Kassia St Clair

So they do start kind of proliferating through the UK through railway stations.

And it also, this is going to sound really odd, but also at this time, you have kind of local time.

So the time in London is not the same as the time in Slough.

The time is sort of done by sundials locally, but that's not very useful if you're trying to set up a railway system.

And so the railway system, not only is it kind of an early adopter of the telegraph system, but it also uses the telegraph to kind of set the clocks.

And there's kind of like British railway time as well as local time.

And so this message that is sent, I can actually read it to you verbatim.

I've got my notes open here.

So it said, a murder has just been committed at Salt Hill and the suspected murderer was seen to take a first class ticket to London by the train which left Slough at 7.42 p.m.

He is in the garb of a Quaker with a great coat on, which reaches nearly down to his feet.

He is in the last compartment of first class compartment.

I'm not entirely sure what the kind of letter or word per minute rate was at this time.

But kind of, I think it's something like three letters per minute.

So it's really quite slow.

And this message, you know, it's long winded.

So I think it would have taken a relatively long time to transmit, you know, successfully.

Apparently, you know, I don't know whether how much of this is newspaper sensationism, but apparently it did take them a little while to work out what Quaker meant because it was spelt with a K.

This early model is a little bit unusual.

It doesn't have all the letters.

So now we think of the telegraph system as being kind of, you know, using Morse code and being a system of dots and dashes.