly by fog, by rain and even by gloomy weather. The Admiralty semaphore was abandoned in 1847.
Optical Marine Telegraphs
Independent of these obsolete Government semaphore lines there were three other similar commercial marine telegraphs still functioning early in this period. 
The General Telegraph Association’s optical telegraph station at Southwark, London, it worked Barnard Watson’s semaphore until 1843 The Liverpool & Holyhead Telegraph worked between 1827 and 1860; the General Telegraph Association connected London with the North Foreland and Kingsdown on the Kent coast between 1841 and 1843, when its London signal tower burned down; the Hull & East Coast Marine Telegraph Company linked Hull with Spurn Head in the period 1839 to 1857; and a line between Southampton and the south coast of the Isle of Wight, owned by the London association, functioned for a short period from 1842.
All of these commercial optical telegraph companies used the semaphore system of Barnard Watson, with moving arms atop tall masts on a sequence of hill-top stations, to give advance warning to docks and wharfs of approaching shipping. Messages had to be received and re-signalled by each station in the line in daylight hours, but even so – if the weather was clement – they worked regularly.
The marine telegraphs were private investments of the dock companies; the service was used free-of-charge by ship-owners except for the need to purchase Watson’s proprietary signal flags; over 1,300 vessels carried them. Marine telegraphs did not offer public access or messaging unconnected with shipping.
At the maturity of the telegraph companies, during the early 1860s, there had been a technical consolidation into three wholly-independent, incompatible national operating ‘systems’, Cooke & Wheatstone’s single-needle with the Electric Telegraph Company, Bright’s bell with the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company and Hughes’ printer with the United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company. But there had been others. 
Davy’s Recorder 1838 Plan view, left to right: six current reversing keys and three galvanic cells, the three wire circuit, two sets of three horizontal needle indicators, two more cells, and the six-element cylindrical chemical recorder with a clockwork-driven broad roll of treated cloth at extreme right The Voltaic Telegraph Company Had Edward Davy’s marital affairs been more ordered the history of the telegraph would have been radically different.
Edward Davy proposed the first company of proprietors for the working of an electric telegraph. On September 8, 1838 he launched the prospectus of the Voltaic Telegraph Company, of 5 Exeter Hall, Strand, London, with a joint-stock capital of £500,000 in 10,000 shares each of £50, requiring a deposit of £5. This was, on the surface, a substantial concern. The Marquis of Douro (son of the Duke of Wellington), and Lord Sandon agreed to be Trustees, in whose names all property would be held. A Board of Directors was assembled: Sir Francis Knowles FRS, John Wright, James Emerson Tennent MP, William Bagge MP and a Mr Harrison. Knowles was a director of the St Marylebone Bank, Wright was proprietor of Wright & Co., bankers to the catholic hierarchy, and Harrison was chairman of the London & Southampton Railway. Charles Fox, an associate of Robert Stephenson on the London & Birmingham Railway, was appointed Engineer, and Edward Davy was to be Superintendent of Machinery. McDougall & Co., Parliament Street, Westminster, one of the few firms of lawyers familiar with joint-stock companies, was to handle legal matters. The price of Davy’s new telegraph patent was to be £10,000 and “one or two thousand shares”. The draft prospectus was circulated to railway companies throughout England, seeking wayleaves or rights of way as well as capital during 1838. Mr Brunel, junior, and the directors of the Great Western Railway called on Davy to view his telegraph. Other companies contacted during 1838 included, in order of approach, the London & Birmingham, London & Southampton, Birmingham & Gloucester, Midland Counties, Bristol & Exeter, Grand Junction, Birmingham & Derby, and London & Brighton. All of this advanced corporate activity was undertaken in the year that W F Cooke and Charles Wheatstone obtained their first patent. It took them, or rather W F Cooke, another ten years of negotiations and heartache before they got to the same state. Davy was a man of quite incredible genius tempered, if that is the word, with a degree of paranoia. By education and training he was a surgeon and apothecary, born in 1806 at Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, and dying in 1883 in Australia. He established a successful business in 1830 as Davy & Company, operative chemists, 390 Strand, London, manufacturing and supplying instruments and devising chemical products, such as a cement to repair fine china. In May 1837 Davy described in detail his first plan for a message telegraph. This was a twelve-needle apparatus, including letter and colour (or shift) functions, and alarms, worked by twelve keys and two current reversers, with “electrical renewers”, transmitting fifty letters of the alphabet in two-and-a-half minutes. This was wholly original in introducing both current reversal, rather than “on-off” switches, and the relay to electric telegraphy! He published estimates for six-wire circuits connecting London with Dover, Brighton, Bristol, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Liverpool, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Exeter, as well as Liverpool to Manchester, totalling £144,000. He proposed up and down circuits, as in the working of the railways, anticipating traffic would be too great for one line. Davy even calculated individual station expenses in staff and materials. Earlier in that year he had obtained permission of HM Commissioners of Woods & Forests to lay a one mile long circuit of copper wire around the Inner Circle of the Regent’s Park in Marylebone, London. Unsurprisingly, given his enthusiasm and enterprise, Davy opposed the grant of Cooke & Wheatstone’s telegraph patent of May 1837. During November and December 1837 the initial Davy apparatus, made in his own workshops, was demonstrated to the public at the Belgrave Institution, 30 Sloane Street, London. Then from December 29, 1837 until November 10, 1838 Edward Davy took a show-room and office at No 5 Exeter Hall, Strand, in London from which to promote and display his telegraphs. The exhibition, “lighted by an enormous galvanic battery”, was open from 11 o’clock to 5 o’clock each day, entry was one shilling. Early in 1838 Edward Davy launched his chemical recording telegraph in direct competition with Cooke & Wheatstone’s patented needle instrument. The new telegraph utilised three wires with individual circuits that combined to work by means of six keys both a two-needle telegraph with a third needle as a “shift” function, and a printer that recorded a six-element cypher on a continuous roll of chemically-treated calico cloth by means of six clockwork-driven metallic cylinders. The recording telegraph was reviewed by the famous physicist Michael Faraday and a favourable report given by him to the Commissioners of Patents. This enabled Davy to obtain a patent in spite of Cooke & Wheatstone’s opposition, including his “electrical renewer” or relay. It was completed on January 4, 1839. Davy, anticipating that the railway companies would beat a path to his door to pay for rights, began to organise the Voltaic Telegraph Company. But by the summer of 1839 Edward Davy had abandoned all his plans and sold his operative chemist business at 390 Strand to Dr William George Welch and had sailed to a new life in Australia.
The Davy family, though not understanding the opportunities they offered, attempted to promote the message and recording telegraphs in new rooms at the Exeter Hall through 1839 and 1840. They had not Edward Davy’s talent or determination; late in 1840 his telegraphs were taken off to his home town of Ottery St Mary in Devon where they survived until 1878 before being broken up. Charles Wheatstone thought sufficient of the competitive telegraphs to propose to W F Cooke on July 18, 1839 that they buy Edward Davy’s patent. However Davy eventually acknowledged that the partners’ apparatus was of more utility than his own complex devices. It was not until May 12, 1847 that the Electric Telegraph Company acquired the patent so as to utilise the “electrical renewer” – the very first electrical relay. The company bought it for £600.
J J Fahie, from whose work this long extract is drawn, wrote in 1884 “it is certain that… (Davy) had a clearer grasp of the requirements and capabilities of an electric telegraph than … Cooke and Wheatstone.” Even if he had persevered Davy’s Voltaic Telegraph Company may not have prospered, the banks of his directors, Knowles and Wright, both failed catastrophically in the next couple of years. Edward Davy left London in 1839, his family records show, not for any nefarious or coercive reason, but to escape from Mrs Davy… It is therefore pleasing to record that Dr Davy had a full and successful career (and private life) in Melbourne, Victoria.
