The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage Read Free Book Online

He set up his equipment on a desk, with sending and receiving stations only a few feet
     apart, and a huge coil of wire in between, and his talk of dots and dashes and codes didn't seem to have much to do with sending
     messages from one place to another. And by this time Congress seemed to have lost interest in the telegraph scheme.
    Morse went to Europe in i838-39 to popularize his invention and obtain patents for it there. In Britain, he crossed swords
     with Cooke and Wheatstone, but when it became clear he had no chance of being granted a British patent in the face of their
     objections, Morse moved on to continental Europe, where he spent several fruitless months trying to attract support.
    C OOKE AND WHEATSTONE were only a little more successful. Cooke's father was a friend of Francis Ronalds, whose telegraphic
     experiments a few years earlier had been rejected by the Admiralty. So Cooke knew that he was unlikely to get anywhere if
     he took his new invention to the British government. Instead, he identified a niche market for his product: the railway companies.
     After successfully demonstrating their apparatus to officials of the London & Birmingham Railway in 1837, Cooke and Wheatstone
     built an experimental telegraph link between Euston and Camden Town stations, a distance of a mile and a quarter, which worked
     well and boded well for the future. Cooke even drew up plans for a telegraph system linking London to Birmingham, Manchester,
     Liverpool, and Holyhead, which would be made available for public use. But the railway company suddenly went cold on the idea
     and said it "did not intend to proceed further at present."
    Cooke turned to the Great Western Railway, which eventually agreed to a thirteen-mile telegraph link between Paddington and
     West Drayton, based on the five-needle system. Soon afterward, another telegraph system was installed on the Blackwall Railway,
     a small line in London's docklands. The story goes that when some of the connecting wires broke, preventing three of the five
     needles from working, the operators quickly improvised a new code, based on multiple wiggles, which only required two needles.
     At any rate, Cooke and Wheatstone soon realized there was no need for all five, which meant that subsequent installations
     would require fewer wires and would be much cheaper.
    But the personal rivalry between the two men over which of them was principally responsible for the invention of the telegraph
     had, by this time, resurfaced. They eventually decided upon a gentlemanly way to resolve the matter: They appointed a panel
     of two mutual friends to act as arbitrators and agreed to be bound by their decision. In April 1841, the arbitrators came
     up with an artful compromise acceptable to both sides: "Whilst Mr. Cooke is entitled to stand alone, as the gentleman to whom
     this country is indebted for having practically introduced and carried out the electric telegraph as a useful undertaking,
     Professor Wheatstone is acknowledged as the scientific man whose profound and successful researches have already prepared
     the public to receive it as a project capable of practical application." In other words, the panel declined to rule in favor
     of either man. Almost immediately, the bickering started again.
    Meanwhile, Cooke was planning to extend the Great Western Railway telegraph, but the company appeared to be losing interest.
     So Cooke offered to take on the running of the lines himself. He brokered a deal whereby he extended the line eighteen miles
     to Slough, this time with a two-needle telegraph, and could make the telegraph available to the public, on the condition that
     railway messages were carried for free. By this stage he had spent hundreds of pounds of his father's money for very little
     return. "At the beginning of 1843 we were at our lowest point of de­pression," he later wrote in his memoirs.
    B Y THE Time morse got back to the United States, having failed to make any