H aving been asked a question about when telegraph poles first appeared I decided to do some research. And for the want of a good book, I trawled the world wide interweb…
I went right back to the birth of the telegraph as a form of communication, in fact to the first use of the term telegraph from the Latin tele meaning distant, and graphos, writing. I read about the earliest static electricity transmission experiments by Francis Ronalds and how the technologies improved and matured through the patents of messrs Cooke and Wheatstone to the first poles appearing alongside railway lines ca. 1843 – before then, telegraph cables had been bundles of cotton and tar coated wires contained within iron tube conduits and either buried or suspended just above the ground alongside railway tracks.
Why am I telling you all this – it is all to be found on one amazing website – a sort of eBook called “Distant Writing” by Steven Roberts. This is a fantastic and detailed history of the telegraph and associated apparatus – including telegraph poles. Go there and read it now.
