THE ENGLISH PASSPORT SYSTEM. [From Dickens's Household Words.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume IX, Issue 802, 9 April 1853, Page 4

THE ENGLISH PASSPORT SYSTEM. [From Dickens's Household Words.]

About thireen years ago, a Quaker was walking in a field in Northumberland, when a thought struck him. Well! what of that ? There are men walking in fields in Northumberland every day ; and there are Quakers walking in fields everywhere in England, at all times, and all with some thought or another in their heads. What is the wonder of that particular case, thirteen years ago ? Why, the idea was a noticeable one. It has produced some rather important results —results whifh made «tbat walk in the field a mailer of considerable consequence to everybody wLo reads this page. The man who was walking was named Thomas Edmondson. He had been, though a Friend, not a very successful man in life. He was a m<in of integrity and honour, as he afterwards abundantly proved, but he had been a bankrupt, and was maintaining himself now as a railway clerk at a small station on the Newcastle and Carlisle line. In the course of his duties in this situation, he found it irksome to hive to write on every railway ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness of the method of tearing the fait of paper off the printed sheet as it was wanted, and filling it up with pen and ink. He perceived how much time, trouble, and error might be saved by the process being done in a mechaoical way; and it was when he set his foot down on a particular spot in the beforementioned field that the idea struck him how all that he wished might be done by a machine: —how tickets might be printed with the names of stations, the class of carriage, the dates of the month, and all of them, from end to end of the kingdom, on one uoifnim system. Most inventions accomplish their great deeds by degrees —one thought suggesting another from time to time; but when Thomas Edmondson showed his family the 6pot in the field where his invention occurred to him, he used to say that it came into his mind complete, in its whole scope and all its details. Out of it has grown the mighty institutions of the Railway Clearing House; and with it the grand organisation by which the railways of the United Kingdom act, in regard to the convenience of individuals, as a unity. We may see at a glance the difference to every one of us of the present organised system —by which we can take our ticket from almost any place to any other, and get into a carriage on almost any of our great lines, to be conveyed without further care to the opposite end of the kingdom—and the unorganised condition of affairs from which Mr. Edmondson rescued us, whereby we should have been compelled to shift ourselves and our luggage from time lo time, buying new tickets, waiting while they were filled up, waiting at almost every joint of the journey, and having to do with divers Companies who had nothing to do with each other but to find fault and be jealous. If we remember what the Railway Clearing House is, and what it does ; if we remember that what it does is precisely what it saves travellers and merchants the trouble of doing ; if we remember that the two hundred clerks of that establishment dispose of about fifty millions of matters of detail in the course of a year, we shall see that Mr. Edmondson's idea has saved a good deal of trouble to a good many people besides himself. . It was thought a fine thing, and justly, when one railway was complete, for a short distance. It was thought a splendid thing that railways should be opened in ?ariou« parts of the country ; and when it was arranged that aome of tbem should meet at certain points, people aske« whether so grand a thing was ever heard ot uefort. But there was something grander to_corae . a plan by which a dozen Companies should unite to cairy a passtnger and his carpet-bag as far as he wanted to go, and save him the trouble °f dividing the fare among them by doing it_tnemselves. In the central spot at the Euston Square Station whe.e the Clearing House may be found, ,he railway Companies have their mutual charges computed and the bailees struck and cleared, day by day, from the tweliih part of

a schoolboy and his box to the charges on ' horses, 1 carriages, and corpses," which, the orders ; declare, i "are not to be included in the parcels trans- , mitted during the day. It would be cruel to . torture the reader's imagination with a precise i account of what the business is that is accom- . piisbed by that courageous band— the two nundred clerks of the Clearing House. Ins enough to say that they examine and record the business of (we believe by this time) a thousand stations, with all their complications. Now, if we consider what these complications are— that for instance for passengers alone, without regarding the transmission of goods, the changes on a single line of thirty stations may amount to six hundred and sixty, we shall shrink from looking more closely into the bewildering business of the Oaring House. The letters received and sent ofi amount to many thousands per dty, and there is a staff of lads whose business it is to open and sort them. Some of us who have travelled on very short, or very insignificant out-of-the-way lines may ! have seen up to yesterday, paper tickets— yellow, bine, or pink-printed in ordinary printing-presses. ! There are a few such ; bu<f they are now quite i exceptional. The little cards— blue for the moßt part— which gentlemen stick in their hats and ladies carry in their gloves, are Mr. Edmondson's tickets ; and they are now well-nigb universal in the United Kingdom, and familiar in France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, the West Indies, and Peru. It is rather confounding to the imagination, in the first instance, to see, as we did the other day at the