Curiosities of Civilization Part 20

Nothing in telegraphy impresses the thoughtful mind more than the fact that the electric fluid, after spanning, maybe, half the globe, should come back to its battery, through adamantine rocks, through seas and all the diverse elements which make up the anatomy of the globe. The explanation of the phenomenon is still a matter of pure speculation.

Indeed, it may be objected that our flight of the electric principle is altogether a flight of fancy--that there is in fact no flow of electricity at all, but that its progress through bodies, according to the generally received theory, is owing to opposite poles of contiguous particles acting upon each other. The hypothesis, however, first received in science gives birth to its language, which usually continues the same, although it may have ceased to be an adequate expression of the current doctrine of philosophers.

The traveller, as he flies along in the train, and looks out upon the wires which seem stretched against the sky like the ledger lines of music, little dreams of these invisible conductors that are returning the current through the ground. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, indeed, the wires and their sustaining posts represent to the spectator the entire telegraph. The following conversation between two navigators, overheard the other day by a friend, gives the most popular view of the way the telegraph works. "I say, Jem, how do 'em _jaw_ along them wires?" "Why, Bill, they pulls at one end, and rings a bell at t'other." Others again fancy that messages are conveyed by means of the vibrations of the metal, for on windy days they sometimes give out sounds like an aeolian harp: a fact which, according to Sir Francis Head, called forth the remark from a North-Western driver to his stoker, "I say, Bill, aint they a giving it to 'em at Thrapstone?" The more ignorant cla.s.s of people actually believe that it conveys parcels and letters, and they sometimes carry them for transmission to the office.

Iron wire, coated with zinc, or "galvanised," as it is termed, to prevent its rusting, is now universally used as the conductor of the electric fluid when the lines are suspended in the air. The first rain falling upon the zinc converts it into an oxide of that metal, which is insoluble in water, so that henceforth in pure air it cannot be acted upon by that element, and all further oxidation ceases. Mr. Highton says, however, that in the neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns the sulphur from the smoky atmosphere converts the oxide into a sulphate of zinc, which is soluble, and consequently the rain continually washes it off the wire. He a.s.serts that he has had wires in this manner reduced from the eighth of an inch to the diameter of a common sewing-needle. There has been a great controversy as to the best means of insulating the wires from their supporting-poles, which would otherwise convey the electricity from the wires to the earth. There is no method known of effecting this completely, but we believe it is now decided that stoneware is the best material for the purpose, both on account of its non-conducting qualities, and the readiness with which it throws off from its surface particles of water.

The latter quality is extremely important, for, in very rainy weather, if the insulator should happen to get wet, the electric fluid will sometimes make a bridge of the moisture to quit the wire, run down the post to the earth, and make a short circuit home again to its battery. Indeed, when there are many wires suspended to the same pole on the same plane, a dripping stream of water falling from an upper to a lower one will often suffice to return the current before it has done its work, much to the telegraphist's annoyance. Not long ago, a mishap, having similar consequences, occurred on the line between Lewes and Newhaven, owing to the following very singular circ.u.mstance: a crane, in its flight through the rain, came in contact with the wires, and having threaded his long neck completely through them, the current made a short cut along his damp feathers to the wire below, and by this channel home. Moisture, however, much as it may interfere for a time with the working of a line, rarely does any permanent injury. Lightning, on the contrary if not guarded against, is capable of producing great mischief. It has been known to strike and run for miles along a wire, and, in its course, to enter station after station, and melt the delicate coils and the finer portions of the instruments into solid ma.s.ses. In most cases it reverses the polarity of the needles, or renders permanent the magnetism of the electro-magnets. All these dangerous and annoying contingencies are easily avoided by the application of a simple conducting-apparatus to lead away the unwelcome visitor. The method adopted by Mr. Highton is to line a small deal box, say ten or twelve inches long, with a tin plate, and to put this plate in connection with the earth. The wire bound up in bibulous paper--which is a sufficient insulator for the low-tensioned fluid of the battery--is carried, before it enters the instrument, through the centre of the box, and is surrounded with iron fillings. The high-tensioned electricity of the lightning instantly darts from the wire, through the pores of the paper, to the million points of the finely-divided iron, and so escapes to the earth. There are, of course, many kinds of lightning conductors used on different lines, but this one is simple in its construction, and, we are given to understand, answers its purpose exceedingly well.

