TELEGRAPHY AND TELEPHONES

Abstract

This paper surveys the emergence of the era of electrical communications, from its beginnings in the 1830s through to the end of analogue technology. The electric telegraph soon became an essential and visible business tool with its network of poles and wires, but it is argued that, as each system was supplanted by the next, the evidence of its existence soon disappeared. The telegraph equipment manufacturers have not necessarily survived either, and a case study of the history of Reid Brothers, Engineers Ltd is given by way of example. Little evidence of the electric telegraph’s built environment now remains in Britain. When the telephone was introduced in Britain in the late 1870s, it was seen by the Post Office as a threat to its monopoly control of the inland electric telegraph system, and a court action which the Post Office won in 1880 had a retarding effect on the development of a national telephone network. The telephone exchange buildings and trunk lines became more prominent than those of the telegraph, but technological improvements caused the open-wire pole routes gradually to disappear. The Post Office created a characteristic architectural style for its buildings, but the independent telephone undertaking in Kingston upon Hull remained distinctively different in this respect. Wireless telegraphy and radio telephony imposed their own new look on the countryside, but this too has disappeared in turn. The author concludes that selected preservation of the buildings and artefacts of superseded telecommunications systems is important for a full understanding of the technology.