X President's Address for the year 1887. 



after describing various modes of signalling by flags, boards, 

 or beacon fires on mountain tops, concludes thus : — " Of late 

 years several very interesting experiments have been made 

 of the practicability of conveying intelligence with the speed 

 of lightning by means of galvanism." 



The practical application and commercial success of the 

 electric telegraph is by common consent of the leading 

 electrical experts, dated from an experiment made by 

 William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, on the 

 25th July, 1837, about one month after the coronation of 

 Her Gracious Majesty. On this occasion, intelligible 

 messages were sent between Euston Square and Camden 

 Town, a distance of about two miles, by means of five 

 copper wires, laid in grooves in a triangular wooden rail and 

 '^ve magnetic needles at each end which were deflected by 

 the currents of electricity passing through the wires. Cooke 

 and Wheatstone's apparatus was patented on December 12, 

 1837, but for some years little was done with it. At last, 

 however, it was taken up by the Government, and by the 

 railways, the former recognising its probable value in time 

 of war, the latter its usefulness in controlling the operations 

 of that great system of transit which was beginning to 

 spread its giant arms abroad through the length and breadth 

 of the kingdom. 



In 1850, a new and most important departure was made. 

 Up to this time it was supposed that the telegraph wire 

 could traverse the dry land only, and that the seas must 

 continue, as heretofore, to separate nation fi^om nation, but 

 now a wii'e covered with an insulating coating of gutta 

 percha was laid across the Straits of Dover, and Great 

 Britain was telegraphically united with the Continent of 

 Europe. This pioneer cable, though so soon destroyed by 

 Mction, lasted long enough to prove the practicability of 

 submarine telegraphy, and was replaced in the following 

 year by a permanent armoured cable, resembling in its 

 essential features, those now in use. 



In 1858, a proposal which at first seemed utterly absurd 1 

 in its audacity, was at vast expense carried into efiect, and I 



