PEOGEESS DUEING THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. 
Ill 
change was made on 6th May, 1840, when penny postage was 
started for the United Kingdom, and the old black penny and blue 
twopenny adhesive stamps were issued as well as the 1 d. and 2d. 
Mulready envelopes and wrappers. Hertfordshire is to a certain 
extent associated with this issue, as all the paper for the Mulready 
envelopes was made at Apsley Mills; it had silk threads running 
through it to prevent forgery, an invention patented by Mr. John 
Dickinson. In 1839 about 82 million letters and papers passed 
through the post, as compared with 3,000 million in 1900, when 
the penny post had been practically extended to the whole empire. 
For the more rapid conveyance of news the prehistoric fire- 
beacon had already been superseded by the telegraph in 1801; not 
the electric telegraph of modern times, but a series of semaphores 
worked on high buildings or eminences at a distance of 8 to 12 
miles from one another. A semaphore station of this sort is shown 
in old prints on the top of the clock-tower at St. Albans. In 
favourable weather messages could be sent with great speed by this 
means either by night or day ; for instance, the time taken to send 
a message from London to Deal (72 miles) was only 3 minutes. 
An electric telegraph had been suggested in the eighteenth 
century, and some more or less successful attempts had been made 
to utilize for this purpose the so-called frictional electricity, in 
conjunction with pith balls; but the originators of the modern 
telegraph were Wheatstone and Cook, who took out a patent 
for it in 1837 and made the first successful installation on the 
London & Blackwall Kailway in that year. At about the 
same date or just afterwards Morse devised, in the United States 
of America, an electric telegraph, in which he first used the dot 
and dash of the Morse code. A line was opened on the Great 
Western Kail way from London to Slough soon afterwards. By 
1845 there were two or three more lines in use in the country ; 
and in January of that year public attention was forcibly directed 
to their merits in the following manner:—A woman was murdered 
at Slough, and a description of the murderer was telegraphed to 
London so that the police were enabled to meet and arrest him. 
The man was Tawell, a Quaker and ticket-of-leave man in business 
as a chemist at Berkhamsted, so that a Hertfordshire man, though 
one of whom the county was not inordinately proud, indirectly 
gave a great impetus to the development of telegraphy. In 1851 
the first submarine cable was laid to France. 
Greater facilities for travel and communication did much for the 
development of science and trade, but in order that their full 
benefit should be felt it was necessary that books should also be 
