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Picked up this book en route home from last weekend’s amazing Do Lectures. It jumped out from a small book/ antiques shop in Cardigan for a number of reasons. Firstly, I love the cover design – the illustration, font, colour and it’s tactile hessian like texture. Secondly, when I peered inside the opening sentence seemed so relevant – to my weekend at Do, and to where we are today in terms of technology.

‘Have you ever thought what a very large part of the world’s work consists in conveying messages from one person or place to another….the most complicated and beautiful mechanisms, are employed in this “science of communications”.

So I snapped it up and found it be the most wonderful read. I can’t work out when it was published (guessing 50s?) but it’s a charming jaunt through the history of communications from the days of mail coaches and the travelling post office (TPO) to the electric telegraph, the telephone, ‘the wonder of wireless’ right up to broadcasting.  It’s written in such a captivating and refreshing style that I couldn’t put it down. It marvels at the wonders of developments and has a refreshing congratulatory tone about the inventors – something which feels somewhat absent when we read about technological today.

The language and turn of phrase also had me laughing out loud on several occasions. Describing the clock work precision required by the mail workers on board the Travelling Post Office trains ‘Don’t forget it’s not only a matter of standing up in a swaying carriage and sorting letters. There are many different things to do, all precisely at the right moment…You will be pleased to know that they can make tea on board, and we may be sure that a cup of tea in the early morning hours tastes very good indeed!’.  In the chapter covering the beginnings of Air Mail it describes the French aviator and inventor as ‘that clever Frenchman, Beleriot”.
There are loads of great facts and figures in here, and wonderful stories. Some of my favourites below:

• In the chapter about the work of Wheatstone & Cooke and the development of the Electric Telegraph It highlights that it took until 1839 for the Great Western to allow a fixed line between Paddington and West Drayton – but in spite of this significant engineering achievement this failed to capture the public’s imagination until the electric telegraph was used by the Police to relay a message to London that a suspected murderer had boarded a train in Slough headed their way. When the train pulled in to Paddington ‘to the suspects astonishment he was spotted by detectives, taken to prison, tried and in due course hanged’. This human story of technology sounds very familiar – Twitter and the Iranian elections?
• Chapter 9 covers Submarine Telegraphy and there are some amazing tales about the attempts to lay cables under our oceans. With the first cable between England and France in 1851, England and Ireland connected in 1853 and how Charles Bright and William Thomson raised £350,000 to lay the first cables between England and America and the challenges they faced getting the two ships to meet in the middle of the Atlantic.
• Chapter 10 covers the Telephone; Graham Bell; formation of the Post Office then to the invention of the microphone (described as the ‘servant or handmaid of the telephone’) by the Welshman David Edward  Hughes. According to this account, we owe the invention of the microphone to an attack of bronchitis. In November 1877, Hughes, indoors with a severe cold was amusing himself with a speaking telephone. It occurred to him that there might be a some way of making the wire of the telephone circuit speak of itself without the need of one telephone, namely, that used in transmitting sounds’

It’s a great read – so if you see it in an old book shop, grab it.