The
Cooke and Wheatstone Telegraph was an early telegraph dating from the 1830s.
Overview
It was designed by its namesake inventors,
William Fothergill CookeSir William Fothergill Cooke was, with Charles Wheatstone, the co-inventor of the Cooke-Wheatstone electrical telegraph, which was patented in May 1837...
and
Charles WheatstoneSir Charles Wheatstone FRS , was a British scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope , and the Playfair cipher...
.
The receiver had 5 pointers, two of which were energized to point to the selected letter.
Advantages
The main advantages of this telegraph were that it is designed to be used by relatively unskilled operators. The telegraph displayed to the receiver the letter that had been sent.
Disadvantages
The main disadvantage was that is required 5 five wires to connect the sending and receiving stations. A sixth wire might also be desirable for the return current if the earth return were poor, or if there was interference from other circuits.
Another disadvantage was that only 20 letters could be displayed of the 26 letters in the English
AlphabetAn alphabet is a standardized set of letters basic written symbols or graphemes each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or...
, leaving out C, J, Q, V, X and Z.
Obsolescence
It was later found that telegraph messages could be received by sound alone, which was the basis of the 1-wire and 2-wire Morse Telegraph, which also had no difficulty transmitting the whole alphabet plus symbols as well.
Famous Tawell Arrest
The Cooke and Wheatstone Telegraph was famously involved in the arrest of murderer
John TawellJohn Tawell was a British Quaker and convicted murderer.Transported to Australia in 1820 for the crime of forgery, he obtained a ticket of leave, and started as a chemist in Sydney. There he flourished, and after fifteen years left it a rich man....
. Because this telegraph lacked the letter "Q", while the message contained the word "Quaker", the receiving operator had some trouble understanding that "Kwuaker" was meant to be "Quaker".
It is not clear how the other missing letters would have been transcribed:
- C- K,S?
- J - I ?
- Q - KW
- V - U?
- X - KS (think of sox and socks)
- Z - ?