Excerpt from Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. 44: Year 1881 The practical working of the electric telegraph for commercial purposes may be said to date from 1838, when Messrs. Cook and Wheatstone, after having in the previous year patented their magnetic needle telegraph, put up the first telegraph line on the Great Western Railway between Paddington and West Drayton; this was followed by the construction of a telegraph on the Black wall line in 1840, and by another in Glasgow in the following year. It is not a little remark-able that for some considerable time sub sequent to the invention and construction Of the electric telegraph, its use was almost exclusively confined to railway purposes and train signalling, the idea of its commercial value being so little appreciated by the public at that time, that the Electric Telegraph Company, on its establishment, after purchasing Messrs. Cook and Wheatstone's inventions in 1846, was looked upon as a complete commercial failure, the shares for a long time being considered as almost valueless, the chief source of the telegraph company's revenue then being derived from contracts they managed to obtain from the railway companies for the construction and maintenance of railway telegraphs. Fortunately, however, for themselves, the Electric Telegraph Company, foreseeing the future commercial value of their undertaking, at the same time that they succeeded in Obtaining from the railway companies highly advantageous con tracts for the construction and maintenance of the railway tele graphs, secured in many cases by way of set Off for the use of their patents, and for other services, exclusive way leave rights for their own telegraphs over the respective railway companies' lines. From 1846 to 1851 very great improvements were made in the working of the telegraphs, and in November Of the latter year, a cable was successfully laid between Dover and Calais, and for the first time the prices of the funds in Paris were known the same day within business hours on the London stock exchange. 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.