Electrical telegraphy in the United Kingdom

Cooke and Wheatstone single-needle instrument c. 1872–1873

The Electric Telegraph Company (ETC) was formed in 1846 by Cooke and financier John Lewis Ricardo,[34] and was the first company formed for the purpose of providing a telegraph service to the public.[35] It was formed without Wheatstone as he and Cooke had had a serious falling out over who should take credit for the invention. The matter went to arbitration with Marc Isambard Brunel acting for Cooke and Daniell acting for Wheatstone. A compromise was reached with both of them taking some credit. Wheatstone was uninterested in commercial enterprises, wishing only to publish scientific results. The ETC bought out Wheatstone's patent interest in exchange for royalties;[36] Davy's relay patent was also acquired.[37] The company bought out Bain for the substantial sum of £7,500 (equivalent to £730,000 in 2019) because he was threatening to derail the bill forming the company on the grounds that his patents would be infringed.[38] The ETC bought out other telegraph patents when they could, often not because they wanted to use them, but as a means of suppressing competition.[39]

The company at first concentrated on business with the railways but struggled to be profitable.[40] On the other hand, their relationship with the railways gave them a structural advantage over competitors that started up later. By the time competitors came on the scene the ETC had agreements with most railways. The railways gave exclusive use of the wayleaves to the ETC, shutting out competitors from the most economic way of building a telegraph network.[41]

After 1848 other areas of business started to grow in comparison to the railways.[42] Supply of news to newspapers and stock exchange information to the financial sector were profitable.[43] A major user from the beginning was the insurer Lloyd's of London, and they had telegraph instruments installed directly in their London offices in 1852.[44] General use by the public was slow to grow due to high prices.[45] The telegram business grew after competition drove down prices and this led in 1859 to the company relocating their London central office to bigger premises in Great Bell Alley, Moorgate, the eastern portion of which was later renamed Telegraph Street after the company.[46] The ETC remained by far the largest telegraph company until nationalisation in 1870,[47] after which, Cooke retired from the company. Both he and Wheatstone were knighted for their services to telegraphy in, respectively, 1869 and 1868.[48]

The ETC was heavily involved in laying submarine telegraph cables to Europe and Ireland. They operated the first cable ship permanently fitted out for laying cables, CS Monarch. In 1853 they created the International Telegraph Company to overcome Dutch objections to a British company laying telegraph cables on their soil. This company was merged back into the ETC in 1854, the name of the new company becoming the Electric and International Telegraph Company.[49] Other subsidiary companies created to lay submarine cables were the Channel Islands Telegraph Company (1857) and the Isle of Man Telegraph Company (1859).[50]

Henley-Foster two-needle telegraph

The English and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company (Magnetic Telegraph Company, or just Magnetic for short) was established by John Watkins Brett in 1850,[51] initially to connect Britain and Ireland with a submarine telegraph cable.[52] The first attempt at this failed as did several other attempts by rival companies. The Magnetic finally succeeded in 1853, giving Ireland a telegraphic connection to Britain for the first time, and through Britain, on to mainland Europe.[53] This was the deepest submarine cable laid to date.[54]

The Magnetic was the largest competitor to the ETC with the two of them forming a virtual duopoly, and in this context the ETC was commonly referred to as the Electric to counterpose it to the Magnetic.[55] The Magnetic was not, however, the Electric's first competitor. That was the British Electric Telegraph Company (BETC), founded in 1849.[56] It later changed its name to the British Telegraph Company to avoid confusion with the ETC.[57] The BETC failed because they were founded on the mistaken assumption that they would be able to obtain railway wayleaves. They wrongly believed that Parliament would force the railway companies to allow them to erect lines. In the event, they obtained very few wayleaves; one exception was the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.[58] They were taken over by the Magnetic in 1857 under the new name of the British and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company.[59] The Magnetic avoided the pitfalls encountered by the BETC. From the start, they planned their system based on underground cables along highways.[60] Not only did the ETC have the railway wayleaves, but the United Kingdom Telegraph Company had the wayleaves for canals and the BETC had the wayleaves for overground cables along highways.[61] This asset of the BETC was the attraction for the Magnetic in its takeover of them.[62]

The Magnetic used a telegraph system not covered by the ETC patents.[63] It used the needle telegraph of William Thomas Henley and George Foster which did not require batteries. Movement of the machine handles while the operator was sending a message generated the electricity electromagnetically. This was the meaning of magnetic in the company name.[64] After the BETC takeover, the Magnetic acquired the needle telegraph of its founder, Henry Highton. This instrument was the cheapest available of the manual telegraph systems at between £2 10 shillings (£2.50) and £3 (equivalent to £280 in 2016).[65] By the time of nationalisation, the Magnetic were also using Bright's bells on their most important lines. The latter instrument was an invention of Charles Tilston Bright which was acoustic rather than visual; it allowed the operator to work faster.[66]

