Today, we learn how telegraphy came to India. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
In 1854 the British in India
completed an 800-mile telegraph line between
Calcutta and Agra. This system was the brainchild
of a visionary inventor named William
O'Shaughnessy, and it did much to secure England's
grip on India.
O'Shaughnessy had gone to India 21 years earlier,
in 1833, as an assistant surgeon with the East
India Company. There he began to experiment with
electricity. He invented an electric motor and a
silver chloride battery. Then, in 1839, he set up a
13½-mile-long demonstration telegraph system
near Calcutta.
That was just two years after Samuel F.B. Morse had
built his demonstration system in the United
States, but O'Shaughnessy wasn't aware of Morse's
work. His telegraph used a different code, and the
message was transmitted by imposing a series of
very small electric shocks on the operator. He also
came up with another unique invention -- he used a
2½-mile stretch of the Hooghly River, in
place of wire, to complete the circuit.
Historian Mel Gorman tells us that it took eleven
years for O'Shaughnessy to gain support to put in a
regular system. By 1851 he had a 27-mile line in
service near Calcutta, and the first trans-India
line was running three years later.
O'Shaughnessy's construction of the India telegraph
system was an amazing triumph over technical and
bureaucratic problems. By now he knew about the new
English and American telegraph systems, and he had
to invent his own equipment to avoid patents, to
reduce costs, and to accomodate local problems. He
invented his own signal transmitter, his own
methods for stringing lines, and so forth. It was a
good system, and in 1854 it helped the British in
the Crimean War. Three years later it was decisive
in putting down the Sepoy mutiny. A captured
mutineer, being led to the gallows, pointed to a
telegraph line and bravely cried, "There is the
accursed string that strangles us!"
One may question 19th-century British colonialism;
but we can only admire O'Shaughnessy. He shows us
what one person can do when he really trusts his
own creative ability and then looks squarely at a
real problem.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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