Alexander’s telegraph 1837 Thirty letters and symbols, thirty-one wires and thirty keys Each key (right) dipped in and out of mercury, a galvanic cell below Alexander’s Telegraph Another curious might-have-been is in an advertisement in ‘The Times’ of July 8, 1837. William Alexander of 19 Windsor Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, proposed to connect his home city with London, a distance of 450 miles, through his own system of galvanic telegraphy. This involved having one copper wire for each letter of the alphabet and for punctuation and one common return circuit, i.e. thirty-one wires in all, laid three feet beneath the public highways, each wire insulated with lacquer or “resin” within two boards of baked wood for further protection. The “telegraph” itself was a three-foot square horizontal screen with thirty one-inch square apertures each with a lifting shutter worked by a four-inch electro-magnet connected with a distant set of thirty keys. He estimated that such a circuit would cost £26,000, and, anticipating sending a minimum of sixty-five words in five minutes at 5s 0d a message, an annual revenue over 300 twelve hour working days of £10,800. Experiments at the University of Edinburgh over several hundred yards, Alexander felt, had proven the technical aspects of his ideas; he expected the Post Office to take an interest in continuing his plan. Although reviewed by the learned and mechanical societies it was otherwise ignored. Like Banquo’s ghost Alexander’s telegraph reappeared at the Great Exhibition of 1851 to haunt the telegraph companies!
General Oceanic According to Board of Trade returns the Railway Mania year of 1845 saw the registration under the new Joint Stock Companies Act of the General Oceanic Telegraph Company and the General Commercial Telegraph Company.
General Oceanic was registered by Jacob Brett on June 16, 1845 “to form a connecting mode of communication by telegraphic means from the British Islands and across the Atlantic Ocean to Nova Scotia and the Canadas, the Colonies and Continental Kingdoms.” It was also known later as the “General Oceanic & Subterranean Electric Printing Telegraph Company”; the Brett family, promoters of the first successful submarine telegraph, had a weakness for compendious company titles. General Commercial The General Commercial Telegraph Company, a mysterious, anonymous promotion, of Bond Court, Walbrook, City, sought a capital £600,000 in twenty-four thousand shares, on September 15, 1845 – the same day as the Electric Telegraph Company was launched. It has been said that S F B Morse, having a competitive telegraph to sell and who visited England during the year, was connected with this company. General Oceanic and the General Commercial firm, did not progress beyond discussion in the press. But the Brett family did as they promised, forming electrical connections “from the British Islands and across the Atlantic Ocean to Nova Scotia and the Canadas, the Colonies and Continental Kingdoms”.
Scottish Electric Telegraph The Scottish Electric Telegraph Company was the first promotion of the serial capitalist Thomas Allan in Edinburgh. It was advertised on December 8, 1848, to acquire and work the improved needle and dial telegraphs patented by Prof George Henry Bachhoffner, the founder and principal lecturer at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. It was only able to promote itself as the master patent of Cooke & Wheatstone did not apply in Scotland; however the Scots proved quite happy to have the Electric Telegraph Company of England provide its circuits in their country and the Scottish company had the briefest of lives. Allan was to go on to project telegraph companies for another twenty years, all of which were unsuccessful.
Highton Henry Highton, a cleric from Rugby, took out a patent in February 1846 for his ‘gold-leaf’ telegraph. The indicator was a gold-leaf filament in an air-filled glass tube moved left and right by an electro-magnet, using a single wire. Although it was a frail contrivance it was adopted on the Baden Railway in South Germany in October 1847, and was bought by the Electric Telegraph Company. The Highton family were to found the first competitor to the Company in 1850.
Little George Little, an American living in London in 1847, obtained a patent for a remarkably simple two-needle telegraph along with a host of other electrical devices, relays, lightning conductors, clocks, batteries and insulators. Only the insulators survived into posterity. From the patent drawings the device was obviously manufactured (they were illustrations not schematics). A substantial pamphlet was produced to promote the patent apparatus. Initially Little was in partnership with Alfred Brett, not, apparently, one of the famous Brett family who organised the cross-Channel cable, but a brandy merchant. After successfully challenging Little’s patent in the Courts during 1851 the Electric Telegraph Company suppressed its use. At this time George Little went on devise an ingenious miniature telegraph receiver using magnetised moving filaments in oil-filled glass tubes instead of needle galvanometers, which he attempted to market in Britain, Europe and America during the 1850s. In July 1852 Little returned to New York and, in the later 1860s, patented his version of an automatic telegraph, which T A Edison in America subsequently perfected – the great man’s first electrical success. Gamble One of the side-bars to the early telegraph chronology in Britain is that created by Douglas Pitt Gamble. He was born in 1819 as one of the family that successfully introduced preserved provisions in tin-plated canisters. By 1844 he was in partnership with John Richard Gamble, trading as provision merchants of 78 Cornhill, London. By his own account he first took an interest in the dial telegraph devised by John Nott late in 1845.
