184.8.] 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



13 



unsupplied are Plymouth, Cliatham, Preston, Exeter, Bath, 

 Brighton, and Oxford. The number of shire towns brought into 

 connection is near thirty ; all the chief seaports and seats of 

 manufactures, and se\eral wiitering-places. 



Besides the places already enumerated, many considerable towns 

 can be served, being already placed on the line of telegraph, as 

 Worcester, Sunderland, Stockport, Kingston, Lichfield, Tunbridge 

 VV^ells, Poole, Croydon, 'W^atford, JNIaldon, Droitwich, Thetford, 

 Beverley, Braiiitree, Ashford, Newark, Alnwick, Dunbar, Lough- 

 borough, Crewe, Wolverton, Leighton Buzzard, Driffield, Reigate, 

 Romford, Bishops Stortford, Tliirsk, Northallerton, Market AVeigh- 

 ton, &c. In fact, within a very short period, the company wiU be 

 able to supply the prices of above a hundred market towns, if 

 wii-es enougli are laid down. 



In the United States, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Balti- 

 more, AV'a^liington, Albany, Newhaven, and Hartford, have the 

 means of intercommunication, and a line of a thousand miles long 

 runs to Quebec. • 



With regard to submarine telegraphs their practicability is indis- 

 putable. Tlie great essay w ill be the line between Dover and Calais, 

 when the two great cities of western Europe will have instant 

 parley. Already the money markets of the two sympathise, the 

 capitalists of the two cities are bound up with each other, and it is 

 to be hoped these ties will be drawn closer, and the peace of the 

 two great nations be maintained. A continuous line between 

 London and Vienna is talked oiF as in progress ; at any rate, we 

 shall soon have, by a telegraphic communication with Marseilles or 

 Trieste, the means of abridging our East Indian correspondence. 

 The value of such correspondence to the London houses engaged 

 in East India business and expecting remittances would have been 

 very great during the late crisis. 



If the steamboat threatens us with greater hazard of invasion 

 during any future war, the telegrajih comes in good time to coun- 

 teract any unfavourable influence, by giving us instant intelligence 

 of any danger to our coasts, and allowing of immediate, and as it 

 niav be called, personal communication between the statesmen of 

 England and France, so as to allow negociations for peace to be 

 carried on with more rapidity than by mean of envoys. 



To the Admiralty the electric telegraph offers the means of 

 superseding the cumbrous semaphore, and of rapid intercourse with 

 the naval stations. We consider the Admiralty greatly blameable 

 in not having sooner availed themselves of the system, after the 

 success of the Slough experiment. As it is, they have only a line 

 to Gosport. There is none to Plymouth, Chatham, Sheerness, 

 or Milford. We do not see why a submarine telegraph should not 

 be carried out to the anchorage at Spithead, so as to allow of 

 readier correspondence with the admiral or officers afloat. It is 

 no testimony in favour of government management in England and 

 France th;it the clumsy semaphores, useless at night and in a fog, 

 and useable only for a fifth of the year, should have been so long 

 persisted in ; but we entertain no doubt that so soon as the electric 

 telegraph system is fully applied for public service, the govern- 

 ments will liecome candidates for taking its control into their own 

 hands, tir for interfering with it as they have with the railways. 



A submarine telegraph which will be of great use will be between 

 England and Ireland, and nothing but the want of energy of the 

 government prevents them from applying it in the present crisis, 

 when it will be a means of economising money, and most probably 

 of saving human life. Such a telegraph is properly a government 

 experiment, and not a commercial experiment ; and for that reason 

 it is not likely to be done until it cannot be put off any longer, and 

 when done to be badly done. 



It is to be remembered that the telegraphic establishment will 

 be a new post-office, operating almost instantanemisly, and with 

 this ad\antage — that instead of the whole business being restricted 

 to one fixed time, or to two fixed times, communication will be 

 made at the moment desired by day or night. The way in which 

 such an establishment must operate on society must be most bene- 

 ficial. All those interested in markets, whether belonging to the 

 agricultural interest or the mercantile interest, will, in every part 

 of the kingdom, wherever they may be, know the state of all the 

 markets open within a few minutes of operations being effected, 

 while they will ha\e the means of making purchases or sales hun- 

 dreds of miles oft', whereby transactions will be much quickened, 

 and a general and uniform rate of prices will be established through- 

 out the country. The charge for subscription is only two guineas 

 yearly, and the subscriber, wherever he may be, has admission 

 to the subscription rooms, in which are posted the shipping 

 lists, the share lists from the London and provincial share ex- 

 changes, the prices current, the prices of corn, live stock, and pro- 

 duce, and every event of public or mercantile interest. No one con- 



cerned in any business can well avoid this payment, for it will in 

 the end become de facto a tax, for no one will dare to be placed 

 under a disadvantage to his neighbour. It will be as common as 

 to read the newspapers. 