Notwithstanding that the Electric Telegraph Company has been established so many years, it is only just now that the public have begun to understand the use of the "wire." The very high charges at first demanded for the transmission of a message, doubtless, made it a luxury rather than a necessary of life; and every reduction of the tariff clearly brought it within the range of a very much larger cla.s.s of the community, as will be seen by the following table issued by the Company, which shows the advance of the system under its management.

----------------------------------------------------------------------- In the Miles of Miles Number Receipts. Dividends paid.

half-years Telegraph of of ending in Wires Messages operation ---------------- --------- ------ -------- ----------- ---------------- . s. d. June, 1850 1,684 6,730 29,245 20,436 10 0 4 per Cent. per Ann.

December, 1850 1,786 7,200 37,389 23,087 13 9 4 per Cent. per Ann.

June, 1851 1,965 7,900 47,259 25,529 12 4 {6 per Ct. per Ann.

{& 2 per Ct.

Bonus.

December, 1851 2,122 10,650 53,957 24,336 8 10 6 per Cent. per Ann.

_Note._--In this half-year the paid-up Capital of the Company was increased, and the tariff diminished about 50 per Cent. from the original rate of charge. June, 1852 2,502 12,500 87,150 27,437 4 8 6 per Cent. per Ann.

December, 1852 3,709 19,560 127,987 40,087 18 2 6-1/2 per Cent.

per Ann.

June, 1853 4,008 20,800 138,060 47,265 16 3 6-1/2 per Cent.

per Ann.

December, 1853 4,409 24,340 212,440 56,919 0 1 7 per Cent. per Ann.

It will be seen from the above what an impulse was given to the business by the reduction in the tariff which took place in December, 1851; for if we compare the messages of the half-year ending June, 1850, with those of the half-year of June, 1852, we shall find that whilst the miles of telegraph in work had not increased one-half, the messages transmitted had nearly trebled. It is only within this last year or two, however--as will be seen by the table--that a very large augmentation of business has taken place, which is doubtless owing to the public being better acquainted with its capabilities. The tariff has since been further reduced, with the result of a still further increase of the messages sent and of the money received--the profits allowing, at the present moment, of a seven per cent. dividend! The lowest point of cheapness, in our opinion, is yet very far from being reached; and it would only be a wise act on the part of the Company to at once adopt an uniform charge for messages, say of fifty words, for one shilling. If this were done, the only limit to its business would be the number of wires they could conveniently hang, for the present set would clearly be insufficient. Means should also be taken to obviate one great objection, at present felt, with respect to sending private communications by telegraph--the violation of all secrecy,--for in any case half a dozen people must be cognizant of every word addressed by one person to another. The clerks of the English Electric Telegraph Company are sworn to secrecy, but we often write things that it would be intolerable to see strangers read before our eyes. This is a grievous fault in the telegraph, and it _must_ be remedied by some means or other.

Our own opinion is that the public would much prefer the dial telegraph, by the use of which two persons could converse with each other, without the intervention of a third party at all--or the printing step by step instrument would be equally good. At all events, some simple yet secure cipher, easily acquired and easily read, should be introduced, by which means messages might to all intents and purposes be "sealed" to any person except the recipient. We have reason to believe that Professor Wheatstone has invented a cipher of this description, which will speedily be made public. "One-eighth of the despatches between New Orleans and New York,"

says Mr. Jones in his "Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph," "are in cipher. For instance, merchants in either city agree upon a cipher, and if the New Orleans correspondent wishes to inform his New York friend of the prices and prospects of the cotton market, instead of saying 'Cotton eight quarter--don't sell,' he may use the following:--'Shepherd--rum--kiss--flash--dog.'"

