On This Day… 9 June 1870

London, 9 June 1870

MUCH CONVERSATION in fashionable salons of late has concerned that most wondrous invention, the electrical telegraphic transmitting-and-receiving engine, or ‘telegraph’ for brevity of terminology. In an effort to impart to our loyal readers the requisite degree of informed comment, we felt it incumbent upon ourselves to solicit the opinion of a savant possessed of acknowledged expertise in such arcane natural scientifical matters, and approached, most humbly, Sir Isambard Kingdom Perkins (Bart) BSc, PhD, FRS, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Electrovoltaic Studies at the University of Oxford.

“The electrical telegraphic transmitting-and-receiving engine, or, as I shall henceforth refer to it for reasons of brevity and clarity, the ‘telegraph’, is a most complex device typical of the cascade of miraculous inventions which prove that Man is, indeed, the highest of God’s multitude of creations,” elucidated the prodigious savant.

Explaining that the new ‘telegraph’ represented a prodigious advance upon earlier communicatory techniques, such as the shoutophore, in which lines of men spaced every fifty yards shouted the message to each other, Sir Isambard waxed lyrical of the communications revolution this powerful new technology has opened before Mankind’s very eyes. “We now survey,” he stated, with a not unseemly degree of scientifically motivated excitement evident in the jaunty angle at which he set his top-hat, “the vista of untold thousands of ‘telegraphs’ around the world forming an ‘Information Superior Railway’. This is unifying as never before our great Empire, as thousands upon thousands of telegraphic cables gird the globe, criss-crossing each other o'er land and ocean in an extraordinary mesh which some of my more irreverent colleagues have termed the ‘World Wide Crinoline’.”

However, a cautionary note was sounded by the esteemed moral campaigner, Mr William Booth Esq., who warned of the capacity for this miraculous invention to deprave and corrupt the moral fibre of the nation by facilitating the spread of confidence trickery, ribaldry and general beastliness. “Why, only this morning,” Mr Booth told us, the colour draining from his face, “I received several unsolicited telegrams, one purporting to be from a dispossessed Prince of Ruritania, humbly offering to pay me a thousand in sterling to help him transfer a hundred-thousand guineas from his embargoed bank account if I would only first of all wire him a hundred pounds, another that started, ‘There was a young man named Blunt,’ and worst of all, an offer to make my top-hat taller…!”