Early History of Telegraph

Just a month of Britain’s Queen Vitoria came to the throne, directors of the London and Birmingham Railway watched a demonstration of a new electric telegraph system.

They were told that the four needle instrument could transmit five words a minute, provided the words were short.

The distance the telegraphed words was travel under the modest – less than a mile – although the inventors, Charles Wheatstone and W.F Cooke, needed to lay 19 miles (30km) of line to carry them to their destination.

The railway engineer Robert Stephenson sent the first, suitably terse, telegram: ‘Bravo’.

The idea of electric telegraph system had occurred to a numbered of people in both Europe and the United States at about the same time, and it was one of the several ways in which communications were revolutionized in the 19th century.

Its development more and less paralleled that of the railway, especially so in the early years when the telegraph poles carrying the wires were erected almost exclusively alongside the railway station.

It was the railway companies that were the first to grasp the significance of this new means of communication, and make practical use of it. It allowed them to establish uniform time, or ‘railway time’ throughout the network, and to create a system of signaling that kept the trains at safe distance, Railway officials could also use the telegraph to summon help.
Early History of Telegraph