History of telegraphy in Australia

Australia was a relatively early adopter of electrical telegraph technology in the middle of the nineteenth century, despite its low population densities and the difficult conditions sometimes encountered in laying lines.

Australia was linked to the rest of the world for the first time in 1872, through the Overland Telegraph which ran some 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) from Adelaide through to Darwin.

At the distant location the impulses are converted into magnetic fields that operate a mechanical device to make a sound or to move a visual indicator.

[4] Late 1854 the South Australian government sought help from the Colonial Office in London to find a suitable superintendent of telegraphs.

One of his first tasks was the long-promised Adelaide–Semaphore telegraph line, for which architect James Macgeorge had stolen a march, avoiding Government restrictions by running the (single) wire away from the main road and railway.

Macgeorge's telegraph (which used Cooke and Wheatstone's "Electric" patent equipment) was working by 26 November 1855[5] and began commercial operation on 10 December.

[8] Critical to the progress of South Australia was a connection to Melbourne and in 1857 Todd made arrangements with Samuel McGowan to build a uniform system between the capitals.

Both Todd and McGowan dreamt that their proposed intercolonial interconnection would one day be a key link in a chain leading to 'a step in the direction of our ultimate telegraph communications, via India, with England, a scheme vast and difficult [that] will, we doubt not, at no very distant date be carried out'.

Connections were quickly built to remote areas through dense terrain from Launceston to George Town in March 1858 and easier lines from Hobart to Mt Nelson in July, and Low Head in October 1858.

An enduring cable link was established between Cape Otway on the Victorian mid-south coast, through to King Island and, ultimately, Launceston, Tasmania, the £70000 cost paid fully by the Tasmanian Government and it was opened in 1869.

[3] The New South Wales government commenced construction of the Sydney to Liverpool telegraph line, a distance of 32 kilometres (20 mi), which opened on 30 December 1857.

[3] A newspaper man Edmund Stirling proposed a scheme to connect Perth with Fremantle a distance of 19 kilometres (12 mi).

If messages, information and newspapers could be intercepted and transmitted quickly to Perth rather than by the long horse and coach journey, a commercial advantage might be gained by Western Australia.

Charles Todd and Samuel McGowan both envisaged telegraph links to England via India, and saw the creation of an inter-colonial network as being preliminary to that ambition.

From 1858 the prospect of a cable being laid from Britain to Australia began to generate competition within the Australian colonies for landing rights.

Queensland thought they had the overseas link in the bag with an agreement with the British Australian Telegraph Company to connect their new submarine cable from Java to Port Darwin then overland to Burketown.

At the time, however, the majority of the route of the line had not once been visited by Europeans and presented a huge risk, not least financially, to the South Australian government.

The work was finally completed on 15 July 1877,[16] meeting the line being built from the west at Eucla, a location close to the WA/SA border, after some very substantial hardships and logistical challenges had been encountered during construction.

Marine archaeologist Dr Silvano Jung said that it caused "a national revolution that started in Darwin", by reducing the impact of Australia's geographic isolation from the rest of the world.

Charles Todd commented:We had only one intercolonial wire and on the arrival of every English mail, there was an exciting amount of rivalry between the different newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne, great efforts being made to secure first possession of the line.For the business community, the telegraph signalled prosperity and wealth.

City and country telegraph offices became the centre of trade where orders were placed, banking transacted, market information exchanged.

With further observations and recordings made near Wentworth, Todd was able to establish the position of the 141st degree of east longitude to give a boundary line of the border between South Australia and Victoria.

[citation needed] Following the federation of Australia in 1901, the Postmaster-General's Department was established to take over from the states all postal and telegraphic services and administer them on a national basis.

[citation needed] As World War II threatened the Northern Territory in 1942, and Japanese forces moved through Java and Timor, the Allies were afraid that Japan would use the telegraph service to eavesdrop on communications with the rest of the world, so the submarine connection from Darwin to Java was cut.

In 1959, an automated switching system (TRESS) further enhanced the utility of teleprinters by allowing messages that were centrally directed to be automatically retransmitted to their final destination without the need for a human operator.