The Magnetic not only laid the first cable to Ireland, they also had an exclusive agreement with the Submarine Telegraph Company which controlled the cables to Europe.[67] For a short period, the Magnetic had control of all international traffic, shutting out the ETC.[68] In Ireland, the Magnetic acquired most of the railway wayleaves forcing the ETC to use roads and canals, the exact reverse of the situation in Great Britain.[69]

London District Telegraph Company (the District), formed in 1859 in London, was a company closely associated with the Magnetic. John Watkins Brett and Charles Kemp Dyer were directors of both companies and Edward Brailsford Bright was secretary of both. Their telegraph operators were trained at the Magnetic's headquarters in the Strand.[70] The Magnetic installed the telegraph lines for the District and leased them back to the District for a peppercorn rent in exchange for the District passing on the Magnetic's messages to and from outside London.[71] The business model of the District was to provide cheap telegrams within London and not install expensive links between cities. Prices were fourpence (1.7p) for ten words and sixpence (2.5p) for fifteen words.[72] By comparison, a long distance telegram on the Electric cost four shillings (20p).[73] The area of the District was limited to within four miles of Charing Cross, with possible later expansion to twenty miles. The District avoided the expense of erecting telegraph poles or burying cables by stringing the wires from building to building, a technique that could only be used in heavily built-up areas.[74]

Rooftop wires may have been cheap to install, but obtaining the wayleaves could be troublesome. Thousands of individual permissions had to be sought and some unusual conditions were sometimes imposed. One householder insisted that the installers enter her property only once (after wiping their feet) to access the roof. Meals were hoisted up to the workmen on the roof until they had finished.[75] In all, around seven thousand interviews and negotiations were conducted, many of them equally troublesome, to erect only 280 miles of wire.[76] The cheap prices of the District stimulated a much more casual use of the telegraph; in 1862 the company transmitted a quarter of a million messages.[77]

The United Kingdom Telegraph Company (UKTC), founded by Thomas Allan, was the last major telegraph company to be formed. It was registered in 1850, but did not raise sufficient capital to launch until 1860.[78] The business model was to provide a flat rate of one shilling (5p) for twenty words within 100 miles and two shillings (10p) beyond 100 miles, thus undercutting the established companies.[79] The Electric, with the Magnetic's support, put a great deal of effort into obstructing the UKTC. They challenged UKTC's right to use highways in Parliament, and this was not resolved until Parliament passed an Act in 1862 allowing the UKTC to erect trunk lines along highways. The Electric used their exclusive agreements with the railways to demand that they cut down UKTC lines crossing railway property, a demand which the railway companies for the most part complied with. The Electric also petitioned other landowners to exclude the UKTC, and in some cases UKTC lines were cut illegally. All this activity made it extremely difficult for the UKTC to establish trunk routes between cities. The UKTC did have one good option; they had exclusive rights along canals, but they could not reach Scotland or Ireland this way.[80]

The UKTC got their first trunk line up in 1863 connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. In 1864, they completed a second trunk along the route London, Northampton, Leicester, Sheffield, Barnsley, Wakefield, and Hull. The northern end of this line was then linked to Manchester and Liverpool, thus connecting the two trunks together at both ends. Later, the trunk network was extended into Scotland reaching Glasgow and Edinburgh. In 1865 the network was extended west, reaching Swansea and Plymouth.[81] In 1858, the UKTC laid a cable from Newbiggin to Jutland, Denmark. This line was extended on to Russia giving the UK direct telegraph access to North European and Scandinavian countries.[82]

The UKTC used the printing telegraph of David Edward Hughes. This was an early form of teleprinter in which the message is directly printed without the operator needing to decode it. Transmission was from a piano-like keyboard marked with the letters of the alphabet. The Electric had tested the Hughes printing telegraph in 1858 but decided against using it.[83] The operation of the printing telegraph was mechanical, a spinning wheel with the character types, similar to a modern daisy wheel printer, was pressed against the paper at the appropriate time. The wheel in the receiving machine had to be kept in exact synchrony with the sending machine, otherwise garbage would be printed. The Hughes machine did this by sending synchronisation pulses down the line. This was a marked improvement on earlier machines which were slow and temperamental.[84]

An ABC telegraph instrument from the General Post Office era, dated 1885

The Universal Private Telegraph Company (UPTC) was established in 1861 for the purpose of providing private telegraph links for companies and institutions. The telegraph system they used was the ABC telegraph, also known as Wheatstone's universal telegraph. This was an instrument patented by Charles Wheatstone in 1858. It was designed to be used by unskilled operators with no knowledge of telegraph codes. Letters were marked around a dial with a button for each. The operator pressed the desired button and then turned a handle which generated pulses of current. The pulses moved a pointer through successive positions until it reached the button that had been pressed at which point the current was cut off. A receiving dial indicated the position that had been reached at both ends of the circuit. Although much slower than other telegraph systems, it was possible to reach 25 wpm with practice.[85]

The company proved to be highly profitable. It charged £4 per mile of wire per annum, and had few overheads. Unlike the public companies, it did not have to staff telegraph offices or employ operators to send and receive messages.[86]

