“Economy,” says a French writer, M. de Courcy, “teaches conciseness. The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness. ‘May I ask you to do me the favour,’ is 6d. for a distance of fifty miles.” How many of those fond adjectives, therefore, must our poor fellow relentlessly strike out to bring his billet down to a reasonable charge! What food for speculation each person affords, as he writes his hurried epistle, dictated either by fear, or greed, or more powerful love!—for we have not yet got into the habit of employing the telegraph, like the Americans, on the mere every-day business of life. Every message—and of these there are 350,000 transmitted by this Company yearly for the public, and upwards of 3,500,000 for the Railways—is faithfully copied, and put by in fire-proof safes, those sent by the recording telegraph being wound in tape-like lengths upon a roller, and appearing exactly like discs of sarcenet ribbon. Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting therefrom the salient features of the social and commercial life of England in the nineteenth century. If from the Household Book of the Duke of Northumberland, or still later, from the Paston Letters, we can catch such glimpses of the manners of an early age, what might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?
“Softly, softly,” interposes the Secretary of the Company, “we have no such intention of gratifying posterity; for, after a certain brief period all copies of communications are destroyed. No person unconnected with the office is, under any consideration, allowed to have access to them, and the servants of the Company are under a bond not to divulge ‘the secrets of the prison-house.’” Very good, as far as the present generation is concerned; nevertheless, it is devoutly to be wished that an odd box or two of these sarcenet ribbons, with their linear language, may escape, for future Rawlinsons to puzzle over and decipher for the instruction of mankind.
Whilst we have been thus speculating, however, a dozen messages for all parts of the kingdom have successively ascended, through the long lift before us, to the instrument-rooms, of which there are two, situated in the attics of the establishment, on either side of the top gallery of the central hall; these, to carry out our anatomical simile, might be called the two hemispheres of the establishment’s cerebrum. The instruments of one of these rooms are worked by youths, while those of the other are manipulated by young ladies; and it seems to us as though the directors were pitting them against each other—establishing a kind of industrial tournament—to see which description of labourer is worthiest. As yet, little or no difference can be detected: this, however, is in itself a triumph for the fair sex, as it proves their capacity for a species of employment well calculated for their habits and physical powers, and opens another door for that superabundance of female labour of a superior kind which has hitherto sought employment in vain.
Click, click, go the needles on every hand as we enter. Here we see the iron tongues of the telegraph wagging, and talking as fast as a tea-table full of old maids. London is holding communication with Manchester. Plymouth is listening attentively to a long story, and every now and then intimates by a slight movement that he perfectly comprehends. But there is one speaker whose nimble tongue seems to be saying important things by the stir around him,—that is the Hague whispering under the North Sea the news he has heard, an hour or so ago, from Vienna of a great victory just gained by the Turks. We are witness to a series of conversations carried on with all corners of the island, and between the metropolis of the world and every capital of northern and central Europe, as intimately as though the speakers were bending their heads over the dinner-table, and talking confidentially to the host. And by what agency is this extraordinary conversation carried on? All that the visitor sees is a number of little mahogany cases, very similar to those of American clocks, each having a dial, with two lozenge-shaped needles working by pivots, which hang, when at rest, perpendicularly upon it. Two dependant handles, situated at the base of this instrument, which the operator grasps and moves from side to side at his will, suffice to make and break the currents or reverse them, and consequently to deflect the needles either to the right or left. Two little stops of ivory are placed about half an inch apart, on either side of the needle, to prevent its deflecting too much, and to check all vibration. It is the sound of the iron tongue striking against these stops that makes the clicking, and to which the telegraphists are sensitively alive. In the early days of telegraphy, the operator’s attention, at all the stations, was drawn to the instrument by the sudden ringing of an alarum, which was effected by the agency of an electro-magnet; but the horrid din it occasioned became insupportable to persons in constant attendance, and this part of the instrument was speedily given up, the clicking of the needle being found quite sufficient to draw his attention to the arrival or passing of a message. We say or passing of a message, because, when a communication is made, as for instance, between London and Edinburgh, the needles of all the telegraph-stations on the line are simultaneously deflected, but the attendant has only to take notice of what is going on when a special signal is made to his particular locality, informing him that he is spoken with. A story is told of a certain somnolent station clerk, who, in order to enjoy his nap, trained his terrier to scratch and awaken him at the first sound of the clicking needles.
There are but two kinds of telegraph used by the company, the needle telegraph and a few of the chemical recording telegraph of Bain. The latter instrument strikes the spectator more, perhaps, than the nimble-working needle apparatus, but its action is equally simple. Slits of variable length representing letters, according to the alphabet in the note,[35] are punched out from a long strip of paper called the message-strip, which is placed between a revolving cylinder and a toothed spring. The battery is connected with the cylinder; the wire, which goes from station to station, is joined to the spring. As dry paper is a non-conductor, no electricity passes while the unpierced portion of the message-slip interposes between the cylinder and the tooth; but when the tooth drops into a space, and comes in contact with the cylinder, the current flows. If we now transfer our attention to the station at which the message is received, we find a similar cylinder revolving at a regular rate, and a metal pin, depending from the end of the telegraph wire, pressing upon it; but in this case the paper between the cylinder and the pin has been washed with a solution of prussiate of potash, which electricity has the effect of changing to Prussian blue at the point where the pin touches it. Therefore, as the chemically prepared paper moves under the pin, a blue line is formed of the same length as the slits at the other end, which regulate the duration of the electric current; and thus every letter punched upon the message-strip is faithfully transferred to its distant fellow. Such is the celerity with which the notation is transmitted by this method, that “in an experiment performed by M. Le Verrier and Dr. Lardner, before committees of the Institute and the Legislative Assembly at Paris, despatches were sent 1,000 miles at the rate of nearly 20,000 words an hour.” In ordinary practice, however, the speed is limited to the rate at which an expert clerk can punch out the holes, which is not much above a hundred per minute. Where the object was to forward long documents, such as a speech, a number of persons could be employed simultaneously in punching out different portions of the message, and the message-strips would then be supplied as fast as the machine could work.
