He was born at Ealing, Middlesex; his father, William Cooke, was a surgeon there, and later was appointed professor of anatomy at the University of Durham.

[1] After five years' service in India Cooke returned home; then studied medicine in Paris, and at Heidelberg under Georg Wilhelm Munke.

In 1836 he saw electric telegraphy, then only experimental: Munke had illustrated his lectures with a telegraphic apparatus on the principle introduced by Pavel Schilling in 1835.

[2] Before a parliamentary committee on railways in 1840, Wheatstone stated that he had, with Cooke, obtained a new patent for a telegraphic arrangement; the new apparatus required only a single pair of wires.

In 1845, however, Cooke and Wheatstone succeeded in producing the single needle apparatus, which they patented, and from that time the electric telegraph became a practical instrument, soon adopted on all the railway lines of the country.