|
|
It was a young Canadian of Irish extraction, Samuel Walker McGowan who brought the telegraph technology to the Colonies. At 24 McGowan was already an expert telegraphist and experienced entrepreneur in the flourishing North American telegraph development. He studied briefly for the law but, in 1847, entered the field of telegraphic experimentation, studied under Samuel Morse, became associated with Morse's colleague, Ezra Cornell (inventor of the first telegraph insulators) managed for a time the New York-Buffalo line that took the telegraph towards Canada and was one of the bevy of successful enterpreneurs who canvassed subscriptions for Americas spreading private telegraph companies.
When news of Victoria's gold discoveries reached the United States in 1852 McGowan saw his opportunity. He consulted with his former instructor, Professor Morse and, fortified by his advice, embarked for Australia. McGowan reached Melbourne early in 1853 with a specific plan for electric telegraph development, equipped with several complete sets of Morse instruments, batteries and insulators, and accompanied by a "first class electrician". It was the first transfer of modern telecommunication technology to Australia.
McGowan's plan was to develop a private company to construct and work telegraph lines from Melbourne to the Ballarat and Bendigo goldfields and to link Victoria's golden capital with those of its neighbouring Colonies. He was soon in touch with interested backers and a demonstration of the working of his Morse apparatus in Melbourne in June 1853 stirred excited praise.
'To us, old Colonists who have left Britain long ago', the Argus editorialist reflected the next day, 'there is something very delightful in the actual contemplation of this, the most perfect invention of modern times .... as anything more perfect than this is scarcely conceivable, and we really begin to wonder what will be left for the next generation upon which to expend the restless enterprise of the human mind ... Let us set about electric telegraphy at once.'
Government intervention, however, was to forestall the growth of privately sponsored telegraphy in the Colony. At first, distanced from the remarkable advances of the technology in America and Europe, McGowan's evidence and enterprise transformed their inertia. As plans for his company took shape, the Victorian Government called for tenders for the construction of an experimental electric telegraph line from Melbourne to Williamstown and indicated to McGowan that any independent approach would meet 'the utmost resistance'.
At the same time they offered him a leading place in the management of public telegraphy. Confronted by bureaucratic impasse and persuasively solicited by Governor La Trobe, McGowan conceded. The contract for the 11 mile Melbourne-Williamstown telegraph line was let to him.
The work of establishing Australia's first telegraph line was completed with home-made wooden poles cut from the tallest trees and imported British galvanised iron wire. McGowan had great trouble with the insulators. Melbourne had no glass house, Sydney's one manufacturer "botched" the production, and McGowan himself had to devise and manufacture a quantity made from shellac and tar. But on March 3 1854, the first telegraph line in Australia began operation (six months before the first Australian railway line was opened between Melbourne and Port Melbourne on September 12) and McGowan himself was gazetted as general-superintendent of the new electric telegraph of Victoria.
His vision of riches had been thwarted but McGowan quickly applied the qualities of a dynamic telegraph entrepreneur to those of an active superintendent.
Within three years Victoria was webbed with a network of overhead telegraph lines from Melbourne to Portland near the South Australian border, and north and north-west via Wangaratta and Wodonga to the Murray River. The closed circuit system of Morse transmission was employed and the received signals were recorded on an embossing recorder. With instruments, recorders and techniques derived from American experience, Victorias first telegraph statute of 1854 was based on Canada's Telegraph Act, legislated eight years earlier, a copy of which McGowan had prudently brought with him to Australia.
Nearly 4000 telegrams were despatched in the first year of operation in 1854. Two years later this figure had tripled. In 1857 McGowan met Charles Todd and discussed the connection of South Australia to the prosperous port of Melbourne using the successful system of Morse's technology. The Adelaide-Melbourne electric telegraph line; strung securely above the ground, was begun in April 1857 and opened in July the following year.
McGowan's overall plans depended on a Sydney, Melbourne , Adelaide telegraphic triangle but he had to press the NSW Colony to build a telegraph within their own borders to understand the workings of the system before plans for an intercontinental link were made. This link opened in 1858.
In February 1858, McGowan travelled to Tasmania to consult the Government regarding the connection of Tasmania to the Victorian system and in July 1859 McGowan left Victoria on board the SS Omeo to supervise the laying of what was to be the longest cable in the world (at that time). This cable was to have a short and erratic life of only three years.
In 1858 a proposal was to connect the Australian Colonies with England and Europe. This caused a flurry of rivalry and keen desire by the Colonial Governments to have the connection terminate on their territory.
Four separate pathways were proposed:-
1. Brett's route from Ceylon to Western Australia through Cocos Keeling Island.South Australia's Governor favoured the overland route and he consulted with Todd, who replied that he preferred the 4th. option as it would require comparatively short lengths of cable in shallow seas where the cable could be taken up and examined easily. He saw the overland route as a shorter distance, at less cost and more easily repaired but in 1858 the desert was uncharted and should be settled before this concept taken up. McGowan expressed other views. As he was more technologically more experienced and better informed than Todd, he drew attention to the 'suitable nature of the bottoms of any cable route around the Australian coast to the north and north-east, since it was, he understood, mostly composed of coral intersected by sharp angular ledges of the same material occurring suddenly and in unexpected positions'.
2. From Timor Island to the northern coast near Cambridge Gulf in NT.
3. From Banjoewangi in Java to Perth.
4. Gisbourne's Port Essington to Morton Bay
But McGowan was not disposed to endorse the SA overland route . 'Even if it was possible to overcome the difficulties likely to be found in attempting to cross the interior's barren wastes', he reported to his Government in January 1859, 'the constant liability or molestation from the incursion of hostile native tribes, the nearly total absence of suitable timber for the several hundred miles, want of natural fodder for the beasts of burden, and the scarcity of water, would all tend to raise difficulties'. He cast his vote on 'a causal consideration' for Brett's Indian Ocean-Western Australian route.
In 1865, eleven years after McGowan's initiative, several thousand miles of Morse's "lightning lines" silhouetted the Australian countryside. Over long distances repeaters were installed, initially human operators who read the incoming Morse signals and retransmitted them to their destination. The work of contracting and installing was experimental and difficult. Linesmen and telegraphers had to be trained but, in city and suburb and remote country repeater stations, they impressed a new technology upon society.
Towards the close of the century Australia had become one of the largest national users of the telegraph.'
'In no country in the world has the development of telegraphic communication been so rapid as in Australasia, and in none has it been taken advantage of by the public to anything like the same extent.'This was brought about by pioneers such as McGowan.
Samuel Walker McGowan died in
1887.