John Nott of the city of Cork in Ireland obtained a patent for a dial telegraph on January 20, 1846. This apparatus used two keys to work an electrically-controlled ratchet that propelled a pointer around a large dial to indicate letters and numbers. By the end of the year Nott had taken into partnership D P Gamble and J R Gamble, with offices at 2 Royal Exchange Buildings, in the financial district of London.
Pitt Gamble had considerable influence in the City and in government through his firm’s provision contracts with the shipping companies and with the Admiralty. The latter was, of all state bodies, the most interested in the electric telegraph – even as early as 1844 connecting its staff in London with its stations and yards on the coasts by that medium. Gamble was a pragmatist and quickly realised the future of the telegraph lay in cooperating with the trunk lines of railway extending out from London.
His first activity on behalf of Nott’s telegraph was in approaching the chairman of the newly-formed London & North-Western Railway, George Carr Glyn, the banker, and meeting with its Secretary, Richard Creed on January 28, 1846. Creed commissioned a series of tenders from Pitt Gamble, ranging from constructing telegraph lines at a rate per twenty-five miles, up to 500 miles, to purchasing a license for the Nott patent and erecting the line themselves. Creed and Pitt Gamble continued negotiations over the next two months, at which time a committee of the Board of Directors was set up to examine the telegraph issue. Cooke & Wheatstone had already contracted with the Grand Junction Railway, one of the components of the London & North-Western Railway, whose Secretary was the formidable Captain Mark Huish, to lay its telegraph alongside of its rails between Birmingham and Newton Junction for Liverpool and Manchester. This was to prove a considerable lobbying base in the Amalgamated Board.
At Pitt Gamble’s own expense an experimental Nott line with overhead wires on poles was made on the railway’s branch between Northampton and Blisworth (Part of the Northampton & Peterborough railway, which seems to have been used by the North-Western company for several electrical experiments). He also organised an ‘impartial’ report on Nott’s apparatus from Professor William Thomas Brande of the Royal Institution, an academic associate of Michael Faraday. The railway company appointed Edward Highton, who had his own patented instruments to promote, to be its Telegraph Engineer and to advise its Telegraph Committee on the best technical arrangements. He was tasked with comparing the competitive systems of Cooke & Wheatstone and Nott on the two test circuits. Highton and the Telegraph Committee reported in favour of the Electric Telegraph Company, owners of Cooke & Wheatstone’s patents.
Pitt Gamble was to claim that “the Chairman, many of the Directors and the Engineer of the London & North-Western Railway Company, were deeply interested in the (Electric) Telegraph Company with Mr Ricardo” in 1846. Whilst the engineer, Robert Stephenson, and his business partner George Parker Bidder, were indeed advocates of the Electric company, this was scarcely a secret, neither was the fact that Glyn & Co. were the Electric’s bankers.
However none of this stopped Pitt Gamble from using his insider contacts to obtain reports made for the Admiralty by Michael Faraday and Major Brandreth on his telegraph and having them sent to the railway’s board to further his cause.
The Electric Telegraph Company pursued Nott and Gamble ruthlessly through the Court claiming patent infringement. The first suit was heard on November 13, 1846 when they sought an injunction against the use of Nott’s apparatus. It was refused. Between February 10 and 19, 1847 a much more substantial case was presented against Nott and Gamble. In this the affidavits, from Prof George Henry Bachhoffner, Prof William Thomas Brande, John Raymond Brittan, clockmaker, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, civil engineer, William Carpmael, engineer, Prof John Thomas Cooper, John Farey, engineer, James Sealy Fourdrinier, engineer, Charles Frodsham, chronometer-maker, Prof William Allen Miller, William Newton, engineer, Peter Mark Roget of the Royal Society, George Stephenson, civil engineer, Robert Stephenson, civil engineer and Prof Charles Wheatstone, totalled 133 pages. Once again the Court of Chancery refused an injunction without legal proof of patent piracy by Nott and Gamble. The telegraph company almost immediately commenced three more actions against Nott and Gamble. These lasted from March 30, 1847 until 1848, when they were abandoned.