Telcon cable works at Greenwich, 1865–1866

The Gutta Percha Company was founded in 1845 to exploit the new material. They initially made bottle stoppers, but soon expanded to a very wide range of products.[99] In 1848, on hearing of the potential use for telegraph cables, they modified a machine for extruding gutta-percha tubing into one capable of continuously applying gutta-percha to a copper conductor.[100] Up to 1865, nearly all the cores for submarine cables in the UK were made by the Gutta Percha Company which had a monopoly on the supply of gutta-percha.[101] S. W. Silver and Co. in Silvertown, London made waterproof clothing using rubber and gutta-percha.[102] In 1864, an offshoot of Silver and Co., the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company, was founded as a rival cable manufacturer.[103]

Some early submarine cables were laid with just their insulation for protection. These were not very successful, they were easily damaged and some attempts to lay cables failed because they would not sink.[104] The construction found to work well was to twist the cable cores together, bind with tarred hemp, wind tarred cord around the whole group of cores, and then protect the assembled cores with iron wires twisted around them.[105] The Gutta Percha Company never made completed cables of this sort. Instead they were sent to another company for completion. These companies were specialists in the manufacturing of wire rope. The principal companies involved in this early work were R.S. Newall and Company in Tyne and Wear, Glass, Elliot & Company, and W. T. Henley in London.[106] In 1864, the Gutta Percha Company merged with Glass, Elliot to form the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (Telcon).[107] This was done at the instigation of John Pender with Pender as chairman.[108] Pender, with a consortium than included Thomas Brassey and Daniel Gooch bought the SS Great Eastern, a huge passenger ship made by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but now failing in that role, and converted it into a cable layer. The ship was chartered to Telcon who used it on some of the major cable installations around the world.[109]

By 1880, cable production was centred on the banks of the Thames in East London. The major supplier by far was Telcon, with some work subcontracted to W. T. Henley at North Woolwich who themselves had become a major manufacturer of electrical equipment with a 16.5 acre site. Gutta-percha production was near-monopolised by the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company, by then a subsidiary of Telcon, at their 15-acre site in Silvertown. The company operated a number of cable ships, of which the Silvertown was the largest in the world at that time. Siemens also had a cable manufacturing facility at Woolwich. Exports were a large part of the business totalling well over £2 million in 1873 and 1% of total British manufactured exports.[110]

John Brett c. 1850s

Jacob Brett in later life

The first ocean cable in the world was laid across the English Channel. Jacob and John Watkins Brett had been planning such a cable since 1847.[111] In 1849, the South Eastern Railway Company conducted a trial of two miles of cable made by the Gutta Percha Company from the ship Princess Clementine anchored off Folkestone. The ship was able to send telegraph messages directly to London via a connection to the South Eastern's overhead telegraph line.[112] After several failed attempts, the Bretts' company, the Submarine Telegraph Company (STC), succeeded in connecting to France in 1851. The company went on to lay numerous other cables to European countries.[113]

The Magnetic had a close relationship with the STC. From about 1857 the two companies had an agreement that all STC submarine cables were to be used only with the Magnetic's landlines.[114] The Magnetic also had control of the first cable to Ireland. This control of international traffic gave them a significant advantage in the domestic market.[115] Both Newall and Glass, Elliot laid cables as subcontractors to the inland telegraph companies. Newall was prone to fall out with his customers and was often involved in litigation resulting in the company slowly moving away from the telegraph cable business.[116]

The British government took a strong interest in the provision of international telegraph connections. Their assistance included the provision of Royal Navy ships to assist with cable laying and monetary guarantees. Two major failures gave them cause for concern; the first transatlantic telegraph cable, laid in 1858 by the Atlantic Telegraph Company, and the Red Sea to India cable in 1859 laid by the Red Sea & India Company.[117] The insulation of the transatlantic cable failed after a few weeks. The cable to India (manufactured and laid by Newall) was too thin and laid taut over underwater peaks which soon broke it in multiple places.[118] The guarantees provided by the government for these two ventures had caused them a financial loss. In response, a government committee was formed in 1859 to investigate the issue. In their final report in 1861, the committee concluded that future failures of this kind were avoidable now that the technology was better understood. They recommended specifications for future cable construction, installation, and maintenance.[119] After the Red Sea failure, the government no longer provided subsidies or guarantees and left it to private companies to entirely take on the risk of new ventures.[120]

Getting a telegraph connection to India was a priority for the government after the Indian Mutiny of 1857; the urgent telegram requesting assistance had taken forty days to reach London.[121] The failure of the first cable was a significant blow. A connection to India was finally achieved in 1864 after the Indian government laid a new cable made by W. T. Henley from Karachi to Fao, Iraq and thence by overland routes. This route was a shorter distance in ocean than the Red Sea route and in shallower water, but still 1,450 miles. This was the first really long submarine cable to be a permanent success, many times longer than any other submarine cable at that time.[122]

