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.
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. This, and the General Commercial firm, did not progress beyond discussion in the press.
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.
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 the Brett family who also controlled the patent for Royal House’s type-printing telegraph in England. After unsuccessfully challenging Little’s patent in the Courts the Electric Telegraph Company acquired and suppressed it in 1851. At this time George Little also devised 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.
John Nott obtained a patent for a dial telegraph in January 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 and his partner D P Gamble had offices in the financial district of London and were working a short experimental wire on a branch of the London & North-Western Railway 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). The Electric Telegraph Company successfully sued Nott and Gamble for patent infringement early in 1847 and seized their instruments. The apparatus was installed by the 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.
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).
Whishaw’s widely-publicized ‘telekouphonon’ was simply a long, flexible gutta-percha tube with an ivory or metal mouth-piece and removable whistle at either end through which people spoke with others up to three-quarters of a mile away. Scarcely an original invention it 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 he obtained a “poor man’s patent”, a Registered Design, for it on May 22, 1849.
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 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 replaced 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.
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.
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 J 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.
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. Except for the first concern, Shaffner was the chief personality in all of these uncompleted lines. He 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…
The 1860s, particularly after the passing of a new liberal Companies Act in 1862, saw the promotion of several speculative concerns. Thomas Allan, the telegraph engineer, after being dismissed by the United Kingdom company, launched Allan’s Telegraph Factory Company, the National Telegraph Company, the Ocean Telegraph Company (the second of that name, also called the Great Ocean Telegraph Company) and the Great Indian Submarine Telegraph Company from his home in the Adelphi; none proceeded beyond publicity. Non-starters also included the Coast Telegraph Company, promoted by Charles West, another telegraph engineer.
In September 1865 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 wholly speculative Economic Telegraph Company, originally formed in 1865 to “construct and maintain private telegraph wires for merchants and others, between their mills, warehouses, and private residences”, obtained an Act of Parliament in July 1866 to justify its purchase by the government. This authorised a capital of £100,000 in £10 shares and powers to borrow £25,000. Even though it had just a couple of miles of private wire in Manchester working two Breguet galvanic dial telegraphs the government generously paid £15,000 for its “assets” in 1870.
Gaetano Bonelli was one of the instigators of electric telegraphy in Italy in the 1840s and 1850s advocating the American telegraph and is recognised as a pioneer of communication in his own country. In 1860 Bonelli obtained an English patent for the so-called ‘typo-telegraph’, a compact desk-top apparatus in which metal type was set and then passed under a comb of electric feelers on a set of rails. It required from five to twenty wires, one for each feeler, in each circuit. The resulting pulses then copied the message set in the metal onto electrically-activated chemical paper tape on another set of rails in print.
Bonelli’s Electric Telegraph Company was formed by the owner of Bonelli’s patent, Henry Clark, an American, in 1860 with an initial capital of £25,000, and obtained an Act of Parliament in 1861, when its secretary was Simon Rendall, a lawyer, of 69 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. It completed an experimental five-wire roadside line, a single Bonelli circuit, between 2 Dale Street, Liverpool and 2a Victoria Street, Manchester in northern England on September 19, 1863. It then called for a capital of £250,000 to create a national network. James Gutteres, the Magnetic company’s London manager, joined as Secretary. The firm quickly failed against fierce commercial competition. In 1867 its rump fell into the hands of Alexander Collie, a cotton-speculator from Manchester, who contrived to sell its rights to the government when it created a telegraph monopoly. The directors of the defunct company had been willing to sell-out for £5,000 but Collie challenged the valuation and got £22,000 from the Post Office, receiving 25% of the purchase money as his reward. Gutteres went on to become Superintendent of the West Indies & Panama Telegraph Company in Jamaica during the 1870s.
The Globe Telegraph Company was formed in 1861 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, that he patented on May 12, 1863. This was an electro-magnetic dial telegraph with separate communicator and indicator, which he called the “Globe telegraph” and was derived from Wheatstone’s Universal telegraph. Wilde was sued, unsuccessfully, for patent infringement by the Universal Private Telegraph Company, owners of Wheatstone’s patent. The 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 was unable to raise capital, no doubt due to the prospect of government appropriation. The Globe attempted to work private circuits in its home city of Manchester but did not survive the year.
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.
