Gem From The Archive

David Hay explains how a patent at the start of the Victorian era radically changed how our ancestors communicated

A patent for the electric telegraph, 1837

The invention of the telegraph transformed the world over the course of the 19th century, and enabled our forebears to send messages across the country or even to another continent in a matter of hours. The patents for this crucial invention are now held in the archives of telecommunications company BT. We recently spoke to David Hay, BT’s head of heritage and archives, about how the documents reveal a world on the cusp of massive technological change.

Can You Tell Me About The Pictured Document?

It’s one of the patents to the world’s first practical telecoms device, the electric telegraph. The patents were awarded to its inventors, William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, in 1837 and 1838 under the separate patent-registration systems within the UK at the time. The patent pictured is the Irish patent from 1838. The one registered for Scotland, from 1837, looks rather different and is in Latin. Sadly the original English patent hasn’t survived – at least, it hasn’t been passed down in our collection.

We regard the patents as our crown jewels, because they are the documents from which everything comes as far as telecommunications is concerned. It all stems from the electric telegraph, because telegraphy was the first telecoms technology, although it now seems relatively primitive.

Back then patents were rather more grand affairs than today, very much like a legal charter in many ways. The patents have the great seal of the monarch attached to them, but although a very young Queen Victoria is named in the documents – and indeed pictured at the top-left-hand corner of the Irish patent – she’d only just become queen by a matter of a few weeks. Because Victoria hadn’t been crowned yet, the great seals at the bottom of the patents actually belong to her uncle, William IV.

How Important Was The Electric Telegraph To The Development Of Victorian Society?

The telegraph had a huge impact on the Victorians, and on the world generally. I would argue that it had even more far-reaching effects than the internet has had on our own age, because it had a profound impact on all aspects of society. Within a few years the electric telegraph was a global technology – the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable began operating in 1866 – and it had a huge impact on domestic and international commerce, trade and governance, shrinking the time it took to send a message around the world from months to hours.

How Did The Patent End Up In Your Archives?

Cooke and Wheatstone went on to found the Electric Telegraph Company, which was incorporated in 1846.

This is the company from which BT is ultimately descended, and we celebrate our 175th anniversary in 2021. Rather like companies today, the Electric Telegraph Company built up a patent portfolio by buying up as many patents as it could relating to telegraphy to give it a commercial advantage, and this included Cooke and Wheatstone’s original patents. The collection of patents was kept by the Electric Telegraph Company then passed to the General Post Office (GPO) in 1870 when the telegraph system was nationalised and brought under state control; the telephone system was similarly nationalised in 1912. When British Telecom

‘The telegraph had a huge impact on the Victorians, and on the world generally’

was carved out of the Post Office in 1980 it inherited the patents, and they came to BT after it was itself privatised in 1984.

What Other Documents Does The Archive Hold?

The collections we have are the records of BT itself from privatisation; the records of the GPO’s telecoms business from 1870 to 1980; and the records of the pre

nationalisation private inland telegraph and telephone companies from 1846 and 1878 respectively. Because the Post Office and latterly British Telecom were such major players – after all, for most of the 20th century they were the monopoly suppliers of the nation’s telecoms services – the collection is recognised by UNESCO and Arts Council England as a particularly significant corporate archive.

Also, it represents a huge body of knowledge about scientific research into telecoms, and related subjects such as computing. The

Post Office’s telecoms side developed Colossus, the world’s first semiprogrammable electronic digital computer, during the Second World

War to help Bletchley Park decrypt enemy coded messages. That’s something that we at BT are very proud to be associated with, so we have funded an exhibition at Bletchley about the codebreakers’ work. ‘D-Day: Interception, Intelligence, Invasion’ was opened by the Duchess of Cambridge last year, and runs until 2029. In terms of family history, we hold the UK’s largest collection of telephone directories, which are on ancestry.co.uk for 1880–1984. We also have Establishment

Books from the 1870s to 1981, detailing “established” – ie permanent – employees complete with a very short career history for each individual, together with oral history interviews with former employees.

Finally the collection is a great resource for social and economic historians too. We have a huge advertising archive going back to the beginning of telecoms, together with a wealth of material illustrating changes in social attitudes.