The Origins of the Telegraph Service
Simone Fari · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2015
10 June 1837. One of William IV’s last acts was to grant a patent for Wheatstone and Cooke’s telegraph apparatus, though it took ten years before the first telegraph company was authorized by Parliament, on 18 June 1846. Four years passed and it was only when serious competition began to surface that the telegraph service really began to move. Why was it so long in the making? Why was there a ten-year gap between the patent and the establishment of the first commercial company? Why did another fourteen years go by before the public began to make any significant use of it? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.