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TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN AUSTRALIA: AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, 1854-1930
Abstract
Australian history has been conspicuously short on the examination of the history of technical subjects and of the role technological development has played in the country's evolution. As early as 1961, Geoffrey Blainey observed: “We historians are uneasy outside the old triad of political, social and religious history; we are inclined to avoid the history of technical subjects even more than did the historians of the last century with their narrower compass of history.” The comment remains valid today. The history of technology in Australia stands as a broad and relatively empty canvas on which to depict the major underpinnings – and their social interconnections – of an increasingly industrialised society.
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NOTES AND REFERENCES
Blainey G.. 1961. . ‘Gold and governors’. . Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand . , Vol. 9((36)): 338
Thompson R.. 1947. . Wiring a Continent . , Princeton : : University of Princeton Press. .
Sydney Morning Herald, 31 December 1857.
A uniform telegraph system based on Morse was established by the first International Telegraph Convention, signed in Paris in 1865. The International Telegraph Union followed.
Quoted in F.W. Symes, ‘Australia and world communications — A summary of developments: 1830–70’, paper presented to a symposium to mark the centenary of the Adelaide-Darwin Overland Telegraph Line, Institution of Engineers Australia and the Australian Post Office, August 1972, p. 3. O'Shaughnessey was a telegraph experimenter in the East India Company.
Undergrounding swallowed up two-thirds of Morse's $30,000 Congress appropriation. The insulated wire was painfully unravelled by Cornell and later erected on poles above ground.
South Australia, Report of Superintendent of Telegraphs, Tenth Report, 1884.
A subsequent cable laid in 1909 was to have a splendid, if unexpected, future. During 1943 it was pulled up, rewound, and, in the exigencies of war, taken to New Guinea where it was laid from a village near Port Moresby across Torres Strait to Australia's northernmost tip, Cape York. There it provided a vital submarine telegraph link to connect US and Australian troops with mainland headquarters.
Ned Kelly, bushranger extraordinary and national folk-hero, was successfully tracked by telegraph.
The alliance between the telegraph and the extending railways was important in most countries in the nineteenth century. In Australia, railwaymen kept an informing watch in remote areas on needed repairs to the telegraph line.
A Statistical Account of the Seven Colonies of Australasia, 1899–1900, Sydney, Government Printer, 8th issue, 1900, p. 713.
1 January 1938, p. 12.
Todd Papers, South Australian Archives, Public Lecture Notes, 1873.
‘Overland Telegraph Port Augusta to Port Darwin. Instructions to overseers in charge of works’, copy, Telecom Telecommunication Museum, Adelaide. M. J. Gooley, ‘The construction of the Overland Telegraph Port Augusta to Darwin’ paper to Overland Telegraph symposium, op. cit.
F.P. O'Grady, ‘The Overland Telegraph Line technology of the 1870s’, paper to Overland Telegraph symposium, op. cit.
Ibid.
Ann Mozley Moyal, Scientists in Nineteenth Century Australia, Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1976, p. 154.
J. Moynihan, ‘In touch with the world’, Western Australian, 6 December 1977 p. 58.
Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1851–1890, Melbourne University Press, Vol. 3, 1969, p. 65.
McGowan experienced great trouble with insulators. Melbourne had no glasshouse, the Sydney manufacturer ‘botched’ the production and McGowan himself had to resort to inventing and manufacturing a quantity made from shellac and tar. Argus, 11 March 1854, p. 5.
Sir Samuel Jones, ‘The development of the Australian telecommunications manufacturing industry’, papers to Overland Telegraph symposium, op. cit., p. 32.
‘Early experiments in telephony in Australia’, typescript, Telecom Western Australia.
Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1851–1890, