170 Yeras of Electrical communications

Most people think that Samuel Morse invented the first electrical communication, but it was actually two Englishmen who, in 1837, pioneered a 'needle telegraph' system of communication. The UK's University of Salford is planning to show off a working Wheatstone-Cooke needle telegraph this coming Wednesday, which happens to be the 170th anniversary of the first public application of the telegraph - when the Great Western Railway Company connected the stations Euston Square and Camden Town over a distance of 2.4 kilometres.
Visitors to the free event will get the chance to see a Wheatstone-Cooke needle telegraph, seeing how it used the magnetic properties of electricity to deflect a series of needles, which then pointed to alphabet letters and spelt out words.
The University's Professor Nigel Linge said: "The Wheatstone-Cooke success was the first in a whole series of major inventions that have transformed the way we communicate. The telegraph systems of 1837 were the equivalent of the high performance mobile phones of today. It's amazing how telecommunications has evolved so much in such a relatively short time."
As well as being able to see a Wheatstone-Coke system, the Family Telecommunications Day will feature an exhibition of 170 years of telecoms technology and hands-on experiments using semaphore, Morse code, telephones and much more.