Telegraph
Explanation:
On 25 July 1837, William Fothergill Cooke, an English inventor, and Charles Wheatstone, an English scientist, made the first electric telegraph communication between the station rooms at Camden Town – where Cooke was stationed, together with Robert Stephenson, the engineer – and London Euston, where Wheatstone was situated.
The directors of the London and Birmingham Railway were their audience, and their goal was to improve safety on the railways. In fact, the impact of the demonstration was far more wide-reaching than that – Cooke and Wheatstone went on to become the founding fathers of The Electric Telegraph Company, of which BT today is a direct descendant. They also pioneered the close relationship between rail and telegraph networks.
But in the 19th century, things moved rather more sedately. The world’s first commercial telegraph line, which connected Paddington and West Drayton, didn’t launch for another two years, in 1839. But from these slow beginnings grew a national and then a global network, a “Victorian internet” that pioneered not only great advances in technology but profound changes in society too, as instant long-distance communication became a reality and far-flung parts of the world came within whispering distance.
Vladimir Putin recently congratulated the US President-elect Donald Trump by telegram
However, as well as bringing the world closer, the telegraph soon became known for a secondary (and rather more exciting) use – catching criminals. On New Year’s Day 1845, one John Tawell decided to start the year on a decisive note by poisoning his mistress. Her dying screams panicked him and he ran off, in his long Quaker coat, boarding the train from Slough to London. Alas, the stationmaster at Slough, having heard about the murder, spotted Tawell in his distinctive threads, and because the newfangled telegraph travelled faster than steam rail, the police were waiting for him at the other end – which, for Mr Tawell, ended at the gallows.
Just two decades after that first commercial telegraph signal, in 1858 the first transatlantic telegraph message was sent – by Queen Victoria to US President James Buchanan. The technology was such that her 99-word message took 16 hours to transmit through 2,500 miles of transatlantic cable: torturously slow by today’s standards, but technologically a huge step forward and a source of wonder at the time – and a tool of power, too. In its imperial pomp, Britain’s far-flung empire was brought that much closer by laying submarine telegraph lines to India in 1870 and Australia in 1872. Its impact reverberated through the Victorian mass media, too. When Reuters set up its telegram service in 1851 to supply foreign news to papers, it revolutionised the newspaper industry, heralding the era of the “scoop”. Its usage spread far and wide, culminating in peak telegram traffic during 1902-3, when 92 million telegrams were sent.
