An electrical telegraph was a point-to-point text messaging system, used from the 1840s until the late 20th century when it was slowly replaced by other telecommunication systems. At the sending station switches connected a source of current to the telegraph wires. At the receiving station the current activated electromagnets which moved indicators, providing either a visual or audible indication of the text. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems called telegraphs, that were devised to communicate text messages more rapidly than by physical transportation. Prior to the electric telegraph, semaphore systems were used, including beacons, smoke signals, flag semaphore, and optical telegraphs for visual signals to communicate over distances of land.
Elizabeth Fry, sometimes referred to as Betsy Fry, was an English prison reformer, social reformer, philanthropist and Quaker. Fry was a major driving force behind new legislation to improve the treatment of prisoners, especially female inmates, and as such has been called the "Angel of Prisons". She was instrumental in the 1823 Gaols Act which mandated sex-segregation of prisons and female warders for female inmates to protect them from sexual exploitation. Fry kept extensive diaries in which the need to protect female prisoners from rape and sexual exploitation is explicit.
Company rule in India refers to the rule of the British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent. This is variously taken to have commenced in 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, when the Nawab of Bengal surrendered his dominions to the Company, in 1765, when the Company was granted the diwani, or the right to collect revenue, in Bengal and Bihar, or in 1773, when the Company established a capital in Calcutta, appointed its first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, and became directly involved in governance. The rule lasted until 1858, when, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and consequent of the Government of India Act 1858, the British government assumed the task of directly administering India in the new British Raj.
India Post is a statutory body under the ownership of the Department of Post, part of the Ministry of Communications of the Government of India. Generally known as the Post Office, it is the most widely distributed postal system in the world. Warren Hastings had taken initiative under East India Company to start the Postal Service in the country in 1766. It was initially established under the name "Company Mail". It was later modified into a service under the Crown in 1854 by Lord Dalhousie. Dalhousie introduced uniform postage rates and helped to pass the India Post Office Act 1854 which significantly improved upon 1837 Post Office act which had introduced regular post offices in India. It created the position Director General of Post for the whole country.
There have been two separate generations of trams in London, from 1860 to 1952 and from 2000 to the present. There were no trams at all in London between 1952 and 2000.
Siemens Brothers and Company Limited was an electrical engineering design and manufacturing business in London, England. It was first established as a branch in 1858 by a brother of the founder of the German electrical engineering firm Siemens & Halske. The principal works were at Woolwich where cables and light-current electrical apparatus were produced from 1863 until 1968. The site between the Thames Barrier and Woolwich Dockyard has retained several buildings of historic interest. New works were built at Stafford in 1903 and Dalston in 1908.
The Peace Society, International Peace Society or London Peace Society originally known as the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace, was a pioneering British pacifist organization that was active from 1816 until the 1930s.
Telegraph stamps are stamps intended solely for the prepayment of telegraph fees. The customer completed a telegraph form before handing it with payment to the clerk who applied a telegraph stamp and cancelled it to show that payment had been made. If the stamp was an imprinted stamp, it formed part of the message form.
Gurney's bank was a family-run bank founded by members of the Gurney family in 1770 and headquartered in Norwich, England. It merged into Barclays Bank in 1896.
Penryn and Falmouth was the name of a constituency in Cornwall, England, UK, represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1832 until 1950. From 1832 to 1918 it was a parliamentary borough, initially returning two Members of Parliament (MPs), elected by the bloc vote system.
Samuel Gurney was an English banker and philanthropist from the Gurney family of Norwich. He should not be confused with his second son, Samuel (1816–1882), also described as banker and philanthropist, and a Member of Parliament.
Joseph Fry was a tea dealer and an unsuccessful banker. He was the husband of the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry.
The General Post Office (GPO) was the state postal system and telecommunications carrier of the United Kingdom until 1969. Before the Acts of Union 1707, it was the postal system of the Kingdom of England, established by Charles II in 1660. Similar General Post Offices were established across the British Empire. In 1969 the GPO was abolished and the assets transferred to The Post Office, changing it from a Department of State to a statutory corporation. In 1980, the telecommunications and postal sides were split prior to British Telecommunications' conversion into a totally separate publicly owned corporation the following year as a result of the British Telecommunications Act 1981. For the more recent history of the postal system in the United Kingdom, see the articles Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd.
The Universal Private Telegraph Company, Limited was formed in 1861 to exploit Professor Charles Wheatstone’s 1858 Universal Telegraph. The company was to "carry out a system by which banks, merchants, public bodies and other parties may have the means of establishing a telegraph for their own private purposes from their houses to their offices, manufactories or other places".
The City of Oxford and District Tramway Company and its successor the City of Oxford Electric Traction Company operated a horse-drawn passenger tramway service in Oxford between 1881 and 1914. The tramway was unusual for having a track gauge of only 4 feet (1.219 m).
Bonelli's Electric Telegraph Co. Ltd. was formed in August 1860 by Henry Cook, an American, of 69 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, and Eastbourne, with an initial capital of £25,000. The company was formed to exploit the telegraph system of Gaetano Bonelli of Italy, but the firm had limited success and it failed in 1864.
Samuel Gurney (1816–1882) was a banker from the Gurney family. He served as independent Member of Parliament for Penryn & Falmouth from 1857 to 1868 but never spoke. He was also the first Chairman of the London and Provincial District Telegraph Co. Ltd. in 1859. He was president of the National Association for the relief of British Miners and, along with Edward Thomas Wakefield, founder and chairman of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association
The Gurneys were an influential family of English Quakers, who had a major part in the development of Norwich, England. They established Gurney's Bank in 1770, which merged into Barclays Bank in 1896. Members of the family still live in the United Kingdom.
The Stamp Act of 1712 was an act passed in the Kingdom of Great Britain on 1 August 1712 to create a new tax on publishers, particularly of newspapers. Newspapers were subjected to tax and price increased. The stamp tax was a tax on each newspaper and thus hit cheaper papers and popular readership harder than wealthy consumers. It was increased in 1797, reduced in 1836 and was finally ended in 1855, thus allowing a cheap press. It was enforced until its repeal in 1855. The initial assessed rate of tax was one penny per whole newspaper sheet, a halfpenny for a half sheet, and one shilling per advertisement contained within. The act had a potentially chilling effect on publishers; Jonathan Swift was a frequent publisher of newspapers, and complained in a letter about the new tax. Other than newspapers, it required that all pamphlets, legal documents, commercial bills, advertisements, and other papers issued the tax. The tax is blamed for the decline of English literature critical of the government during the period, notably with The Spectator ending the same year of the tax's enactment. It would see increasingly greater taxes and wider spectrum of materials affected until its repeal in 1855.
In the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom had the world's first commercial telegraph company. British telegraphy dominated international telecommunications well into the twentieth. Telegraphy is the sending of textual messages by human operators using symbolic codes. Electrical telegraphy used conducting wires to send messages, often incorporating a telegram service to deliver the telegraphed communication from the telegraph office. This is distinct from optical telegraphy that preceded it and the radiotelegraphy that followed. Though Francis Ronalds first demonstrated a working telegraph over a substantial distance in 1816, he was unable to put it into practical use. Starting in 1836, William Fothergill Cooke, with the scientific assistance of Charles Wheatstone, developed the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph. The needle telegraph instrument suggested by Wheatstone, the battery invented by John Frederic Daniell, and the relay invented by Edward Davy were important components of this system.