The Company has lately made an arrangement, by which the very absurd and inconvenient necessity of being obliged to attend personally at the telegraph station with a message has been obviated. "Franked message papers," pre-paid, are now issued, procurable at any stationers'. These, with the message filled in, can be dispatched to the office when and how the sender likes, and the Company intend very quickly to sell electric stamps, like Queen's heads, which may be stuck on to any piece of paper, and frank its contents without further trouble. Another very important arrangement for mercantile men is the sending of "remittance messages," by means of which money can be paid in at the central office in London, and, within a few minutes, paid out at Liverpool or Manchester, or by the same means sent up to town with the like dispatch from Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Hull, York, Plymouth, and Exeter. There is a money-order office in the Lothbury establishment to manage this department, which will, no doubt, in all emergencies speedily supersede the Government money-order office, which works through the slower medium of the Post Office.

We have spoken hitherto only of the Old Electric Telegraph Company. There are several other companies in the United Kingdom, working different patents. We have chosen, however, to describe the proceedings of the original Company, because it is the only one that has an amount of business sufficient to give it universal interest; it is the only company, in fact, that has seized the map of England in its nervous grasp, and shot its wires through every broad English shire. The European and the British Telegraph Companies have laid their lines, insulated with gutta percha and protected by iron tubes, beneath the public roads. The European Company works between Manchester, Birmingham, London, and Dover, and, by means of the two submarine cables of Dover and Calais and Dover and Ostend, puts the great manufacturing and commercial emporiums in connection with France, Belgium, and the rest of Europe by a double route. The British Telegraph Company works princ.i.p.ally in the northern counties. Of the other lines, we need only mention at present the United Kingdom, and the English and Irish Magnetic Company, which works wires between London, Belfast, and Galway, by means of a subterranean line as far as the west coast of Scotland, and of a submarine cable stretched between Portpatrick and Donaghadee.

It will, perhaps, be a source of wonder to our readers that one company should virtually possess the monopoly of telegraphic communication in this country, but this will cease when they consider that this Company was the first to enter the field, that it came forward with a large capital, speedily secured to themselves the different lines of railway--the only paths it was then considered that telegraphs could traverse with security,--and that it bought up, one after another, most of the patents that stood any chance of competing with its own. The time is fast approaching, however, when most of these advantages will fail them, and when the Company, powerful as it is, must be prepared to encounter a severe and active compet.i.tion, and that for the following reasons:--

1. The plan of bringing the wires under the public roads turns, as it were, the flank of the railroad lines.

2. The patents of the old company are year by year expiring.

3. The very large capital expended by it--upwards of 170,000_l._ being sunk in patent rights alone,--independently of the vast expense attaching to the first introduction of the invention, forms a dead-weight which no new company would have to bear.

In the ordinary course of events, then, the other lines at present in existence will gain strength; new companies will spring up, and the supply of a great public want will be thrown into the arena of compet.i.tion. Would it not be wise for the legislature to consider the question of telegraphy in England before it is too late? We all know what the principle of reckless compet.i.tion led us into in our railway system. For years opposing companies scrambled for the monopoly of certain districts, and the result was the intersection of the country with bad lines, and, in many cases, with useless double routes. Millions were spent in litigation; railway travelling became, as a natural consequence, dear; the property of the original shareholders rapidly deteriorated; and it has all ended in half a dozen powerful companies swallowing up the smaller ones; and that compet.i.tion, in whose name so much was demanded, has turned out to be only "a delusion and a snare." The conveyance of intelligence cannot safely and conveniently be left in the hands of even one company without a strict Government supervision; much less can half a dozen systems be allowed to distract the land at their own will. Indeed, the question might with propriety be asked, Is not telegraphic communication as much a function of Government as the conveyance of letters? If the do-nothing principle is to be allowed to take its course, we shall have to go through a similar state of things to that which occurred only a few years since in the United States, when different competing lines refused to forward each other's messages, and the whole system of telegraphic communication was accordingly dislocated. Indeed, even with the most perfect accord between different companies, the dissimilarity of instruments used by them would prove a great practical evil--as great a one, if not greater, than the break of gauge in the railway system. Messages could not be pa.s.sed from one line to another, and delays as vexatious as those which occur on the continental lines would take away much of the value of the invention. It seems to us, then, that even if Parliament should refuse to interfere with the principle of compet.i.tion in the case of the telegraphic communication, it should, at least, provide for the use of the same kind of instruments, and make it a fineable offence for one line to refuse to forward the messages of another.

