“In the United States and in Great Britain, as soon as the telegraph had been demonstrated to be something more than a scientific toy, it was taken up and rapidly exploited as a commercial enterprise . . .”

“On the Continent of Europe it was otherwise. Commercial telegraph companies did not spring into existence . . .The public administrations and military authorities alone displayed any active interest in the improvement of existing means of communication.” (A.N. Holcombe, Public Ownership of Telephones on the Continent of Europe, Harvard University Press, 1911, p. 8.)

Mr. Holcombe points out that in France in 1845 the first electric telegraph line was constructed by the Government for its own purposes and the line was not open to the public. After the installation of a short line by a railway company, for operating purposes only, the Government forbade any further private construction. The attitude of the French and other Governments is explained by military considerations.

“In the middle of the 19^th Century, war, both foreign and domestic, was never a remote contingency in European politics. The powers that were had every incentive to prevent an important military and political instrument from passing beyond their control, to fall perhaps into improper hands” (p. 9).

Mr. Holcombe quotes a French Minister of the Interior who declared in the Chamber of Deputies in 1847 : “The Telegraph must be a political instrument, not a commercial one” (p. 11).

In Prussia the attitude was much the same and it was the military authorities who displayed from the first a keen interest in the new invention. They planned a comprehensive telegraph system and recalled Siemens (a name still associated with the production of electrical equipment) to the army to carry out construction. Only later did the authorities open the service to the public, and then only with the object of helping to defray the expense to which they were committed.

Mr. Holcombe emphasises the point that nowhere in the Continent was there any controversy over the question of the State operating the first telegraph systems, and he recalls that the short-lived German National Congress at Frankfurt in 1848-9, in Section 44 of the draft Constitution, provided for the organisation of an imperial telegraph system, to be administered as a Governmental undertaking throughout all Germany (pp. 14-15).

Speaking of the continent generally, he says :

“If the public authorities had done nothing, doubtless sooner or later the scattered railway signal services would have developed into services of real public benefit, or else commercial undertakings would have entered the field directly. In the beginning, however, the general public was indifferent . . .

“The needs in response to which the electrical telegraphs were first called into existence, on any considerable scale, were purely military and political . . .” (p. 15).

Reverting to England, where the telegraphs first grew up round the railways and were jointly used by the railways and the public, and then were developed also by private telegraph companies, keen competition existed and rates were cut to an unprofitable level. “But experience proved that the flat rate (1/- for 20 words) was unremunerative, and by agreement among the companies a uniform zone tariff, in which the 1/- charge was limited to distances of a hundred miles or less was restored.” (The Post Office, Sir Evelyn Murray. Putnam. 1927, p. 67.)