In the early nineteenth century, it would take a message 5-8 months to travel from England to India. Steamships cut that time to six weeks each way, but furthermore electrical telecommunications made that time, for all practical purposes, instantaneous. This new form of communication gave imperialists the ability to maintain their empire, being able to govern a colony thousands of miles away. The web of cables that was so eagerly constructed around the world gave the European empires an advantage that earlier nations never could have imagined.

The following pages will cover the history and effects of electrical telecommunications from its beginning through the first world war. They will describe the basic

An important form of communication that was not widely used until the beginning of the war was electromagnetic radiowaves. Guglielmo Marconi (Fig. 7) first began experimenting with wireless in 1895. He was soon able to transmit across the Atlantic, but the technology was expensive and insecure. New improvements, however, made the technology very practical for military use. Ships could now keep in direct contact, the early aircraft could communicate with each other and the base, and each military unit could organize themselves strategically with direct communication (Stall 13). The British and French both had plans to create major radio networks, but these were stopped when the war broke out (Headrick 129).

At the International Cable Convention, France and the United States proposed that all cable systems be considered neutral in wartime. Not only did Britain categorically refuse this, they proposed and got the right to cut cables during war. The British, owning 24 of 30 cable ships had an unfair advantage at cable cutting (115). The fear of a Franco-British war was now more reasonable than ever. During a near confrontation between French and British forces at the Nile river, the signal from France to Senegal went dead. The British claimed it was a mechanical failure, but now the French realized exactly how necessary a cable network was (116). Another such incident was the extensive censorship of messages during the Boer War. The British forbid all secret code messages south of Aden and re-routed all other messages through the London Central Telegraph Office to approve each one (114).

The British empire was lucky to see the potential of the telegraph early. They realized how it could act as a political reinforcement and give them an advantage in politics and trade over foreign nations. In 1887, J. Henniker Heaton stated to the Royal Colonial Institute:

Now the British began another mission. They did not like the fact that they had to depend upon foreign nations, some of which unfriendly, for communications. Their paranoia began the project for an "all-red" (red referring to the color used to represent the British empire on maps at the time) cable network. An article entitled "Our Telegraphic Isolation" written by Percy Hurd for the Contemporary Review in 1896 was one of the more influential pieces to call for "a system of telegraphic communication completely under British control (69)." Work began in 1889 and after millions of dollars in government subsidies, an entirely British controlled cable network was present in 1902 when Britain to Canada cable was completed (Headrick 110).

Some common words found in the essay are:
British Empire, India Steamships, Britain Canada, , Algeria Headrick, British French, Wheatstone Fig, Marconi Fig, France United, Bell Fig, british empire, cable network, war broke, foreign nations, required cable, land line, royal colonial institute, red sea, cable cutting, contemporary review, british cable,
Approximate Word count = 1990
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)