Originally the wires of this company, insulated by gutta-percha, ran underground in pipes sunken beneath the pavement, but the difficulty of preventing injury from the damp, induced the engineer to adopt in most of the recent lines the overhead system; consequently not more than one-third of the wires are now subterranean, whilst two-thirds are hung aloft, and simply galvanized to prevent oxidation.

We have been very slow in adopting the new system; but the public are beginning rapidly to see the value of the wire in intra-metropolitan communications, especially since the transfer of the town telegraph from the companies to the Post Office, in the year 1870. For instance, the messages have increased from 251,548 received in 1862, to 19,000,000 (exclusive of newspaper telegrams) in 1874, or about 10 per cent. more than in 1873; and there can be no doubt that subsequent reports will show a similar increase, and the trading community, as well as individuals, for domestic and social purposes, have constant recourse to it. For instance, Mr. Chubb notifies, through public advertisements, that in case any person should have left the key of his safe or desk at home, by telegraphing to him he will send a duplicate to any address. Tradesmen, again, inform their customers that they may give their orders free of charge by means of the telegraph.

The Postal Telegraph system has been extended to all places in the kingdom of considerable size, and some of its results are very remarkable. On one occasion, when an important debate took place in Parliament, and when, in addition, there was an unusual number of interesting occurrences in different parts of the country, nearly 440,000 words, equal to about 220 columns of the Times newspaper, were transmitted from the central station in London in a single night. The resources of the department were heavily taxed; but the weather having been favourable for telegraphy, no delay of any consequence occurred.

As an instance of the large number of telegrams sometimes forwarded from a very small place, it may be mentioned that, in connection with a conference of Wesleyan Methodists held at Camborne, which lasted three weeks, more than £350 was received there for telegrams.

In relation to the lamentable railway accident at Thorpe, in 1873, more than 900 ordinary telegrams passed through the Norwich office, and more than I 200 newspaper messages, the latter containing nearly 150,000 words.

The private telegraph department undertakes to put the
merchant's country-house in direct communication with his
office, houses of business with their branches, public offices
with public offices; in fact, its mission is to supply renters
with so many
miles of private wire to run between house and
house at a given price, and to provide telegraphic apparatus
which can be worked by persons in the office, or counter, or
drawing-room, as the case may be. Of course, it would be
impossible profitably to provide a separate wire with its appro-
priate suspending posts to every renter at any reasonable price.
Consequently, a system of combined action has been adopted
for which Professor Wheatstone has taken out a patent.
For instance, supposing that a hundred renters of wires lie on
either hand of some great main thoroughfare, these hundred
wires, for such a distance as they can be conveniently made
to run together, are enclosed in one cable, carefully insulated

from each other by india-rubber. These cables are SO
arranged as to form nearly equilateral triangles, each angle
having a base of nearly a mile; the cable, however, being
supported by wires slung from posts erected on the tops of
the houses at every two hundred yards. At the intersection

of every angle a mile apart, straining posts are erected for tightening the wires and for giving each individual wire its direction of departure. If the spectator only observes one of these posts, he will see that it gives off filaments of wire in every direction: these private wires, having come along the cable in common with others for a given distance, are now making their way down into the offices and houses of their renters in the most direct way they can consistently with the triangular system of laying out the lines we have mentioned. Although a hundred wires are in some instances embedded in the same cable, there is no difficulty in discovering immediately the fault that may occur in any one of them, as at every two hundred yards the suspending pole is provided with a connecting box or plate pierced with small holes, through which every separate wire, going or returning, spreads out from the cable, and having thus passed, is bound together again on the other side and proceeds to the next point.

These holes are all numbered; consequently any failure of the electric current can be narrowed to a distance of 200 yards, and at once set right. By this system of telegraphy the communication is instantaneous; there is no waiting until other messages have passed, for the simple reason that no one else but the renter can possibly use it. Its speed is

also greatly in its favour; as many as 150 letters a minute can be telegraphed by a nimble hand, whilst any person can send and read messages by it. The needle telegraph used by the skilled operators on the long lines is perfectly unintelligible to the uninitiated; but the child who can spell is as capable of sending a message as the expert, when these simple telegraphs of Wheatstone are employed. The Communicator looks like a small clock, with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the nine numerals inscribed on its face; each of these letters and numerals is moved by a small lever. The person telegraphing, by pressing down the pedal or lever attached to each letter, sends a pulse of electricity through the length of wire, which makes a needle point to a similar letter on the face of an Indicator at the other end of the wire, which is being watched by the person receiving the message. We may remark here that it has been objected that unless a person is always in the room where the message is received, and whose attention would have been attracted

to the indicator by the ringing of its bell, that messages would in these private transactions often be told to the barren air; but Professor Wheatstone has contrived a most extraordinary instrument, by which messages are printed in ordinary letter type on slips of tinfoil, and no human receiver is at all necessary: all that a man has to do when he comes

into his room, is to unlock a box and take out the roll of tinfoil, and read the message that has been sent in his absence. This automatic action, which acts perfectly, is one of the most astounding things in the world; and the self-acting printing-box, to any uneducated person, must look like nothing else than magic. Other telegraphic wonders, however, have been achieved. A great want of the age has been supplied at last, and messages can now be sent in a man's own handwriting, at a pace infinitely greater than the speediest Morse instrument will allow. The American electrician, Mr. W. E. Sawyer, is credited with the invention, which is simple enough when once its leading principle has been mastered. The sender of the message writes it upon ordinary paper; the written message is then laid upon a metallic plate and passed between two rollers, with the effect of transferring the copy to the plate, which may be done any time within ten hours after writing. Then the plate containing the copy is placed upon a semi-cylindrical holder which traverses the little track, and the instrument is set in motion. The metallic plate is a conductor of electricity, while the lines of writing are non-conductors. Over the cylindrical plate are carried metallic points upon revolving arms; whenever the point is upon the metallic surface, the electric current passes through to the wire; the instant the point touches a line of writing, the connection is broken, and a dot is made upon chemically prepared paper, placed upon a similar instrument at the receiving point. The two instruments operate synchronously-i.e., the moment a point is passing over the surface of one instrument, it is followed exactly by the point on the other instrument. At the same time the points are moving over its surface, the plate is moving slowly horizontally, so that the entire surface is traversed. The transferred message is, of course, in reverse, but is brought straight by running the receiving instrument in an opposite direction. Each instrument is fitted to either receive or transmit, at pleasure. The rate of speed varies according to the closeness of the writing, the points traversing the entire surface of the copy, it is immaterial as to the number of the words, only the space they occupy requiring a given time to be gone over. To put the matter briefly, the written, and therefore non-conducting parts of a sheet of paper are made to reproduce themselves on a sheet at the receiving end, and this will answer as well for sketches as