The nondescript hut where the Porthcurno cables were landed

The equipment inside the Porthcurno hut

Pender's motivation in creating Telcon from the merger of Glass, Elliot and the Gutta Percha companies was to create a company that could make and maintain the second transatlantic telegraph cable for the Atlantic Telegraph Company.[123] It was also his motivation for buying Great Eastern, the only ship at that time capable of holding all the required cable.[124] With great difficulty, the transatlantic connection was achieved by 1866, creating a truly worldwide telegraph network. London could now communicate with most other telegraph offices in the world. In 1862, a new submarine cable had been laid from Queenstown in southern Ireland to St David's Head in Wales. When this was connected to the transatlantic landing point at Valentia Bay (opposite Valentia Island) it dramatically reduced the distance transatlantic messages had to travel from Ireland to London from 750 miles to 285 miles[125]

The success of the transatlantic cable triggered the formation of a multiplicity of new companies to lay more submarine cables around the world. Most of these companies were founded by Pender, whose first project was to lay a new cable to India that covered most of the distance in international waters. This put it fully under British control, avoiding the political and other risks associated with an overland route. Telcon manufactured the cable and used the Great Eastern to lay it. To limit the risk, Pender founded three companies, each tasked with laying one section of the cable. The Anglo-Mediterranean Company (founded 1868) laid a cable from Malta to Alexandria in Egypt. From there a short overland cable via Cairo connected to Suez. The Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company (founded 1869) connected Malta, to Porthcurno, Cornwall with landings at Gibraltar and Carcavelos, Portugal. The company was so named because Falmouth was originally intended as the landing site in England. In the event, the tiny village of Porthcurno became the largest submarine cable station in the world after numerous other cables were landed there. The final link was provided by the British-Indian Submarine Company (founded 1869) from Suez via Aden to Bombay in 1870. Once the connection was complete, all three companies were merged as the Eastern Telegraph Company in 1872. James Anderson, the captain of the Great Eastern was made managing director.[126]

A cable going east from India was laid by the British-Indian Submarine Extension Company in 1871. This ran from Madras, which was connected overland to Bombay, to Singapore via Penang and Malacca. This met a cable in Singapore laid by the China Submarine Telegraph Company (founded 1869) running to Hong Kong. The British-Australian Telegraph Company (founded 1870) then connected Hong Kong to Port Darwin, Australia via Java. This was the end point of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line, running 2,000 miles to Port Augusta in South Australia. The three companies were merged as the Eastern Extension, Australasia and China Telegraph Company in 1873. This company connected Australia to New Zealand in 1876. Other Pender companies included the Western and Brazilian Telegraph Company (1873), the Brazilian Submarine Telegraph Company (1873), Marseilles, Algiers and Malta Telegraph Company (1870), Eastern & South African Telegraph Company (1879), and the African Direct Telegraph Company (1885). All these companies were merged into the Eastern Telegraph Company, which became the Eastern and Associated Cable Company and the largest multinational of the 19th century.[127]

British telegraph All Red Line global network in 1902

The development of the undersea telegraph cable network began in the late nineteenth century. In October 1902 a worldwide network of cables and relay stations – including some 100,000 miles of undersea cables – was inaugurated. This was called the All Red Line and carried long-distance telecommunications to all parts of the British Empire. The idea was to create a network that did not pass through any non-British territory to avoid security and political risks. It was so called because at that time British territories and colonies were usually coloured red or pink on maps.[128]

In 1928 British submarine cables still dominated world telecommunications, but they were increasingly under threat from radiotelegraphy. A particular concern was RCA in the US, but they were also losing business due to the Imperial Wireless Chain set up by the British government to connect the empire together. The transmitters for the Imperial Chain were supplied by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company which was also a competitor outside the Empire.[129] The Electra House Group, an informal alliance of British telecommunication companies, decided that they could best compete worldwide by merging their cable and radio companies into a single entity. Thus, the Eastern Telegraph Company and the Marconi Wireless Company were merged into Imperial and International Communications Ltd, which in 1934 changed its name to Cable & Wireless Ltd.[130] The Porthcurno station stayed open for exactly one hundred years, closing in 1970 when the last cable was taken out of service.[131] Submarine coaxial cables with repeaters had been in use for some time which carried multiple telephone channels using frequency division multiplexing.[132] By then, there was no real need for distinct telegraph cables. Telegraph was declining and multiple telegraph channels could be multiplexed into a single telephone channel since the 1920s.[133] The building is now the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum and historic archive of Cable & Wireless.[134]

Maintenance costs of submarine cables were high. They were frequently damaged by ships' anchors and the insulation deteriorated over time. They were most at risk in shallow water near the coast, but very deep water was also avoided because it was difficult to retrieve cables for repair. In 1868, the expected life of a cable was fifteen years, and most laid to that date had not even lasted that long.[135] A similar problem of deteriorating insulation plagued inland buried cables, the Magnetic suffering the most from this.[136]