On December 14, 1846 Pitt Gamble was bluntly informed that the London & North-Western Railway and the Electric Telegraph Company were in negotiation and that other parties were no longer involved in the telegraph issue. Richard Creed advised Pitt Gamble to amalgamate his telegraph interests with the Electric company, and that the railway’s chairman, Glyn, would recommend such a course to the telegraph company’s chairman, Lewis Ricardo, as he was “a personal friend”. Pitt Gamble was made bankrupt on his own petition on December 7, 1847 as an “electric telegraph manufacturer and contractor”. His property was sold at auction on December 23, 1847.
Douglas Pitt Gamble became private secretary to Lewis Ricardo, chairman of the Electric Telegraph Company, in 1848. Once in that role he successfully had James Sealy Fourdrinier, one of the witnesses for Nott’s telegraph, installed as Secretary and Manager of the Electric and his ally William Wylde, to the Board. Pitt Gamble became Secretary and Manager of the International Telegraph Company, and of the Channel Islands Telegraph Company, both of which were subsidiaries of the Electric. He was dismissed from these roles for gross insubordination in 1859 and, age 40, had no further employment. He applied in 1874 for a pension from the Post Office Telegraphs; the request was rejected. Whilst Pitt Gamble had sorted out his own future in 1848, according to one source “poor Nott, the inventor, was left to starve”.
Nott’s apparatus was subsequently re-installed by the Electric company on the Great Western Railway on December 1, 1847 to control trains through the long tunnel at Box on its London to Bristol line. Whishaw and the General Telegraph Company
The General Telegraph Company, a simple partnership not a joint-stock concern, was promoted in October 1848 by Francis Whishaw, the civil engineer who had written so much about Cooke & Wheatstone’s apparatus, “to execute, by contract or otherwise, the most approved electric, hydraulic, pneumatic or mechanical telegraphs”. He had publicised a hydraulic telegraph in 1838 but abandoned that and had been employed by Royal Society of Arts & Sciences before joining the Electric Telegraph Company between 1845 and 1848 to manage the correspondence or message department. Whishaw devised the translation system used in abbreviating the Company’s messages. He also introduced the sending of a time signal from London to the provincial offices once each day so that telegraph clocks might be set.
At the Royal Society Whishaw was introduced to the new insulating resin, gutta-percha. He became a strong advocate for its use in telegraphy. In 1844 he presented the case for its use at a lecture attended by William Siemens, then working in Birmingham in England.
On leaving the Electric, Whishaw opened showrooms at 9 John Street, Adelphi, opposite his former employers at the Royal Society of Arts, off the Strand in London, during November 1848. Here he displayed and demonstrated several instruments, including a non-electric mechanical dial telegraph, a hydraulic telegraph, mechanically-connected clocks, an electric burlar alarm, gutta-percha insulation for electric wires, the chain-pipe for protecting submarine circuits, and the ‘telekouphonon’ (or speaking telegraph).  Left: Whishaw's Telekouphonon 1851 The ordinary mouthpiece with a whistle to gain attention. Where several were employed together the indicator pops out when the whistle is blown by the distant correspondent . Whishaw’s widely-publicized ‘telekouphonon’ was simply a long, flexible gutta-percha tube with a rigid mouth-piece and removable whistle at either end through which people spoke with others up to three-quarters of a mile away: in detail it was described in 1851 as “consisting of gutta-percha, glass, metal, or other tubing, with mouthpieces of ivory, hardwood or metal; furnished with whistles, organ-pipes, and other means of calling attention. The index mouthpiece attached to one end of the tube has an indicator to show from which room the call as been made.”
It was also recommended as a Railway Train Communicator, “for communicating between guard and driver, or passengers and driver, a ‘telekouphonon’, in different lengths, with screw joints to suit the lengths of carriages and the spaces between them.” Scarcely an original invention the ‘telekouphonon’ proved very successful in the 1850s domestically, in hotels, in clubs and in business houses, where batteries of such speaking telegraphs were employed to connect distant departments. It was imitated by many others although Whishaw obtained a “poor man’s patent”, a Registered Design, for it on May 22, 1849. 