This system is used extensively in America. A weaker current of electricity than what is required for deflecting needles or magnetising iron, suffices to effect the requisite chemical decomposition. The conducting power of vapour or rain carries much of the electricity from the wires in certain states of the atmosphere; “and in such cases, where both Morse’s and Bain’s telegraphs are used by an amalgamated company in the same office, it is found convenient to remove the wires from Morse’s instruments, and connect them with Bain’s, on which it is practicable to operate when communication by Morse’s system is interrupted.”—(Whitworth’s Report, p. 51.)
This chemical telegraph has also the advantage, in common with all recording instruments, that it leaves an indelible record of every message transmitted, and therefore is very useful when the mistake of a single figure or letter might be of consequence, which we will illustrate by a case which happened very lately. A stockbroker in the City received, during a very agitated state of the funds, an order to buy for a client in a distant part of the country, by a certain time of the day, 80,000l. of consols. This order being unusually large for the individual, the broker doubted its accuracy, and immediately made inquiries at the office. The message had luckily been sent by the recording instrument, and upon looking at the record it was immediately seen that the order was for 8,000l., the transcriber having put in an 0 too much, for which, according to the rules of the company, he was incontinently fined. Now, here the error was immediately traced to the person who made it, and there was no need of telegraphing back to inquire if all were right, two matters of vital importance in such a transaction as this, involving so much personal responsibility; for if the purchase had been made and turned out unfortunate, the loss would indubitably have fallen upon the unhappy sharebroker.[36]
In all ordinary transactions, however, the needle instrument is preferable, because it transmits its messages much more quickly. The speed with which the attendants upon these instruments read off the signals made by the needles is really marvellous: they do not in some cases even wait to spell the words letter by letter, but jump at the sentence before it is concluded; and they have learned by practice, as Sir Francis Head says in “Stokers and Pokers,” to recognize immediately who is telegraphing to them, say at York, by the peculiar expression of the needles, the long drawn wires thus forming a kind of human antennæ by which individual peculiarities of touch are projected to an infinite distance. To catalogue the kind of messages which pass through the room, either on their way from London or in course of distribution to it, would be to give a history of human affairs. Here, from the shores of this tight island, comes the morning news gathered by watchers, telescopes in hand, on remote headlands, of what ships have just hove in sight, or what craft have foundered or come ashore—to this room, swifter beyond comparison than the carrier-dove of old, the wire speeds the name of the winner of the Derby or the Oaks. How the four winds are blowing throughout the island; how stocks rise or fall every hour of the day in all the great towns and in the continental capitals; what corn is at Mark Lane, and what farmer Giles got a quarter of an hour since in a country town in Yorkshire, are equally known in the telegraph room. Intermixed with quotations of tallow and the price of Wall’s End coals, now and then comes a love-billet, which excites no more sympathy in the clerk than in the iron that conveys it; or a notice that the sudden dart of death has struck some distant friend, is transmitted and received as unconcernedly as an account of the fall in Russian stock. When business is slack the telegraphists sometimes amuse themselves by an interchange of badinage with their distant friends. Sir Francis Head informs us that an absolute quarrel once took place by telegraph, and the two irritated manipulators were obliged to be separated in consequence.
In addition to this private message department there is, below stairs, an intelligence office, in which news published in the London morning papers is condensed and forwarded to the Exchanges of Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, &c.[37] A few years since the company opened subscription rooms in all the large towns of the north, in which intelligence of every kind was posted immediately after its arrival in London; but the craving for early intelligence was not sufficient to induce the people to incur the expense, and, with the exception of the room at Hull, the establishments have all been shut up.
On Friday evening especially this department is very busy condensing for the country papers the news which appears in that exciting column headed “By Electric Telegraph, London, 2 A.M.” Thus the telegraph rides express through the night for the broadsheets of the entire kingdom, and even steps across from Portpatrick to Donaghadee into the sister country, with its budget of latest intelligence, by which means the extremities of the two islands are kept as well up in the progress of important events as London itself. Upwards of 120 provincial papers each receive in this manner their column of parliamentary news of the night; and the Daily Mail, published in Glasgow, gets sometimes as much as three columns of the debates forwarded whilst the House is sitting. A superintendent and four clerks are expressly employed in this department; and early in the day, towards the end of the week, the office presents all the appearance of an editor’s room. At seven in the morning the clerks are to be seen deep in the Times and other daily papers, just hot from the press, making extracts, and condensing into short paragraphs all the most important events, which are immediately sent off to the country papers to form “second editions.” Neither does the work cease here; for no sooner is a second edition published in town, than its news, if of more than ordinary interest, is transmitted to the provinces. For instance: whilst we were in the company’s telegraph room a short time since, the following intelligence was being served out to Liverpool, York, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Birmingham, and Hull:—