Lord Kelvin, gave the first mathematical description of retardation

A recurring problem on buried cables, and most especially submarine cables, was the phenomenon of dispersion, which produces the effect called retardation. Dispersion, as it relates to transmission lines, is different frequency components of a signal travelling along a line at different speeds. Frequency analysis of this sort was not understood by early telegraph engineers.[137] The effect of dispersion on a telegraph pulse is to spread it out in time. This is because a rectangular pulse (as used in telegraphy) has multiple frequency components. At the receiving end it appears as if part of the pulse has been retarded, hence the term. The problem this causes for telegraphy is that adjacent pulses smear into each other, an effect called intersymbol interference by modern engineers, and if severe enough the message cannot be read. It forces the operator to slow the speed of sending so that there is again separation between the pulses.[138] The problem was so bad on the first transatlantic cable in 1858 that transmission speeds were in minutes per word rather than words per minute. Thinking he could solve the problem by using a higher voltage, telegraph engineer Wildman Whitehouse only succeeded in permanently damaging the cable making it unusable.[139] This failure represented a loss of nearly £2 million (£210 million in 2016)) for the Atlantic Telegraph Company.[140]

Retardation is worse in insulated cables because the electromagnetic wave is travelling mostly in the insulation material. Uninsulated wires on overhead poles, the most common system on overland routes, are little effected, even over large distances. This solution is not open to submarine cables and the very long distances maximise the problem.[141] The problem of retardation was not fully solved until the introduction of long-distance telephony made it essential to do so.[142] However, various mitigating actions were taken. The Magnetic, who operated a large number of buried cables, had an instrument which sent a delayed pulse of opposite polarity to the main pulse, cancelling the worst of the retarded signal.[143] The mirror galvanometer of Lord Kelvin made it easier to read weak signals,[144] and larger cables with thicker insulation had less retardation.[145]

In 1854, Kelvin produced a mathematical description of retardation by analogy with heat flow after the fiasco with the first transatlantic cable. In 1881, Oliver Heaviside gave the full analysis of transmission lines which described how the problem arose and in 1887 suggested how it could be resolved.[146] Heaviside believed that adding the right amount of inductance to the line would completely remove the dispersion effect. He tried to persuade the General Post Office (the Post Office) to take up the idea, but as an outsider—and considered a maverick—he was ignored,[147] largely as a result of his long-running dispute with William Preece, the Post Office Chief Electrician (chief engineer).[148] It was left to George Ashley Campbell in the US to implement the idea when he added loading coils to a telephone line for the first time in 1900.[149]

By 1866 it was clear that the government intended to nationalise the inland telegraph. This had the effect of inhibiting growth of the network. In fact, in that year growth temporarily went backwards due to a great snowstorm in January. Every above ground line within a 50-mile radius of London was damaged and the rooftop system of the District was put entirely out of action. Across the country, the Electric had 450 miles of line damaged. In May, the Panic of 1866 put a further brake on growth.[168] The financial turmoil and the resultant change of government caused a delay, but did not change the policy.[169] In the following year, significant parliamentary time was taken up with the Reform Bill and Scudamore's bill did not come before parliament until 1868.[170] The bill did not mandate nationalisation or give the Post Office a legal monopoly. It merely gave the Post Office the right to set up telegraph services on the same basis as private companies and the ability to purchase private companies or their assets through normal commercial negotiation.[171]

The resulting opposition from the telegraph companies had been expected by the government.[172] What had not been expected was that the railway companies were going to be a problem. Scudamore had made no allowance in costing the scheme for purchasing railway wayleaves. The railway companies started to vociferously oppose the Telegraph Bill. Many railway telegraph systems were run by the telegraph company that had the wayleave. If the Post Office were to take over the telegraph company, the railway company would, or so they claimed, have the additional expense of running their own telegraph. This difficulty came as a great surprise to the new Chancellor, George Ward Hunt.[173] The problem for the Post Office was that they could not take over on the same terms as private companies, effectively becoming servants of the railway companies. They wanted the lines, but not the terms that came with them.[174]

The government was determined to reach a decision quickly so that future planning was not left in limbo, and rising company share prices meant that delay would likely add to the costs. In June, the companies started to negotiate, fearing that if they did not, a disadvantageous arrangement would be imposed on them. A select committee under Hunt reached deals with the telegraph companies based on the last twenty years net profits, and compensation for the railway companies. By July, opposition had largely disappeared.[175] It was not originally planned to nationalise the UPTC because they had no lines for general public use; all its lines were private wires in which the Post Office had no interest. However, the UPTC complained that the planned Post Office uniform rate would so damage their business that they would become unprofitable. This persuaded Hunt that private wires should be nationalised as well. Another problem area was the cables to continental Europe. The Magnetic was obliged to send all continental traffic through STC's cables. The ETC was obliged to use Reuter's Nordeney cable. It would be impossible for a unified nationalised organisation to simultaneously meet both contractual obligations. To solve this, the government purchased Reuter's cables and leased them back to the STC, together with other continental cables acquired by the Post Office. This was done in a great hurry and afterwards admitted to be not ideal. Reuters and STC were to remain un-nationalised. The bill was passed into law as the Telegraph Act 1868, to take effect July 1869.[176]