patentee's office in Dublin, the boxes of cards that had arrived from Delarue's, to be printed. A square deal box, such ns would nicely hold a lady's bonnet and be light enough to be carried by the lady herself, is, when packed with these cards, a heavy load for a porter, and a fatiguing sight for unaccustomed eyes. It is fatiguing to think of the crowd that would be formed by the railway passengers who will be transmitted by this one boxful of cards. Assembled in Hyde Park or on Salisbury Plain, they would be very alarming in the eyes of the Pope or Louis Napoleon. There are cards of six colours ; and of a few more devices. It would be convenient to the printers to have them all alike ; «nd it is no matter of rejoicing to them when any Company falls in love with some particoloured device, requiring double printing, or other special management. There is so much convenience, however, in certain cases, in the tickets being distinguished at a glance — as the Scotch by a thistle at the back, and different Scotch lines by a different grouping ol the thistle that the pattern-book of the patentee will probably always have, as now, a few pages filled with specimens of devices. We are now to see these tickets printed. Bat we have first to dispose of our surprise at seeing how circumscribed and quiet is the agency by which so vast a work is accomplished as the providing of the passports of all Ireland. We would not, for all the benefits of travel, exchange our passport system for that of any country on the continent. Here is no staring in one's face, as if one were a criminal, to note the colour of bair and eyes, and the shape of one's visage. Here is no dismal anticipation of future annoyances, of bearded inspectors 5 of dirty-fisted hirelings, who will turn over oue's clothes in one's trunks, and inspect a washing-bill, as if it contained treason and insurrection. Here we have a moderate-sized apartment, fitted up with little besides the apparatus, and tenanted by two neatlydressed, cheerful-faced, kind-spoken Friendsyoung brothers, who quietly work out here the invention of their honoured relative. It is in this one room, aud by that bright, clean, handsome apparatus, that millions of railway passports are prepared. There is a larger establishment at Manchester ; but here this modest one is all-sufficient, *s it is easy for one pair of hands to print two hundred iickets per minute, and possible to print three hundred. The first thing about the machine which catches , the eye id an upright mahogany shaft, about two • feet high, large enough in the inside to contain a pile of blank tickets, laid flat upon eath other. Hidden within the machine is a little form of type, containing the names of the places to be printed, and the class of carriage. The practice of printing the fare is now nearly abolished, it being found to occasion great loss and inconvenience in case the fare having to be altered ; which must now and then happen. The type is ; inked by a saturated ribbon, which travels over a wheel, aud is brought in contact with the form, A feeder withdraws the blank tickets incessantly, one by one, from the bottom of the pile, and passes them under the form of type, which is pressed down upon each as it proceeds to the opening where it presents itself, face oppermost, to the printer who is working the lever, so that he can see that each is right and complete, before it falls into its place in the receptacle below. As we have said, two or three hundred can pass under his eye every minute that he is at work. But each one of these tickets bears a different i number, from 0 up to 10,000. Two brassbanded wheels, so close to each other as to look like one, a d each bearing rising figures, revolve ■ at different rates with the working of the rest of , the apparatus, the distance of one figure at a time ; from the units, and the second wheel, the distance i of one figure at a time for the hundreds: so that , the tickets present a numbered end to the eye of I the printer, as he works his Uver Lett there i should be any mistake, however, through a,mo- , ment's lapse of attention on we part of the workmau, there is a Checking Machine-alao the in- . vent on of Mr. Edmondson-by which the pnotiHeket. are finally tested. They are pled in a shaft, and dropped, one by one, by the turning of a handle which torn, also an index numbered ; so that the number turned up aud the ticket dropped should correspond. Th.s process is so , easy t^t six hundred per minute can be dis1 P ° There are specimens in this room of all the re- . ceptacles for tickets invented by Mr. Edmondson ; ! the Issue Cases, of various prices and construc1 tions, from the small one needed at a little rural station or on board a steamer, to the great cup- ■ board required at any central railway station. , 1 There are the shafts or columns which are to be * k e p t supplied with tickets, the undermost o! f which tickets is to be drawn out by the touch of a finger-tip ; and there are the slips of slate on \ which the clerk is to note down the number of , the ticket with which he begins his issue for the r tr«.iu then in band. There are drawers or cases i with compartments, with similar slips of slave lor f humbler uses. There is also a more important

