Image ID: 18292

Erecting telegraph poles in Market Place, Bingham c 1900's

Courtesy of Mr G Nicholson

East side of Market Place
Bingham
England

The use of telegraph and telephones spread like wildfire across the country very soon after their invention. The telegraphic age from 1837 produced a new phenomenon - the wiring of a nation into a network. Wired networks are so much a part of life today that we hardly think about them - but the first telegraph wires seemed both alien and wondrous in Victorian times. The construction of that first network required huge feats of engineering and also gave rise to some hard fought battles. The first telegraph wires were laid underground but the standard practice soon became to hang them from insulators on telegraph poles. Erecting a pole route needed a continuous strip of land between the points to be linked and none of the telegraph companies owned land of this kind - nor did they want to. Instead they made agreements with other landowners and obtained rights (normally exclusive) to erect poles. These agreements were known as 'wayleaves'. The early telegraph lines had followed the railway tracks and the Electric & International Telegraph Company made good use of these routes. Its chief rival, the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, had no such facilities and instead was forced to use canal towpaths. Poles could also be erected alongside public highways or on private land but this called for extensive and lengthy negotiations with a multitude of authorities and landowners. The growth of Britain's telegraphic network was extremely rapid, matching the growth of railways in the 1840s. The first commercial public telegraph line ran between London and Gosport, near Portsmouth. It opened in February 1845 with a transmission of a speech by Queen Victoria. Within ten years, most of the main cities of Britain were connected by telegraph. In the cities the companies needed to be ingenious. Some wires were buried underground but this was expensive. In 1858, telegraph entrepreneurs hit on the idea of paying homeowners for 'wayleaves' and then running his wires over the top of their roofs. By the following year, Charles Dickens reported there were already 160 miles of telegraph wire running over the rooftops of London. By the end of 1848, about ten years after the first telegraph demonstration, the telegraph lines covered over 1,800 miles of Britain's infant railway network - about half the rail lines in service. Within 25 years, Britain was connected to 650,000 miles of telegraph wire and 30,000 miles of submarine cable. More than 20,000 towns and villages were part of the UK network. In 1848 it took around ten weeks to send a message from London to Bombay and get a reply. By 1874 it could be done in four minutes. The next natural progression of invention in communications then came with the telephone, which used the same technology of telegraph poles. Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) exhibited Bell's primitive telephone before the British Association for the Advancement of Science assembly at Glasgow in September 1876, describing it as 'the greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph'. The first pair of practical telephones seen in Great Britain arrived in July 1877, brought here by William Preece, Chief Electrician of the Post Office. A few months later, Bell's 'perfected' type of telephone was exhibited at another meeting of the British Association in Plymouth. Alexander Graham Bell himself demonstrated his telephone to Queen Victoria on January 14, 1878, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. During the demonstration Bell made calls to London, Cowes and Southampton. These were the first publicly witnessed long-distance calls in the UK. Less than six months after making his first British demonstrations, the UK rights to the Bell patents had been taken up by a new British company, The Telephone Company (Bell's Patents) Ltd. The first switched telephone network arrived in Britain when The Telephone Company Ltd opened its first public telephone exchange at its offices in Coleman Street, London. The exchange served just eight subscribers with a two-panel switchboard. By the end of the year, a further two exchanges had been opened at Leadenhall Street in the City, and at Westminster. By then, the number of subscribers totalled around 200. The same year, the company also opened telephone exchanges in Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Bristol. For

Date: 1900

Organisation Reference: NCCS001345

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