Having done so much towards completing our telegraphic organization at home, our engineers adventurously determined to carry the wires across to the continent, and thus destroy the last remnant of that isolation to which we were forced to submit on account of our insular position. As long back as the year 1840 we find, by the Minutes of Evidence in the Fifth Report upon Railways, wherein the subject of electric telegraphy was partially examined, that, whilst Mr. Wheatstone was under examination Sir John Guest asked, "Have you tried to pa.s.s the line through water?" to which he replied, "There would be no difficulty in doing so; but the experiment has not yet been tried." Again, on the chairman, Lord Seymour, asking, "Could you communicate from Dover to Calais in that way?" he replied, "I think it perfectly practicable." A couple of years later the professor, indeed, engaged, and had everything in readiness, to lay a line for the Government across Portsmouth Harbour; it was not executed, however, through circ.u.mstances over which he had no control, but which were quite irrespective of the perfect feasibility of the undertaking.

We question, however, whether it would have been possible to have accomplished the feat of crossing the Channel with the electric fire before this date, as the difficulty of insulating the wires, so as to prevent the water from carrying off the electricity, would, we imagine, have been insuperable, but for the happy discovery of gutta percha, which supplied the very tough, flexible, non-conducting material the electrician sought for. Thus it might be said that the instantaneous interchange of thought between distant nations awaited the discovery of a vegetable production in the dense forests of the Eastern Archipelago. The first application of this singular substance to the insulation of electric conducting wires was made in 1847, by Lieutenant Siemens, of the Prussian artillery, for a line to cross the Rhine at Cologne.

The first submarine wire laid down was that between Dover and Cape Gris-nez, in the vicinity of Calais, belonging to the Submarine Telegraph Company. This wire, thirty miles in length, was covered with gutta percha to the diameter of half an inch, and sunk (August, 1850), as it was paid out, by the addition of clumps of lead at every sixteenth of a mile. The whole was completed and a message sent between the two countries on the same day. In the course of a month, however, the cable broke, owing to its having fretted upon a sharp ridge of rocks about a mile from Cape Gris-nez. It was now determined to make a stronger and better-constructed cable, capable of resisting all friction in this part of the Channel. The form of cable adopted for this and all other submarine telegraphs now in existence seems to have been originally suggested by Messrs. Newall and Co., of Gateshead, the wellknown wire-rope manufacturers. Instead of one, four wires, insulated by the Gutta Percha Company, were twisted together into a strand, and next "served" or enveloped in spun-yarn. This core was then covered with ten iron galvanized wires five-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, welded into lengths of twenty-four miles, and forming a flexible kind of mail. The cable was manufactured in the short s.p.a.ce of twenty-one days. It weighed 180 tons, and formed a coil in the hold of the old hulk that carried it of thirty feet in diameter outside, and fifteen feet inside, standing five feet high. All went well with the undertaking until about one-half had been "paid out," when, a gale arising, unfortunately the tug-boat that towed the hulk containing the rope broke away, and vessel, wire, and all, drifted, with a racing tide, full a mile up the Channel before it could be overtaken. The consequence was, that the cable was violently dragged out of its course in the middle of the straits. What was worse, a sharp "kink," or bend, also occurred near the Dover sh.o.r.e, which doubled the cable on itself, but luckily produced no serious damage.

The "lie" of the submarine cable between Dover and the vicinity of Calais, at this present moment, is expressed in the following diagram:--

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 7.]

When the cable at length came near the French coast, it was found to be, in consequence of this unintentional _detour_, at least half a mile too short. This was remedied, however, by splicing on a fresh piece; and, on securing it at Saugat, the new place of landing, fixed upon on account of its sandy sh.o.r.e, it was found that the communication was good, and good it has remained ever since--a proof of the admirable manner in which the wires were insulated and the cable constructed. The placing of this successful cable was superintended by Mr. Wollaston, the Company's engineer, and by Mr. Crampton, the contractor. Mr. Wollaston, who is a nephew of the ill.u.s.trious philosopher of the same name, and who also presided over the earlier attempt, will accordingly, in the annals of electricity, carry off the honours of having first laid down the ocean telegraph.