Left -Whishaw's Telekouphonon 1851 The ‘compound terminal’, the mouthpiece holding a removable whistle alarm and an ‘acoustic duct’ or earpiece with the plug-in, pop-out indicator, “so that a conversation may be carried on without moving the mouth until the communication is completed”. In the 1860s the ‘telekouphonon’ was expensive; made by Benham & Froud, 40-42 Chandos Street, Charing Cross, it cost 1s 5d a foot for its ¾ inch diameter gutta percha tube covered in coloured worsted fabric; ivory mouthpieces were 6s 0d, or in wood and brass 3s 0d, each; and brass connecting screws 1s 0d each.
Whishaw had the major clockmaker, John Smith & Sons, of 2 & 18 St John’s Square, Clerkenwell, manufacture the immensely complex “Uniformity of time clock and telegraph” in 1848 in competition with Cooke & Wheatstone. This was a mechanical telegraph with several functions, including time and cipher transmission. Smith described Whishaw’s telegraph in 1851: “one of the uses of it being to regulate time between distant places to the hundreth part of a minute, by means of sounds transmitted by electrical agency. It also formed a telegraph, as there were four distinct alphabets and numerous signs and signals distinctly marked in red and black on the annular movable plate which surrounded the dial. There were four hands, which rotated together; one of these was distinguished from the others by being of a light colour, and was called the index hand, as by it the class of signals to be used was indicated. The other hands were used for pointing to the signals, which were thus more quickly given than if only one hand had been used. By two electrical bells, of dissimilar sound, the particular quarter of the dial on which the signals were to be read off was readily understood. Besides the telegraph dial and regulator, there was a second face with the ordinary hands, so that one side might be in the telegraph room of the railway station, while the other faced the booking office.” Two were made, one kept by Smith, the other by Whishaw. One can only imagine its appearance... John Smith & Sons survive today as Smiths Industries, manufacturers of instruments for the aerospace industry.
Latterly Whishaw appears to have acted as agent or licensee for the electric index telegraph of his former colleague, W H Hatcher; for Richard Wrighton’s electric train signal; for Nathaniel Holmes’ electric whistle; for J O N Rutter’s fire and burglar alarm; as well as, and more importantly, for Siemens original galvanic index telegraph.
The Siemens zeigertelegraph was patented in England in 1850, three years after its brevet in Berlin. It was very widely used in Prussia, Russia and the German States. Using galvanic batteries, it consisted of a twelve-inch diameter dial with thirty ivory keys about its circumference and a needle or index at its centre. Once the machine was put in circuit the needle was kept constantly rotating by the electric current, pressing one of the keys stopped the needle at the same point on both the sending and receiving instruments. The large brass case of the dial also possessed a bell alarm in its mechanism. It was contained in a substantial horizontal mahogany box, twenty-four inches by sixteen inches by nine inches, along with its own galvanometer and all the commutators necessary to manage its circuits. It was said to be the perfect galvanic dial telegraph in its ease of operation and integrity. This, the first Siemens instrument, was relatively complex and expensive in original cost and in working. It was to be replaced in manufacture by Siemens magneto-electric dial in 1859.
It was anticipated in the late 1840s that there would be a market for index or dial telegraphs in those locations where the employment of a dedicated, specially-trained operator would not be economical. On European railways station-masters, porters and other staff worked these instruments which did not require knowledge of codes or cipher. As it turned out in Britain the reverse situation transpired; telegraph companies’ clerks assisted with railway duties.
Whishaw also promoted Siemens chain-pipe, lengths of articulated cast-iron tube, 3 feet long and 1 to 2½ inches in diameter connected by ball-and-socket joints. This was used to protect submarine gutta percha insulated wires in Prussia from 1849 before armouring of cables with iron wire was perfected. The longest span of chain-pipe was 1,200 feet, crossing the Rhine river from the town of Cologne to Deutz. When Siemens opened their own office in London during 1850 Whishaw began exhibiting and marketing the electro-magnetic printing telegraph of 1848 devised by P A J Dujardin of Lille, France. This used a rotating magneto to generate a series of dots that were printed in ink in a spiral on a paper-covered drum.