It will readily be seen that even the man of pleasure cannot 

 escape contributing to the revenues of the telegraph company, for 

 political intelligence and sporting intelligence will be recorded, 

 and wherever he may wander he will always have access to in- 

 formation. On going into the telegragh station he will see the state 

 of bets atTattersaU's, and regulate his own proceedings accordingly, 

 or learn who is the winner at Epsom or Newmarket. During the 

 late general election, had the system been in full m ork, intelligence 

 would have been sent of the state of the poll from sixty boroughs 

 and thirty places of county elections, which are now' telegraph 

 stations. A parliamentary division will be known within a few 

 minutes all over the country, and the faction which triumphs or 

 which falls at St. Stephen's will within a brief period be lu-ought 

 under the comment of thousands of its supporters or oiijionents. 

 Now the divisions are telegraphed to Liverpool and Manchester, 

 and posted in the rooms. 



The sending of ]n-ivate messages must be most various in its in- 

 fluence, and the effect of time and experience only can enable its 

 bearing to be fully appreciated. New modes of doing business will 

 spring up, new branches of business will be created, some perhaps 

 be superseded, but that the result will be beneficial on the whole 

 no reasoning man can doubt. AVhoever has a sick relative at a 

 distance, in the hourly peril of death, with life quivering on a 

 breath, in aU the agony of hope and fear, will know the value of an 

 establishment which can give him frequent and immediate intelli- 

 gence of the state of one whom he holds dear. After this example 

 it is of little moment to picture the many ways in which personal 

 interest will seek gratificaticui in a correspondence which extends 

 the power of wealth and enterprise, and widens their sphere of ac- 

 tion. A Rothschild, a Goldsmid, or a Baring, may rule by agents 

 in London, in Paris, in Madrid, and in Lisbon at once ; but hence- 

 forth their most distant affairs will be under their own guidance, 

 and their personal influence will be made to act in cities they have 

 never entered, and with men they have never seen. The confiden- 

 tial agent or the junior partner will be a zero, and tlie means of 

 safely conducting an available operation will lui longer be limited 

 by the necessity of intrusting it to a subordinate. Indeed it is im- 

 possible to contemplate, without excitement, the new world which 

 is as it were opening before us, and to which the effects of railway 

 and steamship intercourse, great as they are, are as nothing. 



To the press the electric telegraph will be a new arm of power : 

 the money which is now si)ent in horses and expresses will lie ap- 

 propriated in a large proportion to keeping up a greater nundier of 

 agents and correspondence. It may appear at first sight that the 

 telegraph rooms by affording so much intelligence will be curtailing 

 the s])here of the newspapers, but they will only be interfering 

 with them in some departments to give them greater facilities in 

 others. The Electric Telegraph Company may announce that the 

 mail steamer has brought to Liverpool the American ]iresident's 

 speech, and its purport, but the special edition of the Tiiiics must 

 give its words sent up by telegraph. Country meetings of im- 

 portance will be sent up by telegraph, and it is not impossil)le that 

 before long such arrangements may be made as to allow of the re- 

 porter's notes being used for telegraphic transmission. The differ- 

 ence in the number of signs between long-hand and short-hand 

 (discarding most of the arbitraries), is as 275 to 170, or nearly as .5 

 to 3 ; this gives a saving in favour of short-hand of two-thirds, and 

 allows five hours' work to be done in three, for it is to be oliserved 

 in telegraphic communication, the great object is to economise the 

 time used at the telegraph. The short-hand system was tried on 

 the South- Western and found to answer. 



It seems by no means improbable that an influence will be ex- 

 erted on the jurisprudence and police of the countiy by the tele- 

 graph system. Perhaps we ought to say that it has already done 

 so. The arrest of Tawell, the quaker, for murder, and the arrest 

 of so many other criminals has given a greater efficiency to the 

 law ; the respite and afterwards execution of the coinict at Maid- 

 stone, show the ready means of communication with the central 

 authorities. But though a telegraphic message may be a sufficient 

 authority to arrest for felony, it will be necessary to pro\ide some 

 new process to make this establishment available in cases of mis- 

 demeanour, and in the end it is likely to be applied in civil cases, 

 in which already it is calculated to quicken many stages of pro- 

 ceeding. It may hereafter not be uncommon to have a witness at 

 Edinburgh examined by telegraph during a trial at Westminster 

 Hall, and other evidence be sought for five hundred miles off'. It 

 may cease to be necessary to bring up a prisoner to the superior 



