Excerpt from A Resume of the Earlier Days of Electric Telegraphy N 0 account of a practical electric telegraph had been published prior to the date of Messrs. Cook and Wheat stone's patent of June, 1837. I say practical because Ronalds, as early as 1823, published a description of an electrical telegraph of originality and merit; but as he proposed to use static electricity in connection with a wire enclosed in a glass tube, his telegraph was not adapted for practical use. In the September following the date of their patent, Messrs. Cook and Wheatstone made their first practical experiment on the London and Birmingham Railway, and demonstrated beyond all doubt that as beacon fires and torches had been superseded in 1792 by the aerial or semaphore telegraph, so now the latter would have to succumb to a far more important rival. But incredible as it may appear at the present time, the contest was long. And fierce, and -not until 1852 did the final defeat arrive, as far as England was concerned, when the Electrical Telegraph superseded the Semaphore which had so long done duty between Liverpool and Holyhead. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.