page_title: Francis Ronalds
section_title: Electric telegraph
hierarchical_section_title: Francis Ronalds / Early electrical science and engineering / Electric telegraph
caption_attribution_description: English: Elements of the subterranean electric telegraph built by Francis Ronalds in 1816
context_page_description: Sir Francis Ronalds FRS was an English scientist and inventor, and arguably the first electrical engineer. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph over a substantial distance. In 1816 he laid an eight-mile length of iron wire between wooden frames in his mother's garden and sent pulses using electrostatic generators.
context_section_description: Ronalds' most remembered work today is the electric telegraph he created at the age of 28.  He established that electrical signals could be transmitted over large distances with eight miles of iron wire strung on insulators on his mother's lawn in Hammersmith. He found that the signal travelled immeasurably fast from one end to the other (but still believed the speed was finite). Foreshadowing both a future electrical age and mass communication, he wrote:
  electricity, may actually be employed for a more practically useful purpose than the gratification of the philosopher's inquisitive research… it may be compelled to travel ... many hundred miles beneath our feet ... and ... be productive of ... much public and private benefit ... why ... add to the torments of absence those dilatory tormentors, pens, ink, paper, and posts? Let us have electrical conversazione offices, communicating with each other all over the kingdom ... give me materiel enough, and I will electrify the world.
  He complemented his vision with a working telegraph system built in and under his mother's garden at Hammersmith. It was infamously rejected on 5 August 1816 by Sir John Barrow, Secretary at the Admiralty, as being "wholly unnecessary". Commercialisation of the telegraph only began two decades later in the UK, led by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, who both had links to Ronalds' earlier work.
caption: Elements of the subterranean electric telegraph built by Francis Ronalds in 1816
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