Victorian Telegraphy Before Nationalization PDF
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Victorian Telegraphy Before Nationalization Victorian Telegraphy Before Nationalization Simone F ari University of Granada, Spain © Simone Fari 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-40651-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-58012-5 ISBN 978-1-137-40652-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137406521 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Contents Acknowledgements v ii Introduction 1 1 The Origins of the Telegraph Service 4 1.1 The heroic years 5 1.2 Experiments along the railroads 13 1.2.1 The London & Birmingham Railroad Company 14 1.2.2 The Great Western Railway Company 18 1.2.3 The London & Blackwall Railway Company 20 1.2.4 The Electric Telegraph Company 23 1.3 The dynamics of the Electric 28 1.3.1 Ties with the past 30 1.3.2 The venture 34 2 Constitutive Choices 42 2.1 “Ne tentes aut perfice” 43 2.2 The optic vs the electric telegraph 48 2.3 The pneumatic vs the electric telegraph 50 2.4 Gas tubes and electric cables 53 2.5 The cumbersome presence of the Penny Post 56 2.6 The symbiosis between railway and telegraph 59 2.7 Conclusion 61 3 From Monopoly to Free Competition 63 3.1 The Electric against all 63 3.2 The British: litigation and marketing 68 3.3 The Magnetic: low profile but high technology 81 3.4 The Submarine and the European: competition at sea 92 3.5 The first mover supreme 97 3.6 The consequences of the constitutive choices 103 4 The Duopoly 105 4.1 The turning point 105 4.2 The Electric’s new majority 112 v vi Contents 4.3 The British/Magnetic merger 116 4.4 The consolidation of the duopoly 125 5 The Triumph of the Oligopoly 134 5.1 Challenging the duopoly 134 5.2 The consolidation of the oligopoly 146 5.3 Submarine telegraphy 153 5.4 Turning points and constitutive choices 160 6 Nationalization 161 6.1 Plans and inquiries 162 6.2 Against nationalization 173 6.3 The 1868 Telegraph Act 179 6.4 T he 1869 Telegraph Act and the passage of the telegraphs to the state 189 6.5 The motives leading to nationalization 196 6.6 A new turning point 204 Conclusion 205 Bibliography 208 Index of Names 233 Acknowledgements The research at the basis of this monograph began in June 2009, when I was studying in London on an Earth Connected Fellowship offered by the London Science Museum together with British Telecom. First of all, I would like to thank Peter Morris and the staff of the London Science Museum for having helped and encouraged me over the years. A special thanks also to David Hay and the staff of the BT library/ archives, who furnished me with precious information on telegraph company documentation. I also received helpful indications on the correspondence of the pioneers of British telegraphs during my visits to the IET archives. As the years have passed, partial results of the research have been presented in many international conferences, thus involving a wider circle of scholars. But I would like to thank individually Graeme Gooday, Richard John, Colin Hempstead and Gabriele Balbi, who in various moments have given me much competent advice. I would also like to recall the precious exchanges with the participants at the session on telecommunications at the 2012 Economic History Society Annual Conference, at the European Fresh (Frontier Research in Economic and Social History) meeting at Pisa in the same year, the XIth Milan European Economy Workshop, the Peripheral Mobilities Workshop, Granada 2013, and the panel “Core and peripheries in the transport and communication infrastructural process” of the 41st ICOHTEC Symposium at Brasov, 2014. Finally, I would like to thank Patricia Kennan for her painstaking care with the translation. vii Introduction We trust that some steps will be taken either by Government or by other parties interested in the execution of such a plan, to procure the establishment of such a communication without delay, between this port and the metropolis. The advantages and conveniences of such a power of instantaneous correspondence with London would be almost incalculable. If no one else were to take the matter up, we should think it would quite repay the editors of the leading London newspapers to procure the estab- lishment of such a Telegraph on their own account. We look forward with confidence to the time when an Electric Telegraph Office will be considered to every large town as a Post Office at the present time. 1 Between the 1840s and 1860s the business world and press’s growing demand for a swift and efficient form of long distance communi- cation met up with a new technology offered by some innova- tive entrepreneurs, thus initiating the dynamic development and spread of British telegraphy. Many studies describe the origins of the service, others the players, while still others take into consid- eration telegraphs over the long term in Britain. This monograph presents instead an analysis of the technological and entrepreneurial features of the service, together with the companies which ran it until nationalization in 1869. It provides a historical reconstruction, mainly based on original and unedited documents belonging to a 1 “Progress of Science – A New Electrical Telegraph”, Cork Examiner , 17 May 1844. 1 2 Victorian Telegraphy Before Nationalization variety of archives, and thus fills in numerous gaps and grey areas, so that historical facts can be interpreted with greater objectivity and accuracy. This explains the wealth of footnotes, which need to be read together with the main text. A second feature of this monograph is that it is at the same time a study in the business and technological histories of the telegraph sector, and it aims at analysing both, as well as showing how they were continually interdependent. This hybridization is also present in the methodological approach, which keeps count of the owner- ship, the power game at the tops and financial results, and at the same time carefully tracks the technological evolution of the sector, the innovations, user needs and continuous interaction with develop- ments in other fields. Economic history, media studies and research into large technical systems converge to sustain that in network technologies like telecommunications the constitutive choices made by the principal players (entrepreneurs, engineers, politicians and users) determine a path-dependency sufficient to justify the consoli- dation of locked-in elements. In our case, each stage of evolution of the telegraph system brings with it an indissoluble tie with the choices of the past. The first chapter illustrates the origins of British telegraphs and details the events that accompanied the Wheatstone-Cooke telegraph through the phases of invention and experiment, up to the estab- lishment of the Electric Telegraph Company. The second chapter reflects on the most salient features and dynamics to emerge from the first 15 years of activity and highlights Cooke’s entrepreneurial role in the experimental phase as well as Ricardo’s managerial input during the early years of the Electric. As we will show, their driving force and interaction with existing technologies went on to forge the constitutive choices from which stemmed the long-term features of the telegraph. The third chapter focuses on the early 1850s, when the tele- graph market moved from a monopoly regime conditioned by the Wheatstone-Cooke patent to free competition. Space is given to an analysis of the strategies adopted by the new arrivals to challenge the first mover, and the latter’s counter moves to foil them and hold on tight to its dominant position. The fourth chapter covers the later part of the decade, when a series of events, partly exogenous and partly endogenous, led to the
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