Abstract
THERE has slipped away noiselessly and quietly one of England's scientific pioneers and one of the world's benefactors. Sir William Fothergill Cooke was the father of electric telegraphy. Born in 1806, educated in Durham, where his father was a professor, he joined the East India Company's military service in 1826, from which he retired in 1835 to study anatomy and physiology in Paris and Heidelberg. He was very clever at wax modelling. In 1836 a lecture on Schilling's telegraph directed his attention to the electric telegraph. His was the active sanguine mind that saw the great future of telegraphy before him, and that, in spite of supineness and unbelief, forced the new agent on an unwilling world. He was not an inventor nor a discoverer, but he was a far-seeing, practical man, with a determined will, indomitable energy, and of great resources. Associated with Wheat-stone, he established telegraphy as a commercial undertaking. The first experimental line in England was put up in 1837. The first Electric Telegraph Company was incorporated in 1844. The first cable was laid in 1851. Now the world is one network of wires, and while the pioneer of this great system is carried to his grave, representatives from every civilised nation of the earth meet in telegraphic parliament in London without heaving one sigh or casting one thought
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William Fothergill Cooke . Nature 20, 244 (1879). https://doi.org/10.1038/020244b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/020244b0