The government did not immediately authorise expenditure under the Act. They had become concerned that entrepreneurs who had been bought out would set up in business again undercutting the Post Office flat rate of one shilling (5p) in lucrative city areas (sixpence (2.5p) had been charged in London by the District) with no obligation to serve unremunerative outlying areas. Consequently, nationalisation was delayed until The Telegraph Act of 1869 was passed. This amended the 1868 Act to create a Post Office monopoly,[177] with the actual transfer taking effect on 1 January 1870.[178] Companies operating submarine cables with no landlines were excluded from nationalisation.[179] Any company that had not, so far, been taken over by the Post Office could demand this happen under the Act for the same 20-year net profit basis as before. Several small companies that the Post Office considered virtually defunct and not worth buying took advantage of this.[180] The Telegraph Acts Extension Act 1870 extended the monopoly to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man resulting in the purchase of the Jersey and Guernsey Telegraph Company and the Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company. The Orkneys & Shetland Telegraph Company was purchased in 1876–77 and the Scilly Islands Telegraph Company in 1879–80.[181] The STC was finally nationalised in 1890, bringing their international submarine cables and cable ships under Post Office control.[182]

There was some criticism of the government handling of the nationalisation. The total price paid for nationalising the telegraph was £5.9 million, compared to Scudamore's original estimate of £2.5 million.[183] By 1876, the total cost of acquisitions and extensions exceeded £10 million.[184] The price paid for most of the telegraph companies far exceeded their capital value due to the 20-year profit calculation.[185] In comparison, the cost of the telegraph across the whole of continental Europe was only £4 million.[186] It was alleged in parliament, somewhat speculatively, that a new UK telegraph system could have been built from scratch for £2 million.[187] The discrepancy was largely due to the unbudgeted payments to the railways, but compounded by paying them on the basis of 20 years net profit. Most of the railway leases had far less than 20 years to run so the Post Office was not going to get 20 years profit from the purchase. However, it was difficult to avoid once the principle had been established; Reuters went to arbitration over the issue when the government offered them a lesser deal and won.[188]

Further criticism concerned the purchase of the reversionary rights of the railway wayleaves, which had been another unforeseen expense. Without these purchases, when the lease expired, the railway company would then have the right to use the line for public telegraphy on its own account unless a new lease was taken out. Another issue concerned the railways free use of the telegraph on their property. This was part of the leasing arrangement with the private companies and was inherited by the Post Office. In most cases, the railway company was also entitled to send free messages to stations not on its own line. The purpose of this facility was supposed to be for the control of trains, but it was heavily abused; in 1891 1.6 million free messages were sent, compared to 97,000 in 1871.[189] The contractual arrangements with the railway companies were so complex that arbitration cases concerning them were still being heard ten years after nationalisation.[190]

In 1871 the Telegraphers' Association was formed amongst the telegraph clerks in Manchester with the aim of agitating for higher wages. This was the first active union in the public service. Scudamore demanded that the clerks resign from the association and then dismissed those that refused. There followed a strike to demand their reinstatement. Scudamore blocked the telegraphic transmission of news of the strike to national newspapers. The resulting protests from the press got him officially censured. Wages were increased in 1872 and a formal staff structure introduced. Their pay was still less than the pay in cable and maintenance companies, resulting in more than 2,300 out of 6,000 clerks leaving the Post Office between 1872 and 1880.[210]

In 1868 Charles Monk introduced a private member's bill to parliament that extended the vote to Post Office workers and other civil servants. It became law despite opposition from the Benjamin Disraeli government and lack of support from Gladstone, the leader of the opposition. There was concern that organised workers could have undue influence on Members of Parliament, but this fear never materialised.[211]

The Exchange Telegraph Company (later known as Extel) was, like Reuters, a news distribution service. It was founded in 1862, but was a very minor player until 1872 when the Post Office granted it a license to provide London Stock Exchange prices and other financial news to its customers in London. Their license limited their operation to within 900 yards of the stock exchange. Similar licenses were later granted for local stock exchanges in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dublin. These were all linked to a central office from where news could be distributed. Extel also provided a service for calling the police, or raising a fire alarm.[212]

From the beginning, Cooke promoted the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph to the railways as a safer way of working, particularly on single lines, with the first installations in the 1840s. Previously, separation of trains had relied on strict timetabling. Block working, controlled by the telegraph, ensured that only one train at a time could be on a section of line.[229] The benefits of block working were not generally appreciated until the late 1860s. The number of block instruments on the London and North Western Railway, for instance, increased from 311 in 1869 to 3,000 in 1879.[230]

Lord Rothermere, 1914

Prior to World War I, the telegraph rates charged to news services became a political issue. There was an extremely preferential rate granted for news providers. They were charged one shilling (5p) for 75 or 100 words (depending whether it was inside or out of office hours respectively) and then twopence (0.4p) for each additional 75/100 words, including repeat messages to different addresses. Thus, a journalist could send 100 messages and 99 of them would cost only twopence. This was not profitable for the Post Office, but the government was reluctant to act because they did not want to antagonise the newspapers.[231] The issue was put on hold when war broke out, but in 1915 the minimum price of ordinary inland telegrams was raised from sixpence (2.5p) to ninepence (3.8p). The Postmaster General, Herbert Samuel, commented "If 6d for 12 words is unremunerative, 1s for 100 words is far more so", let alone the twopence copy rate for subsequent messages.[232] Samuel proposed a new press scale of 1s for 60/80 words and a copy rate of threepence (1.3p).[233] This was first delayed to 1917 because of the war, and then to 1920 when it was finally implemented.[234]

