The telegraph wires that run beside road and rail, doing the office
of nerves in transmitting intelligence with thrilling quickness from
the extremities to the head and from the head to the extremities of
our State, are now so familiar an object, and their operations, such
mere matters of every day, that we do not often recall how utterly
unfamiliar they were sixty years ago, when Wheatstone and Cooke on
this side the Atlantic, and Morse on the other, were devising their
methods for giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by
means of electric currents transmitted through metallic circuits.
Submarine telegraphy lay undreamed of in the future, land telegraphy
was but just gaining hearing as a practicable improvement, when the
crown was set on Her Majesty's head amid all that pomp and ceremony
at Westminster. A modern English imagination is quite unequal to the
task of realising the manifold hindrances that beset human
intercourse at that day, when a journey by coach between places as
important and as little remote from each other as Leeds and Newcastle
occupied sixteen mortal hours, with changes of horses and stoppages
for meals on the road, and when letters, unless forwarded by an
"express" messenger at heavy cost, tarried longer on the way than
even did passengers; while some prudent dwellers in the country
deemed it well to set their affairs in order and make their wills
before embarking on the untried perils of a journey up to town.
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