The same Company, not long afterwards, laid another cable across to Ostend. This established a connection with Europe through Belgium, and was planned to prevent this line of communication falling into the hands of another company, and was not, as was suspected at the time, a matter of political foresight on the part of the directors, to enable them to carry on their intercourse with the continent, in spite of France, supposing war should break out between the two countries. Who would have believed a short time since, in Belgium, that the day would come when it would be quicker to convey intelligence to France by way of England than directly across the frontiers? Yet such was actually the case; for, before the line was laid by land, it was a thing of very frequent occurrence for despatches from Ostend to cross the Channel to Dover by one cable, and to be immediately switched across to Calais by the other; thus paying us a momentary triangular visit underneath the rapid straits.

The notion, however, of preventing compet.i.tion proved to be vain. A third cable was laid on the 30th May, 1853, between the English coast at Orfordness, near Ipswich, and the port of Schevening in Holland, and thence to the Hague. This cable is the longest at present in connection with this isle, extending 120 miles under the turbulent North Sea. It was, however, paid out during a violent gale of wind without the slightest accident, and affords the most direct means of communication with the north of Europe, and entirely commands the commercial traffic of the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The Hague cable (or cables, for there are now many, consisting of a single wire conductor each, running side by side) is the property of the International Company, a branch of the Old Electric Telegraph, and its wires go direct to the Lothbury office.

Whilst England has moored her south-eastern sh.o.r.es to the continent by three cables, and put herself _en rapport_ with all its princ.i.p.al cities, her north-western extremity has been secured, after many failures, to the sister kingdom--the Electro-Magnetic Company having laid a submarine wire from Portpatrick and Donaghadee, in the neighbourhood of Belfast, and the British Electric Telegraph Company another between Portpatrick and Whitehead in Belfast Lough. England, as befits her, led the way in these adventures upon the sea with the electric fire, and the Danes, Dutch, Russians, and others, are now following in her track.

Will it be believed that in 1841, long after the electric telegraph was working in England, scientific men were seriously discussing in the French Chamber the propriety of establishing a night telegraph on the visual principle, and that when at length it was determined to call in the aid of electricity, instruments were ordered to be so constructed that signals could be given after the fashion of the old semaph.o.r.e, in order that the officials might be spared the trouble of leaving their ancient ruts? The needles were accordingly displaced for a mimic post, to which moveable arms were attached and signs were transmitted by elevating or depressing them by electricity, instead of by hand. Of course this absurd system was after a while abolished, and the instrument now made use of is a modification of the dial telegraph constructed by Breguet. The first telegraph planted in France was constructed by Mr. Wheatstone, from Paris to Versailles, in 1842. The princ.i.p.al line is that running from Calais _via_ Paris to Ma.r.s.eilles, which puts the English Channel and the Mediterranean in communication, and transmits for us the more urgent items of the India and China mail.

Belgium and Switzerland are perhaps the best supplied of all the continental kingdoms with telegraphic communication. The Belgian lines were excellently planned and cheaply constructed, consequently their tariff is comparatively low, the average charge for a message being 3 francs 48 centimes, or about 2_s._ 10-1/2_d._ Of the nature of the messages sent we can form a very good idea by the following cla.s.sification of a hundred dispatches:--

Government 2 Stock-jobbing 50 Commercial 31 Newspaper 4 Family affairs 13 ---- 100

A comparison of the average division of messages in every state would afford a very fair index of the nature of the occupations of their peoples. We have attempted to obtain materials for this purpose in vain; foreign governments, as well as English companies, being very jealous of giving any information relative to their messages. The history of the telegraph in Switzerland is an evidence of what patriotic feeling is capable of accomplishing. Although by far the best and most extensive, for a mountainous country, in the world, it was constructed by the spontaneous efforts of the people. The peasantry gave their free labour towards erecting the wires and poles, the landlords found the timber and gave the right of way over their lands, and the communes provided station room in the towns. Thus the telegraph was completed, so to speak, for nothing. The peculiarity of the Swiss telegraph is that, like the great wall of China, it proceeds totally regardless of the nature of the ground. It climbs the pa.s.s of the Simplon in proceeding from Geneva to Milan; it goes over St.

