Electric Telegraph Company

The Electric Telegraph Company was the world's first public telegraph company, founded in the United Kingdom by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and John Lewis Ricardo, MP for Stoke-on-Trent, with Cromwell F. Varley as chief engineer. It was incorporated by the '''''' (9 & 10 Vict. c. xlvi). Its headquarters was in Founders Court, Lothbury, behind the Bank of England. This was the first company formed for the specific purpose of providing a telegraph service to the public. Besides Cooke and Ricardo, the original shareholders were railway engineer George Parker Bidder with the largest holding, Benjamin Hawes, Thomas Boulton, and three other members of the Ricardo family; Samson, Albert, and Frederick. Up to this point telegraph lines had been laid mostly in conjunction with railway companies, and Cooke had been a leading figure in convincing them of its benefits. However, these systems were all for the exclusive use of the railway company concerned, mostly for signalling purposes, until 1843 when Cooke extended the Great Western Railway's telegraph on to Slough at his own expense, at which point he acquired the right to open it to the public. Railway telegraphy continued to be an important part of the company's business with expenditure on the railways peaking in 1847–48. This focus on the railways was reflected in the directors and major shareholders being dominated by people associated with railway construction. Additional railway people who had become involved by 1849 included Samuel Morton Peto, Thomas Brassey, Robert Stephenson (of Rocket fame and who was chairman of the company in 1857–58), Joseph Paxton, and Richard Till, a director of several railway companies. The collaboration between Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in developing the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph was not a happy one, degenerating into a bitter dispute over who had invented the telegraph. As a result, the company was formed without Wheatstone (although he claimed he had been offered the post of scientific adviser). At creation the company purchased all the patents Cooke and Wheatstone had obtained to date in building the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph. == Early years ==

The company was not immediately hugely profitable, and shares were more or less worthless. In 1846 it won a concession from Belgium for telegraph lines covering the whole country. The company installed a line from Brussels to Antwerp but the traffic was light (mainly stock exchange business) and the company decided to return its concession to the Belgian Government in 1850. In 1848, after a dispute with the Great Western over an engine the ETC was alleged to have damaged, the telegraph line from Paddington to Slough was removed, although the railway company continued to use the telegraph at the Box Tunnel. Other areas of growth were in the supply of news to newspapers, and contracts with stock exchanges. However, general use by the public was retarded by the high cost of sending a message. By 1859, growth required the company to relocate its London central office to Great Bell Alley, Moorgate, but retaining the Founders Court site as a public office. The Moorgate office was arranged over three floors and a large number of men and boys were recruited on an accelerating rate of pay. The portion of Great Bell Alley east of Moorgate Street was later renamed Telegraph Street in recognition of the importance of the company at 11–14 Telegraph Street. == Government reserved powers ==

In the act of Parliament establishing the company, the Electric Telegraph Company's Act 1846, the government reserved the right to take over the resources of the ETC in times of national emergency. It did this in 1848 in response to Chartist agitation. In April 1848, the Chartists organised a large demonstration at Kennington Common and presented a petition signed by millions. The government, fearing an insurrection, used its control of the ETC telegraph to disrupt Chartist communication. == Competitors ==

The first competitor to emerge was the British Electric Telegraph Company (BETC), formed in 1849 by Henry Highton and his brother Edward. The ETC tried to oppose the government Bill but without success. A more serious rival came in 1851 with the formation of the English and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company (later renamed the British and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company and usually just called the Magnetic). The Magnetic also used a non-infringing system, generating the telegraph pulses electromagnetically by the operator's own motion of working the equipment handles. The Magnetic got around the ETC's dominance of rail wayleaves by using buried cables along highways, a problem that had hindered the BETC and eventually led to its takeover by the Magnetic. Further, it had an exclusive agreement with the Submarine Telegraph Company who had laid the first cable to France and was busily laying more cables to other continental countries. The Magnetic also beat the ETC in getting the first cable to Ireland in 1853. For a while then, the Magnetic had shut the ETC out of international business. The ETC was keen to correct this situation and started laying its own submarine cables. Other companies came on to the market, but ETC remained by far the largest of them with the Magnetic second. The ETC and the Magnetic so dominated the market that they were virtually a duopoly until nationalisation. == Submarine cables ==

