In the half-years endingMiles of
Telegraph
in
operation.		Miles
of
Wires.		Number
of
Messages.		Receipts.Dividends paid.
£.s.d.
June, 18501,6846,73029,24520,4361004 per Cent. per Ann.
December, 18501,7867,20037,38923,0871394 per Cent. per Ann.
June, 18511,9657,90047,25925,5291246 per Ct. per Ann. & 2 per Ct. Bonus.
December, 18512,12210,65053,95724,3368106 per Cent. per Ann.
Note.—In this half-year the paid-up
Capital of the Company was increased,
and the tariff diminished about 50 per
Cent. from the original rate of charge.
June, 18522,50212,50087,15027,437486 per Cent. per Ann.
December, 18523,70919,560127,98740,0871826½ per Cent. per Ann.
June, 18534,00820,800138,06047,2651636½ per Cent. per Ann.
December, 18534,40924,340212,44056,919017 per Cent. per Ann.

It will be seen from the above what an impulse was given to the business by the reduction in the tariff which took place in December, 1851; for if we compare the messages of the half-year ending June, 1850, with those of the half-year of June, 1852, we shall find that whilst the miles of telegraph in work had not increased one-half, the messages transmitted had nearly trebled. It is only within this last year or two, however—as will be seen by the table—that a very large augmentation of business has taken place, which is doubtless owing to the public being better acquainted with its capabilities. The tariff has since been further reduced, with the result of a still further increase of the messages sent and of the money received—the profits allowing, at the present moment, of a seven per cent. dividend! The lowest point of cheapness, in our opinion, is yet very far from being reached; and it would only be a wise act on the part of the Company to at once adopt an uniform charge for messages, say of fifty words, for one shilling. If this were done, the only limit to its business would be the number of wires they could conveniently hang, for the present set would clearly be insufficient. Means should also be taken to obviate one great objection, at present felt, with respect to sending private communications by telegraph—the violation of all secrecy,—for in any case half a dozen people must be cognizant of every word addressed by one person to another. The clerks of the English Electric Telegraph Company are sworn to secrecy, but we often write things that it would be intolerable to see strangers read before our eyes. This is a grievous fault in the telegraph, and it must be remedied by some means or other. Our own opinion is that the public would much prefer the dial telegraph, by the use of which two persons could converse with each other, without the intervention of a third party at all—or the printing step by step instrument would be equally good. At all events, some simple yet secure cipher, easily acquired and easily read, should be introduced, by which means messages might to all intents and purposes be “sealed” to any person except the recipient. We have reason to believe that Professor Wheatstone has invented a cipher of this description, which will speedily be made public. “One-eighth of the despatches between New Orleans and New York,” says Mr. Jones in his “Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph,” “are in cipher. For instance, merchants in either city agree upon a cipher, and if the New Orleans correspondent wishes to inform his New York friend of the prices and prospects of the cotton market, instead of saying ‘Cotton eight quarter—don’t sell,’ he may use the following:—‘Shepherd—rum—kiss—flash—dog.’”

The Company has lately made an arrangement, by which the very absurd and inconvenient necessity of being obliged to attend personally at the telegraph station with a message has been obviated. “Franked message papers,” pre-paid, are now issued, procurable at any stationers’. These, with the message filled in, can be dispatched to the office when and how the sender likes, and the Company intend very quickly to sell electric stamps, like Queen’s heads, which may be stuck on to any piece of paper, and frank its contents without further trouble. Another very important arrangement for mercantile men is the sending of “remittance messages,” by means of which money can be paid in at the central office in London, and, within a few minutes, paid out at Liverpool or Manchester, or by the same means sent up to town with the like dispatch from Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Hull, York, Plymouth, and Exeter. There is a money-order office in the Lothbury establishment to manage this department, which will, no doubt, in all emergencies speedily supersede the Government money-order office, which works through the slower medium of the Post Office.

