The Electric Telegraph Company was the world's first public telegraph company founded in the United Kingdom in 1846 by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and John Lewis Ricardo, MP for Stoke-on-Trent.
At creation the company purchased all the patents Cooke and Wheatstone had obtained to date. It merged with the International Telegraph Company in 1855 to become the Electric and International Telegraph Company. C.F. Varley was chief engineer in the 1860s.
The company was nationalised by the British government in 1870 and British Telecom, the giant multi-national communications corporation based in over 170 countries worldwide today, is a direct descendant of Cooke's Electric Telegraph Company.
Read more about Electric Telegraph Company: Historical Documents
Famous quotes containing the words electric and/or company:
“That’s the down-town frieze,
Principally the church steeple,
A black line beside a white line;
And the stack of the electric plant,
A black line drawn on flat air.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and dinners at the best taverns.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)