Some London newspaper proprietors, notably Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mirror and cofounder of the Daily Mail, supported increased charges, which would tend to discourage new rivals. In 1926 Rothermere tried to persuade the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, but the Postmaster General, William Mitchell-Thomson was against charging an economic rate. Provincial papers would stop using the telegraph, or be driven out of business altogether, with little saving to the Post Office. The fixed costs of maintaining and operating the telegraph system would still have to be paid.[235] The press rate was not increased until 1940 when it went up to one shilling and threepence (6.3p) when there was a general increase in all charges. The copy rate remained at threepence until 1955 when it was abolished. By that time, with increasing use of the telephone, income from press telegrams had become insignificant.[236]

The first military use of the telegraph in action was during the Crimean War (1853–1856). A submarine cable was laid across the Black Sea from Varna to Balaklava.[237] The army found the use of civilian volunteer telegraphists problematic because of their lack of military training. From 1870, the War Office arranged with the Post Office for the training of military telegraphists. Royal Engineers from the Telegraph Battalion were employed on state telegraphs and withdrawn for overseas duties in time of war.[238]

In World War I, the telegraph was recognised as being of crucial importance. Both sides tried to damage the international telegraph lines of the other. Post Office cable ships were involved in the action.[239] Just a few hours after the declaration of war on 4 August 1914, CS Alert cut the German cables in the English Channel, almost completely isolating Germany from the rest of the world.[240] In 1915, CS Monarch was sunk by a German mine off Folkestone.[241]

The science of meteorology was greatly assisted by the rapid weather reports made possible by the telegraph. In 1860 the Magnetic was contracted by the Board of Trade to pass weather data between London and Paris. Lighthouses, lightships, and islands got telegraph connections and became weather stations. There were even attempts to place weather ships far out into the Atlantic. The first attempt was in 1870 with the old Corvette The Brick 50 miles off Lands End. £15,000 was spent on the project, but ultimately it failed. In 1881, there was a proposal for a weather ship in the mid-Atlantic, but it came to nothing.[242] Deep-ocean weather ships had to await the commencement of radiotelegraphy.[243]

The provision of telegraph connections to lightships gave a means of calling for assistance to a ship in difficulties. Prior to having a telegraph connection, there had been cases of ships wrecked on rocks after being seen to be struggling by a lightship for as long as twelve hours. For instance, the SS Agnes Jack sunk with the loss of all hands in January 1883 in view of a lightship off the coast of Wales.[244]

Installation of street call points to raise a fire alarm by electric telegraph had been installed in Europe as early as 1849 in Berlin. Siemens Brothers had proposed a system in Manchester using the now ubiquitous break glass call points around 1861. The town council rejected the scheme through fear of hooliganism. The first system was not installed in Britain until the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in London took it up in 1880, installing 40 call points. Other towns soon followed and there was a dramatic reduction in serious fires as a result.[245]

The police were an early user of telegraph private wires. In 1850 Scotland Yard had a line to Charing Cross railway station. In 1860 the police stations of the City of London were connected together using the Wheatstone ABC system. Church steeples were used to keep the wires high and out of reach of vandals and criminals. In 1872–73 the Metropolitan Police connected numerous points in their district to police stations.[246]

Telegraph codebooks consist of a large number of short codewords which decode to a whole phrase or sentence. These were important in the UK, and elsewhere. They were used by businesses which sent a large number of telegrams. The idea was to reduce the word count of the message, thus holding down the cost of the message. This was of particular importance for international traffic which was sent over long, expensive submarine cables.[247] This was much more effective than the common practise of telegram style – heavily abbreviated messaging using the minimum number of words.[248] In some cases, telegraph codes also served the purpose of maintaining secrecy for commercially sensitive information; companies would develop their own private code.[249]

Many commercial codebooks were published in the UK. Popular titles included The ABC Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code, first published 1873,[250] and Bentley's Complete Phrase Code, first published 1906.[251] The ABC Code was written by William Clausen-Thue, a shipping manager, later to become a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His codebook was the first public code to be widely sold.[252] Many codebooks were written for a specific trade or industry.[253] Bentley's, for instance, published a supplement especially for mining.[254]

Bentley's was written by Ernest Lungley Bentley and may have been the most widely used codebook worldwide. It had sold 100,000 copies by 1967. In 1905, Bentley was working for a shipping agency on the company's private code. He left to found his own company and develop a code for general use. He used codewords from Whitelaw's Telegraph Cyphers,[255] published in London in 1904, which contained 20,000 pronounceable five-letter words. Whitelaw's could be used to generate 400 million codewords by running any two five-letter words together to make a still pronouncable ten-letter word. Pronouncability was important because only pronouncable codewords were allowed by the telegraph authorities. Whitelaw's was purely a list of codewords; no meanings were assigned to them. Bentley's was the first codebook of such five-letter codewords.[256]