The Electric Telegraph Company merged with the International Telegraph Company (ITC) in 1854 to become the Electric and International Telegraph Company. The International Telegraph Company had been formed in 1853 for the purpose of establishing a telegraph connection to the Netherlands between Orfordness and Scheveningen using submarine telegraph cables. The concession to lay the cables had originally been granted to the ETC, but the Dutch government objected to the ETC laying landlines on its territory so a separate company, the ITC, was set up to do this. In practice, the ITC was run by ETC staff. She was the first of a series of cable ships named Monarch. The cable laying equipment of Monarch was a major step forward compared to the unspecialised ships that had previously been used for cable laying, with sheaves to run the cable out of the hold and a powerful dedicated brake to control the cable running out. However, Monarch did not store the cable in water-filled tanks as was done on future cable ships. The ship could not, therefore, be kept in trim by replacing the cable with water as it was payed out. It was necessary to run out coils of cable alternately from the fore hold and the main hold for this reason. The ship was frequently chartered to other companies like the Submarine Telegraph Company and the Magnetic for cable work. The first charter was to R.S. Newall and Company to recover an abandoned cable in the Irish Sea. Newall had made this cable for the Magnetic and a failed attempt to lay it from Portpatrick in Scotland to Donaghadee in Ireland was made in 1852. Newall temporarily installed its own picking-up machine as Webb's had not yet been fitted. After nationalisation in 1870, Monarch irreparably broke down on her first cable mission for the General Post Office (GPO). She was then relegated to a coal hulk. Ireland The chief competitor to the company, the Magnetic, had succeeded in providing the first connection to Ireland in 1853 on the Portpatrick–Donaghadee route. The ETC was keen to establish its own connection. In September 1854 Monarch attempted to lay a lightweight cable from Holyhead in Wales to Howth in Ireland. This attempt was a failure, as had previous attempts on both routes with lightweight cable. In June 1855 Monarch tried again, but this time with a heavier cable made by Newall. This attempt was successful, the cable being to a similar design to the one Newall had made for the successful Magnetic cable. Isle of Man A subsidiary company, the Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company was formed in 1859 for the purpose of providing telegraph to the Isle of Man. The cable was made by Glass, Elliot & Co and laid by Resolute from Whitehaven. == Nationalisation ==

The company was nationalised by the British government in 1870 under the Telegraph Act 1868 along with most other British telegraph companies. The Electric Telegraph Company formed the largest component of the resulting state monopoly run by the GPO. In 1969 Post Office Telecommunications was made a distinct department of the Post Office, and in 1981 it was separated entirely from the Post Office as British Telecom. In 1984, British Telecom was privatised == Equipment ==

The primary system initially used by the company was the two-needle and one-needle Cooke and Wheatstone telegraphs. Needle telegraphs continued to be used throughout the company's existence, but printing telegraphs were also in use by the 1850s. From 1867, the ETC started to use the Wheatstone automatic duplex system. This device sent messages at an extremely fast rate from text that had been prerecorded on paper punched tape. Its advantage was that it could make maximum use of a telegraph line. This had a great economic advantage on busy long-distance lines where traffic capacity was limited by the speed of the operator. To increase traffic it would otherwise have been necessary to install expensive additional lines and employ additional operators. In 1854 the ETC installed a pneumatic tube system between its London central office and the London Stock Exchange using underground pipes. This system was later extended to other major company offices in London. Systems were also installed in Liverpool (1864), Birmingham (1865), and Manchester (1865). == Historical documents ==

Records of the Electric Telegraph Company (33 volumes), 1846–1872, the International Telegraph Company (5 volumes), 1852–1858 and the Electric and International Telegraph Company (62 volumes), [1852]–1905 are held by BT Archives. == See also ==