Stories from the Telegraph Go back to home page




Many stories were carried through the use of the telegraph. Romances, theft, and scandal were all a part of the operators lives that worked on these machines. Here I will show but a few of them taken from the book The Victorian Internet.


Above, a picture of a common telegraph office room.

• One famous story involves the arrest of a fugitive named John Tawell. “Tawell had murdered his mistress in Slough, and when his crime was discovered he made a run for it and headed for London. He was dressed in a brown, unusual looking greatcoat. His description “Dressed like a Kwaker” (since Cooke and Wheatstone’s telegraphic alphabet had no Q), was sent to London, where the police were able to meet the train and arrest Tawell before he had time to melt into the crowds” (Standage 50). In this instance, without the telegraph, the fugitive would have been long gone before the police in London would have heard the news of his murder.
  
  
  
• Another tells of some of the confusion that people would express over the telegraph. They didn’t quite grasp that the actual slip of paper that the message was written was not actually sent to the person. “In one case a man came into a telegraph office in Maine, filled in a telegraph form, and asked for his message to be sent immediately. The telegraph operator tapped it out in Morse code to send it up the line and then spiked the form on the “sent” hook. Seeing the paper on the hook, the man assumed that it had yet to be transmitted. After waiting a few minutes, he asked the telegrapher, “Aren’t you going to send that dispatch?” The operator explained that he already had. “No, you haven’t,” said the man, “there it is now on the hook” (Standage 68).
  
  
  
• There were also many people who tried to cheat using the invention. “One story from the 1840’s tells of a man who went into the telegraph office at Shoreditch station in London on the day of the Derby, an annual horse race, and explained that he had left his luggage and a shawl in the care of a friend in another station-the station that just happened to be nearest the racetrack. He sent a perfectly innocent sounding message asking his friend to send the luggage and the shawl down to London on the next train, and the reply came back: “Your luggage and tartan will be safe by the next train.” The apparently harmless reference to “Tartan” revealed the colors of the winning horse and enabled the man to place a bet and make a hefty profit” (Standage 107).
  
  
  
• There are also stories of marriages taking place over the telegraph. One particular story tells of a daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant who had fallen in love with one of her father’s clerks in his counting house. “Although her father had promised her hand to someone else, she decided to disregard his intentions and marry Mr. B. (the clerk) instead. When her father found out, he put the young man on a ship and sent him away on business to England. The ship made a stopover in New York, where the young woman sent her intended a message, asking him to present himself at the telegraph office with a magistrate at an agreed-upon time. At the appointed hour she was at the other end of the wire in the Boston telegraph office, and, with the telegraph operators relaying their words to and fro in Morse code, the two were duly wed by the magistrate. Surprisingly, the marriage was deemed to be legally binding” (Standage 128).