Although Francis Whishaw’s name was publicly attached to several of these devices; he widely advertised and organised public expositions of “Whishaw’s Telegraphic System” during 1849 and 1850 with an index apparatus and a peculiar gutta-percha insulated subterranean cable; his only patent protection was for multi-tubular stone-ware pipes to protect resin-covered wires and an electro-magnetic lock. The East India Company, which governed most of the sub-continent, invited him to submit proposals for a telegraph system for India and for undertaking its construction, in September 1849. It was received by their Board but not taken-up.
The General Telegraph concern survived at least until 1851: its real contribution to telegraphy was in the employment of Nathaniel J Holmes as manager in 1849, after W H Hatcher, Whishaw and he were let go by the Electric company in March 1848. An associate of Wheatstone, Holmes became one of the principal electrical engineers in domestic and submarine telegraphy.
Whishaw died in 1856 after a long illness.
Later Speculations The Dublin & Holyhead Submarine Telegraph Company was projected by Charles John Blunt, a civil engineer previously employed by John Watkin Brett, the cable pioneer. Blunt, a man of dubious probity, fell out with Brett and launched this concern on February 24, 1849. He looked for a capital of £40,000 in eight thousand shares. It got nowhere.
George Edward Dering patented a single-needle telegraph in December 1850. In this the needle was suspended like a pendulum from the top rather than rotating on an axis to prevent unnecessary oscillation, with the advantage of reducing the power of the batteries needed. There was also a novel secrecy accessory, in this a separate dial rotated to obscure the needle at selected stations, as well as a paratonnerre or lightning protector, and an insulator. The single pendulum needle telegraph was licensed to the Bank of England, who created an internal network in its vast premises on Threadneedle Street, London, and it was used experimentally on the London to Dover circuit of the European Telegraph Company and on the Great Northern Railway. The ill-fated Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland selected Dering’s apparatus for its circuits in 1852, and elected him a director.
The Universal Electric Telegraph Company was formed in 1853 with a capital of £300,000 to work the patent of John Walker-Wilkins. The novelty of this apparatus lay in using a roll of carbon-paper interleaved with plain paper on which an electro-magnetically-worked blunt needle or stylus moved left and right to indicate signals. The Company advertised Charles Wheatstone as its “Scientific Referee”. It did not raise any capital. Walker-Wilkins had previously worked for the partnership of Cooke & Wheatstone on their first long line to Southampton and for the Electric Telegraph Company. He had also, previously to this company promotion, worked in America for the “People’s Line”, a telegraph from Kentucky to Louisiana, where he had developed a new electrical relay that challenged the Morse Syndicate’s monopoly. The European & American Submarine Telegraph Company was created in 1856 by John Watkins Brett and the directors of the Submarine Telegraph Company for a cable between Ireland and America. With a capital of £750,000 in £5 shares it claimed to be the successor to Brett’s General Ocean company of 1845, combining the oceanic interests of the Submarine and original Magnetic companies in England just before the creation of the British & Irish Magnetic Company in 1857. This evolved quickly into the Atlantic Telegraph Company, described later in this work. There was a rush of promotions for underwater cable lines after the first Atlantic cable failed in 1857, none of which were built, or even raised any significant capital:
The South Atlantic Telegraph Company was registered in London during 1858. It proposed a very ambitious programme of cable laying: connecting Falmouth in the west of England with Cape Finisterre, Lisbon in Portugal, Cape St Vincent, the Canary Islands, St Paul Island, Fernando Noronha Island and Pernambuco in Brazil. Branches were to be built from St Vincent to Cadiz and Gibraltar; from the Canaries to Madeira. A land line was to be constructed from Pernambuco north to Para, with a submarine line hence to Demerara in British Guiana, then along the West Indian islands to New Orleans in the United States.