Starting in 1896,[257] the International Telegraph Union (ITU) attempted to control the use of codes in international telegrams to protect telegraph incomes and avoid messages that were difficult for operators to transmit. In 1875 they reduced the maximum length of a word (telegrams were charged by the word) from seven syllables to ten letters. In 1879, at a conference in London, they decided that all words used must come from one of eight named languages. Codes using invented words could then be charged as a cipher message at a much higher rate.[258] The attempt was not successful. The rules were abused in the UK and Europe and incoming messages from the US (which was not an ITU member) entirely ignored them.[259] In 1890, in an attempt to stop the abuse, the ITU published a list of a quarter of a million authorised codewords. There was strong opposition to this as many existing codes would not be allowed under this scheme. In 1896, they allowed any code provided it was first submitted for approval and the words added to the official dictionary. By 1901 this had expanded to well over a million words. The task of maintaining the list had become too difficult and in 1903 the requirement became that words had merely to be "pronounceable". The publication of Whitelaw's 400 million codewords permanently killed the idea of an official list.[260]

After the war, telegram usage went back into decline and the deficit returned into the millions of pounds. Telegram numbers were 42 million in 1950, under 14 million in 1960, and only 7.7 million in 1970, the lowest it had ever been under nationalisation.[283] Repeated price rises by successive Postmasters General Ness Edwards and Ernest Marples to try to keep the deficit under control only made the situation worse by driving traffic down even further.[284] Other measures were the ending or reduction of special prices for certain categories. These included the end of free messages for the railways in 1967, increase of the press rate, and increase of the surcharge for telegrams to the Republic of Ireland, which had not been part of the United Kingdom since 1922, and officially a republic since 1949.[285]

Valentine's Day greeting telegram by Rex Whistler, 1935

One area that continued to grow was greetings telegrams. More special occasion categories were added and premium "de luxe" telegrams were introduced for some categories in 1961.[286] Business use of public telegrams, once the major user of the service, was now minimal.[287] A greeting telegram unique to the UK was the practise of the monarch sending a message to citizens reaching their hundredth birthday. This was instituted by George V in 1917, and in the 1940s a special telegram bearing a Royal Crest was introduced. There were only 24 recipients in 1917, rising to 255 in 1952 and by 2015, over 8,000 messages were sent, but no longer by telegram as the service had been discontinued.[288]

In 1969 Post Office Telecommunications, of which the telegraph service formed a part, was made a distinct department of the Post Office,[289] and in 1981 it was separated entirely from the Post Office as British Telecom as a first step to its privatisation in 1984.[290] British Telecom ended their inland telegram service in 1982. International telegrams were still handled, of which there were 13.7 million in 1970.[291] However, incoming international telegrams were no longer delivered by messenger, they were instead delivered by ordinary post.[292]

The telegram service was replaced with the telemessage service in which the message is dictated over the phone to an operator and delivered by post in a yellow envelope similar to the old telegram envelope. British Telecom discontinued this service in 2003 and sold the business to Telegrams Online.[293]

At the end of WWII, the Post Office restarted their move to automatic switching which had been put on hold for the duration. Automatic switching was established in 1947 and sowed the seed of the international telex network that developed from 1970 onwards. Telex, standing for "telegraphy exchange", was a switched network of teleprinters using automatic exchanges. It was originally a trademark of Western Union who set up a telex system in the United States in 1962, but soon became a generic name for the worldwide network. The advantages of telex over telephone were that an operator was not required to permanently staff the station to receive messages, and that a printed message provided a permanent record.[294] While the telegram service was declining post-war, in the same period business use of telegraph private wires and telex was growing.[295] Most press traffic was also now on telex or private wires so the increase in the press rate on the public telegram system was of little concern to them.[296] The British military also used telex to link military installations through the Cold War period. Their Telegraph Automatic Switching System was used from 1955 until well into the 1980s.[297]

As office computers became commonplace in the 1980s, telex switched to a new telegraph code, ASCII, which aided integration with computers. ASCII is a 7-bit code, compared to the Baudot 5-bit code, which means it has enough codes to represent both upper and lower case whereas Baudot machines printed in upper case only. Teleprinters could then be used in conjunction with word processor programs for instance.[298] Increased use of fax machines drove down telex traffic, a change that was precipitated by the postal strikes of 1971,[299] and most especially of 1988.[300] Telex was mostly superseded by e-mail and the internet in the 1990s. The number of subscribers in the UK fell from 115,000 in 1988 to 18,000 in 1997.[301] One of the last groups using the telex service was solicitors, who used it for exchange of contracts in conveyancing amongst other things. Conveyancing can be done by post or telephone, but telex has an immediacy that the former does not, and provides a written record that the latter does not. Conveyancing can also be done over the internet, but in the 1990s there was some concern over its security.[302]