We have spoken hitherto only of the Old Electric Telegraph Company. There are several other companies in the United Kingdom, working different patents. We have chosen, however, to describe the proceedings of the original Company, because it is the only one that has an amount of business sufficient to give it universal interest; it is the only company, in fact, that has seized the map of England in its nervous grasp, and shot its wires through every broad English shire. The European and the British Telegraph Companies have laid their lines, insulated with gutta percha and protected by iron tubes, beneath the public roads. The European Company works between Manchester, Birmingham, London, and Dover, and, by means of the two submarine cables of Dover and Calais and Dover and Ostend, puts the great manufacturing and commercial emporiums in connection with France, Belgium, and the rest of Europe by a double route. The British Telegraph Company works principally in the northern counties. Of the other lines, we need only mention at present the United Kingdom, and the English and Irish Magnetic Company, which works wires between London, Belfast, and Galway, by means of a subterranean line as far as the west coast of Scotland, and of a submarine cable stretched between Portpatrick and Donaghadee.

It will, perhaps, be a source of wonder to our readers that one company should virtually possess the monopoly of telegraphic communication in this country, but this will cease when they consider that this Company was the first to enter the field, that it came forward with a large capital, speedily secured to themselves the different lines of railway—the only paths it was then considered that telegraphs could traverse with security,—and that it bought up, one after another, most of the patents that stood any chance of competing with its own. The time is fast approaching, however, when most of these advantages will fail them, and when the Company, powerful as it is, must be prepared to encounter a severe and active competition, and that for the following reasons:—

1. The plan of bringing the wires under the public roads turns, as it were, the flank of the railroad lines.

2. The patents of the old company are year by year expiring.

3. The very large capital expended by it—upwards of 170,000l. being sunk in patent rights alone,—independently of the vast expense attaching to the first introduction of the invention, forms a dead-weight which no new company would have to bear.

In the ordinary course of events, then, the other lines at present in existence will gain strength; new companies will spring up, and the supply of a great public want will be thrown into the arena of competition. Would it not be wise for the legislature to consider the question of telegraphy in England before it is too late? We all know what the principle of reckless competition led us into in our railway system. For years opposing companies scrambled for the monopoly of certain districts, and the result was the intersection of the country with bad lines, and, in many cases, with useless double routes. Millions were spent in litigation; railway travelling became, as a natural consequence, dear; the property of the original shareholders rapidly deteriorated; and it has all ended in half a dozen powerful companies swallowing up the smaller ones; and that competition, in whose name so much was demanded, has turned out to be only “a delusion and a snare.” The conveyance of intelligence cannot safely and conveniently be left in the hands of even one company without a strict Government supervision; much less can half a dozen systems be allowed to distract the land at their own will. Indeed, the question might with propriety be asked, Is not telegraphic communication as much a function of Government as the conveyance of letters? If the do-nothing principle is to be allowed to take its course, we shall have to go through a similar state of things to that which occurred only a few years since in the United States, when different competing lines refused to forward each other’s messages, and the whole system of telegraphic communication was accordingly dislocated. Indeed, even with the most perfect accord between different companies, the dissimilarity of instruments used by them would prove a great practical evil—as great a one, if not greater, than the break of gauge in the railway system. Messages could not be passed from one line to another, and delays as vexatious as those which occur on the continental lines would take away much of the value of the invention. It seems to us, then, that even if Parliament should refuse to interfere with the principle of competition in the case of the telegraphic communication, it should, at least, provide for the use of the same kind of instruments, and make it a fineable offence for one line to refuse to forward the messages of another.

Having done so much towards completing our telegraphic organization at home, our engineers adventurously determined to carry the wires across to the continent, and thus destroy the last remnant of that isolation to which we were forced to submit on account of our insular position. As long back as the year 1840 we find, by the Minutes of Evidence in the Fifth Report upon Railways, wherein the subject of electric telegraphy was partially examined, that, whilst Mr. Wheatstone was under examination Sir John Guest asked, “Have you tried to pass the line through water?” to which he replied, “There would be no difficulty in doing so; but the experiment has not yet been tried.” Again, on the chairman, Lord Seymour, asking, “Could you communicate from Dover to Calais in that way?” he replied, “I think it perfectly practicable.” A couple of years later the professor, indeed, engaged, and had everything in readiness, to lay a line for the Government across Portsmouth Harbour; it was not executed, however, through circumstances over which he had no control, but which were quite irrespective of the perfect feasibility of the undertaking.