THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. [From the Scotsman.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VI, Issue 473, 16 February 1850, Page 4

THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. [From the Scotsman.]

So gradually did the electric telegraph come into operation that people became accustomed to it by slow degrees, and it has never, therefore, as it seems to us, attracted so much attention, or excited so much wonder or admiration, as it might otherwise have done. In the case of our own city, for instance, the telegraphic wires were slowly eztended towards j us from the metropolis, stage by stage, and as from month to n onth the interval of time required for communication with London became shorter and shorter, we became more and more accustomed to the ever increasing celerity, so that when the latest accelerations were accomplished by the wires being carried across the Tyne and the Tweed, and means of almost instantaneouscommuuication with London rendered complete, the previous exparience had prepared us to receive as an expected and not extraordinary event, the really wonderful result. In whatever point of view it is regarded,, the electric telegraph is decidedly one of the greatest wonders of modern times. It is to be admired as the skilful adaptation of a well known scientific truth, to a most useful practical purpose, and the ingenious yet simple contrivances by which this adaptation is rendered effective and easily workable, are worthy of the mechanical genius of the age. Wonderful, also, as an illustration of the commercial enterprise , of our times, is the general establishment of the electric telegraph throughout, the land. An ordinary joint stock

company has undertaken and accomplished the gigantic task of binding city to city, and town to town, throughout a large portion of Great Britain, by lines of wire ; covering the land with a mysterious network, a touch at any point of which may vibrate through the whole, as surely as the tiny web of the spider will quiver if you lay a ringer on any one of its extended threads. If is, however, the element of instantaneousness, if we may so express it, by which the electric telegraph is peculiarly distinguished, which must naturally be considered as being above all its most admirable and striking features. In the ordinary working of the telegraph in Edinburgh (the experience of which suits us as an illustration of the system) less than half an hour U required to send a message to London, or any other town on the line, and receive an answer in return. Public news are regularly transmitted with a celerity which has a truly astonishing effect. Thus the Scotsman is enabled to publish in Edinburgh on the Wednesday and Saturday mornings an outline of the previous evening'si debates in Parliament simultaneously with the Times or any other of the mof&ing papers in London. By the ordinary course of post these same London papers are delivered in Edinburgh only next morning, twenty-four hours after their contents are known here by telegraph ! A royal speech is in print in Edinburgh within two hours of its utterance at Westminster. In that short space it has been taken down in short-hand from the lips of the royal speaker (or rather, we believe, official copies are furnished after delivery, which is likely to occupy quite as long a time), then written off, then read off and committed to the telegraphic wires (an operation which is repeated, by-the-by, on the way), read off, and {written out again, then re- written, and finally put in types and printed off, four hundred miles from the bouse in which it was being spoken two hours before. The Chancellor of the Exchequer rises in the Bouse of Commons to make an important financial statement, and anxious merchants and politicians are perusing the commencement of his speech in York, Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, long before he has himself got to the end of it. The Queen sails from the southern shores of England to visit the sister kingdom, and we dwelleis on the banks of Forth know all about her departure before the royal vessel is out of port. A West India mail packet arrives at Southampton at midnight, or at two or three in the morning, and early in the forenoon we have all the news she has brought from Jamaica and elsewhere lying before us in a news-room in Princes-street. At noon, an atrocious murderer is hanged in a county town in the south of England, and before three o'clock the Edinburgh public is shocked and gratified with a pretty full and particular, and perfectly true, account of the " Execution of Rush at Norfolk '" But there is little use in multiplying examples. It is enough to know that everybody may now be fully " up to time" as to events passing around him. The range of quid-nunc speculation is lessened by the rapid revelation of the facts and results on which formerly hours, or even days, of conjecture might have been expended. The newspaper is now rendered trebly complete and satisfactory, for itnow, with hitherto unattainable certainty, places on theibreakfast table the very latest news not only of its own locality, but of the metropolis, and of every place else in which " news" is usually to be bad. From it the idler, to whom " the weather" forms an important topic of daily consideration and conversation, may now learn how the wind blew, or whether the sun shone last evening, upon a score of towns scattered up and down throughout the wide and smiling plains of merry England. The merchant knows precisely the latest prices of the material in which he deals ; the shareholder the veiy last sales and quotations of stock : and the politician, the last parliamentary division or government appointment. So much- for the use of <the electric telegraph for public purposes ; it is also much employed by private parties for the transmission of messages and communications of a varied kind. Through it, a shareholder instructs his London stockbroker to sell out in , one stock and purchase in another ; a grocer in Edinburgh hears that sugar has fallen in London half-an-hour ago, and in half-an-hour more his London agent may be purchasing far him at the lowered rate; a draper orders a renewal supply of a "it»king" •,tyle J of goods, and receives them in return before the letter of his less enterprising rival can nea.ch the: warehouseman — and so on.