Gothard in its way from Lucerne to Como: it mounts the Splugen, and again it goes from Feldkirch to Inspruck by the Arlberg pa.s.s, thus ascending the great chain of the Alps as though it were only a gentle hillside. The wires course along the lakes of Lucerne, Zug, Zurich, and Constance; sometimes they are nailed to precipices, sometimes they make short cuts over unfrequented spurs of the mountains, going every way, in short, that it is found most convenient to hang them. The completion of the telegraphic system of this little republic, which stands in the same relation to Southern as Belgium does to Northern Europe, was of great consequence, as it forms the keystone between France, Prussia, Austria, Piedmont, and Italy.

In Prussia the lines are insulated in gutta percha, and buried in the ground in leaden tubes, a very costly process, but with many great advantages, in freedom from injury and atmospheric influences, over the more usual method of suspending them in the air on poles. Upwards of 4,000 miles of wire have already been laid down in this kingdom. Although Austria only commenced operations in 1847, she already possesses 4,000 miles of telegraph, which puts the greater part of her extensive empire in communication with Vienna.

Whatever injury the Eastern war might have inflicted upon the world, it at least infused fresh vigour into the telegraphic system, as, independently of the lines planned to put Constantinople in communication with the Danubian frontier, Russia has been stimulated to complete a line between St. Petersburg and Helsingfors, in the Baltic, and a continuation of the line already extending from the capital to Moscow, down to Bucharest, Odessa, and Sebastopol. One feature distinguishes the management of continental telegraphs over those of England and America: they are all, with the exception of the short line between Hamburg and Cuxhaven, possessed and worked by the different governments, who seem afraid of the use they might be put to for political purposes, and accordingly exercise a strict surveillance over all messages sent, and rigidly interdict the use of a cipher.[39] The Anglo-Saxon race, however, has far surpa.s.sed any other in the energy with which it has woven the globe with telegraphic wires. The Americans in the West and the British in the East alike emulate each other in the magnitude of their undertakings of this nature. The United States, although she came into the field long after England--her first line from Washington to Baltimore not having been completed until 1844--has far outstripped the mother country in the length of her lines, which already extend over 16,729 miles. Every portion of the Union, with the exception of California and the upper portion of the Mississippi, is covered with a network of wire.

New York and New Orleans communicate with each other by a double route--one skirting the seacoast, the other taking an inland direction by Cincinnati. These lines alone, following the sinuosities of their routes, are upwards of 2,000 miles in length.

Other lines extend as far as Quebec, in Upper Canada, so that messages may be forwarded in the course of a couple of hours from the freezing north to the burning south. The great chain of lakes which form the northern boundary of the Union is put in communication with the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, and the great valley traversed by the latter will, ere long, interchange messages with the Pacific coast,--Congress having under its consideration a plan to establish a telegraph across the continent to San Francisco, as the precursor of the proposed railroad.

This we suspect is the project of Mr. O'Reilly, the engineer who has already executed the boldest lines in America. In constructing such a line, man, not nature, is the great obstacle to be encountered. The implacable Indians inhabiting this portion of the States certainly would not pay any respect to the telegraphic wire; on the contrary, they would in all likelihood take it to bind on the heads of their scalping tomahawks. To provide against this contingency, it is proposed to station parties of twenty dragoons at stockades twenty miles apart, along the whole unprotected portion of the route; two or three of these soldiers are also to ride from post to post and carry a daily express letter across the continent.

When this project is executed, it is a.s.serted that "European news may be published in six days on the American sh.o.r.es of the Pacific, on the shortened route between the old and new world." "The shortened route," it should be mentioned, lies between Cape Race, in Newfoundland, and Galway, in Ireland, a pa.s.sage calculated to take, on the average, only five days.