little machine than any other but the printing machine — the Dating pres». We are all ftmiliir vrith the click of the sort of bottle-jack which stands on the counter of every booking-office* that machine into which the clerk pushes one end of the ticket he is selling, and from which is comes out dated. This is Mr. Edmondson's convenient dating-press, which does its work without any farther trouble to the clerk than hi* changing the type the last thing at night for the next day, and seeing now and then that the ribbon is duly saturated with the mixture which is to ink the type. Let us see — what is there besides in this quiet little Dublin office ? There is the box of type, in the slits of which are the arranged types — the names of the nations all ready to be transferred to the form in the machine. Aod there is a neat mahogany slide or case, in which the printed tickets are marshalled, to' be tied in packets of 250 ; and whence they are taken to be packed in their proper drawers, in readiness for the rrders which will certainly be coming in soon. In the general directions issued, in the form of a pamphlet, to all clerks-in-chsrge on nilways, it is the first order that they are to be incessantly careful to keep a sufficient provision of tickets from their own station to every other to which passengers are booked ; and especially when fairs, or other incidents, are likely to cause an increased demand ; and next, that the tubes are to be duly replenished wkb tickets, the lowest number being at the bottom. Each clerk had need be careful to watch lest any of hi* stock should be misplaced ; for, if too high a number gets abroad, he must account for all below it. The rule is, that the clerk must make good all deficiencies, and pay over all surplus money. This is no hardship to an able and honest clerk, who will not get wrong in his accounts ; and it is a necessary rule, if the vast host of railway clerks is to be kept in any order at all. Bui it renders a sharp look-out a matter of indispensable self-defence to the official who lives under such an ordinance. After the closing of the hatch in the booking-office, the account of the passengers just despatched has to be made out ; and this is done by means of the numbering oo the ticket. The closing number that went away by the preceding train is booked ; and at the bottom of the tube is the lowest number remaining ; the number between the two is that which has now to be accouDted for — that, of course, of the passengers who are now whirling away to their several destinations. The clerk has to record twice the closing number of the tickets for each train ; that is, in the compartments at the station, and in the proper column in the passengers' ticket-book, which is ruled and printed for the purpose. There are returns, in a puzzling number, to be filled up daily, several of which «re connected, more or lesa, with the record S involved in the delivery of these wonderful tickets. We will not perplex ourselves with them dow, bat merely glance at the trouble occasioned by any passenger omitting to supply himself with a ticket, or to deliver it up on leaving the platform at any intermediate station ; and again, at the business — oo trifle — of tying up in one mass the tickets of every arrival train, after the passengers are off and away, into a hundred homes, or inns, or new trains. These used-up tickets are marked with the nnubers of each class from every other station, and transmitted to the check-clerk's office by the first through- train the following morning. Thus it is seen that these tickets are the curreucy by which ihe bargain of travel is carried en, and without which the business would be aadumsyas a state of barter is in comparison with one of established monetary arn.ngeraenta. And how did the invention of Mr. Edmondson reach this extent of perfection ? Oo bis machines may be seen the name of Blaylock ; Blaylock was a watchmaker, an acquaintance of Edmondson's, and a man whom he knew to be capable of working out his idea. He told him what be wanted ; and Blaylock understood him, and realised his thought. The third machine that they made was nearly as good v those now in use. The one we saw had scarcely wanted five shillings' worth of repairs in five years ; and, when it needs more, it will be from sheer wearing away of the brass-work, by constant hard friction. The Manchester and Leeds Railway Company were the first to avail themselves of Mr. Edmondson's invention ; and they secured hit services at their station at Oldham Road for a time. He took out a patent ; and bis invention became so widely known and appreciated, that he soon withdrew himself from all other engagements, to perfect its details and provide tickets to meet the daily growing demand. He let out hit patent on profitable terms — ten shillings per mile per annum ; that is, a railway of 30 miles long paid him £15 a year for a license to print its own tickets by bis apparatus ; and a railway of 60 miles long paid him £30, and so on. As his profits began to come in, he began to spend them ; and it is not the least interesting to see how. It has been told that he was a bankrupt early in life. The very first use lie made of his money was to pay every shilling be had ever owed. He was fortysix when he took that walk in the field in Northumberland. He was fifty-eight when he died on the 22nd June last year. When we glance over the Railway reports of the United Kingdom, for a single year, it may strike us that a vast deal of riding has come out of one solitary walk — a prodigious machinery of convenience out of one turn of a sagacious man's thought. It is not an exaggeration to attribute a considerable proportion of the existing passenger traffic to the skilful administration of tickets, any more than it is to ascribe much of the increase of commercial business to the constitution of a convenient currency. The present number of travellers could not have been forwarded if tickets must still have been torn off printed sheets or books, and filled up with pen and ink. If it be said that this is one of the inventions which is sure to come because it is so much wanted, and that Thomas Edmondsou happened to be trie man : we may safely say that he was the man who conceived a vast idea with the true sagacity of genius, and worked it out with industry and patience, and enjoyed its honours with modesty, and dispensed its fruits with honour and generosity. We do not know what his best friends need claim ior him more.