In the following year, 1859, Taliaferro Preston Shaffner, an American, registered the British Transatlantic Telegraph Company in London to make a chain of cables from Scotland to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Labrador in Canada. This route was first planned by the Ocean Telegraph Company of 1852, and was later taken up by the North American Telegraph Company and the British & Canadian Telegraph Company in the 1860s. Shaffner in America and the geographer James Wyld in Britain competed for the concessions related to these ultimately unsuccessful lines. Shaffner was determined enough to survey the icy route himself in a chartered schooner. But there is more of the cable business elsewhere in this piece… On May 21, 1860 Captain William Rowett, a Cornish-born former sea-captain, then a rope-maker and patentee of hemp-covered submarine telegraph cables obtained a concession of the Imperial government in Paris for a cable from France to the United States. The 1860s, particularly after the passing of a new liberal Limited Liability Act in 1855 and the Companies Act in 1862, saw the promotion of several speculative concerns. Thomas Allan, the telegraph engineer and serial promoter, launched the Ocean Telegraph Company (the second of that name, also called the Great Ocean Telegraph Company) and the Great Indian Submarine Telegraph Company in 1858, Allan’s Telegraph & Factory Company in 1861, the Railway Electric Engineering & Telegraph Works Company in 1865, then, after being dismissed by the United Kingdom company, the National Telegraph Company in 1865, from his home in the Adelphi; none of these proceeded beyond publicity. In May 1864 William Rowett, obtained a renewal of his 1860 concession of the French government for a circuit running from Brest to St Pierre et Miquelon off Newfoundland, by way of Cape Finisterre, and the Azores. The cable was to be 2,000 miles overall, but the longest single length was 800 miles from the Azores to Canada. It was to be made just one-inch in diameter, with a copper core imbedded in “virgin” india-rubber, rather than contaminated “manufactured” rubber, covered in hemp rope and a new protective compound, weighing only three hundredweight per mile. Rowett formed the International Ocean Telegraphic Company in London during 1864, seeking £500,000 in 25,000 shares of £20, to complete the project but got nowhere. Rowett eventually promoted the Scilly Islands Telegraph Company in 1869 and laid a thirty-one mile circuit between the islands and his home county of Cornwall. The hemp-covered cable, to an identical specification to that proposed for his Atlantic circuit, quickly failed. In September 1865 Thomas Allan finally promoted the Transatlantic Telegraph Company with a capital of £1,500,000 to lay a ‘non-extending cable’ from England to Oporto in Portugal (600 miles), from Oporto to Flores in the Azores (900 miles) and from Flores to Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada (1,400 miles). The Globe Telegraph Company was formed in 1863 with a capital of £100,000 to construct and maintain telegraphs, to acquire and work letters-patent relating to electro-magnetic telegraphs and apparatus, and for other purposes. It was intended to work the instrument of Henry Wilde of Manchester, which he patented on February 25, 1863, having been working on it since 1860 after Charles Wheatstone sent him samples of his Universal telegraph. This was an electro-magnetic dial telegraph with separate communicator and indicator, which he called the “Globe telegraph” and was obviously derived from Wheatstone’s Universal telegraph. The indicator was spherical, containing both a dial and an alarm, hence “globe”. The main difference between the two instruments was the use of a foot treadle to work the magneto rather than a handle. Wilde was sued, unsuccessfully, for patent infringement by the Universal Private Telegraph Company, owners of Wheatstone’s patent. His Company was substantial enough to acquire a Special Act of Parliament in 1864 “to connect dwelling houses, manufactories, warehouses, collieries, gas and water works, barracks, police stations, &c.”, but it was unable to raise more than a derisory £1,500 in capital. The Globe attempted to provide private circuits in its home city of Manchester and in the towns of Oldham, Sheffield and Huddersfield, claiming to have sold forty or so instruments to factory owners, but it did not survive long. Wilde tried to get the Post Office to purchase the jetsam of the Globe company in 1869 but a Parliamentary Committee threw the claim out. 
Wylde’s Globe Telegraph 1861
An early version with a “portable pedal motion” beneath the desk to drive the magneto device, the patented model had everything in a metal stand The Globe Telegraph Company was not connected with Septimus Beardmore’s so-called “globe telegraph” of 1859; nor was it related to the hugely successful Globe Telegraph & Trust Company created by John Pender, co-incidentally also of Manchester, in 1873 to invest in and manage intercontinental cables. | |