It may be asked how is it that such lengths of wire, carried through thinly settled parts of the country, and sometimes through howling wildernesses, can pay? The only manner that we can account for it is the cheapness with which the telegraph is built in America, the average price being 150 dollars, or about 31_l._ a mile--less than a fourth part of the cost at which the early lines of the English Electric Telegraph Company were erected. Again, the low prices charged for the transmission of messages produce an amount of business which the lines running through thickly-inhabited England cannot boast. For instance, let us take the following advertised "specimen message," of the latter Company, and compare the price charged for it here, with what it could be sent for in America:--

"From To James Smith, S. R. Brown, London, Exchange, Liverpool.

"I will meet you at Birmingham to-morrow, 3 P.M. Don't fail me."

Now, the London charge for the above, if forwarded to Liverpool, would be 2s. 6d.; but the American tariff for the same, on the Louisville and Pittsburgh rail, would be only one cent a word, or sixpence halfpenny English. On very long distances our friends on the other side of the steam ferry have a still greater advantage over us: for instance, a message of ten words can be sent on O'Reilly's line, from New York to New Orleans, a distance of 2,000 miles, for sixty cents, or two and sixpence--not half the sum it would cost to send the same message from London to Edinburgh, about 500 miles. We give, as a curiosity, the scale of prices on this line:[40]--

Per word.

200 miles or under 1 cent.

500 " or over 300 miles 2 cents.

700 " " 500 " 3 "

1000 " " 700 " 4 "

1500 " " 1000 " 5 "

2000 " " 1500 " 6 "

These charges, it is true, are unusually low; but if they will pay one Company, why should they not another? There are as many as twenty Telegraph Companies in America, and consequently there is great compet.i.tion, three or four competing lines in many cases running between the same towns. Great confusion has arisen from this compet.i.tion, as we have before stated; but it cannot be doubted that prices have materially fallen in consequence. It is common to send a message 1,000 miles in the United States without its being read and repeated at intermediate stations; and brother Jonathan boasts that he can communicate in fine weather instantaneously between New York and New Orleans. This, if done at all, must be at the expense of enormous battery power, as 2,000 miles of No. 8 wire would expose a conducting surface of no less than 450,000 square feet to the air. The wires in America are all suspended upon poles, and those pa.s.sing through the southern pine forests are in consequence particularly liable to injury from the falling of trees, and watchers are posted at every twenty miles' distance to patrol the line. The telegraph is rarely seen in America running beside the railway, for what reason we do not know; the consequence, however, is, that locomotion in the United States is vastly more dangerous than with us. A comparison of the casualties occurring on railroads in the two countries, in the year 1852, will show this at a glance; for in the State of New York alone, during that year, 228 persons were killed out of 7,440,053 travellers, whilst during the same period only 216 people perished in Great Britain out of a total number of 89,135,729 pa.s.sengers: thus the average in America was 1 killed in 286,179, and in Great Britain 1 in 2,785,491! Of course property suffers in an equal degree with life on the American lines. The people of Boston, on the recommendation of Dr. Channing, have constructed a munic.i.p.al telegraph, the many uses of which will be obvious. Mr. Alexander Jones, in his historical sketch of the electric telegraph in America, gives the following account of the application of the electric wire in cases of fire:--

"A central office or station is fixed upon, at which the main battery, with other instruments, is placed. From this two circuit-wires proceed, like those of the common telegraph wires, fastened to housetops or ingeniously insulated supports. One of the wires communicates from the main fire bell-tower to all the others, and connects each with machinery, which puts in motion the largest-sized hammer, and causes it to strike a large fire-bell the desired number of blows; the other wire proceeds on a still more circuitous route, and from one local street or ward signal-station to another. Each station is provided with a strong box and hinged door and lock. Inside of this box there is a connecting electro-magnet and connecting lever, an axle with a number of pins in it to correspond to the number of the station. The axle is turned by a short crank, and in its revolutions the pins break and close the circuit, by moving the end of the lever as often as there are pins or cogs, the result of which is communicated to the central station. If the alarm indicates a fire in the local district No. 3, the alarm can be instantly rung on all the bells in the city. If it is a subject requiring the speedy and efficient attention of the police, information by alarms can be given at each police-station, or the despatches can be recorded by instruments at each place. The local street alarm-boxes are placed in the charge of a person whose duty it is to give the alarm from the local to the central station, when called upon, or circ.u.mstances require him to do so."