TELEGRAPHING MR BRIGHT'S SPEECH.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume IX, Issue 44, 20 February 1874, Page 2

TELEGRAPHING MR BRIGHT'S SPEECH.

The following curious account of the way in which Mr Bright's speech was telegraphed appeared in the Birmingham ' Morning News ': — " The orator of England addressing one of the mightiest meetings of modern times. Two long tables, at which eit a quiet half hundred men, whose swift fingers aro keeping pace with that wonderful stream of talk which flows in such homely honest purity of Saxton ! speech from the lips of John Bright. Beyond them a great meeting, surging and swelling aa the speaker moves those 15,000 hearts with the magic eloquence not only of his voice, but of his life. The little hajf hundred write on. The picked reporters of the kingdom they. Men who are the historians of the present; whose skilled fingers pbotogrnph in swift word-piclures the passing thoughts of the greatest speakers. In this meeting, such is the importance that England attaches to it, that every paper of note is represented either directly or indirectly. And not only English ones, but America sends a representative; anel thus the sister continent beyond 'the crystal wall' eat listening with England as the tribune of the people spoke of tho past of his party, and the future of the great constituency he represented. Nearly all tha leadiDg local papers were likewise strongly represented — in several cases by their editors as well as their reporters—while the array of ' specials' was at once large and varied. One by one each reporter, having written his allotted time, slips away to Cannonstreet, where the « Special Staff' of the Telegraphic department has been busily arranging for the telegraphing of this great political meeting, All England will be hungry for that speech to-day and London itself would rather go without its breakfast than be without those columns, which will be as the lifting of a curtain from tho life of a statesman whose voice has been silent three years Hardly has John Bright fairly begun to speak before it is taken down in phonography, written out in long-hand, and swift messengers are hurrying to Cannon-street with the first slips of the speech. As we outer tho telegraph oflice in Cnn non-street, the incessant click, click of the magnetic needle is almost deafeDiug. Mr Johnson bustling here, there, and everywhere, wilh such übiquitous energy that he realises Mr '■ Ai chibalel Forbes' sdescription of being a mau iu a chronic state of electrical discharge." The quick rhythm of the working of the machines is infectious. You feel in a state of swift spasmodic jerk. At BiDgley Hall ringing cheers are stamping the words of John Bright as the currency of a constituency which has ever held the van of reform, and away at quiet editorial rooms at Glasgow aud Edinburgh, among the staff of the Dublin papers, in Exeter

and Plymouth, the speech is being eagerly read. London scans the words while they are yet warm with tbe orator's breatb. At the Carlton Club, . members are earnestly perusing a speech which so mightily, affects tbe coming election against them. At the Reform every one is on the qui vive, and the echoes of the cheers in Birmingham seem to float up from the press messages as they are passed from hand to hand, - to linger in the corners of the lofty rooms. The whole kingdom is keeping pace with John Bright's speech, and his sentences tremble away through the night on invisible wires, annihilating both distanoe and time.' 1 '