100 YEARS OF TELEGRAPHY

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 April 1937, Page 14

100 YEARS OF TELEGRAPHY

“WONDER OF THE AGE”

LONDON, March 14.

One hundred years ago the telegraph system was born, when Sir Charles Wheatstone, in collaboration with Sir William Fothergill Cooke, took out a patent for "giving signals and sending alarums at distant places by means of electric currents transmitted through metallic circuits.” The first instrument based on the Wheatstone and Cooke patent was installed in 1937 between Euston and Camden Town railway stations, usingsix wires over the distance of one and a-quarter miles. The following year the Great Western Railway had a similar instru-| meat between Paddington and West i Drayton, later extending it to Slough, When Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s suitor, arrived at Paddington, the message was conveyed over this instrument, a horse messenger riding with it from Slough to Windsor. On New Year’s Day, 1845, the use of the device stirred the attention of I the public in the same way as did wireless telegraphy when, used sixtyfive years later for the detention of Crippen. The 1845 murder was discovered at once, and as . the wanted man was seen to take a. train from Slough to.Paddington, a message was sent over the wires.

The man was dressed as a Quaker, and because there . was. no • symbol representing “Q,” the word was transmitted as “Kwaker,” and so puzzled the Paddington agent that he kept asking for a repeat. By the time he had grasped what “Kwaker” meant the train had arrived at Paddington and the criminal

was away. Eventually he was captured near Cannon Street. But the G.W.R. were quick to seize the opportunity, and a contemporary poster advertising telegraphs on the Great Western Railway which invited members of the public to watch demonstrations on payment of one shilling described this telegraph as “the wonder of the age,” and stated that “by its powerful agency murderers have been apprehended.”

The poster also stated that in the list of visitors’ were “the illustrious names of several of the crowned heads of Europe and nearly all the nobility of England.” In America, Professor Morse had turned his attention to the application of electricity to telegraphs, and in 1838 demonstrated a telegraph, using his dot-dash system of signalling before the President. In the following year an experimental line of forty miles was opened between Washington and Baltimore.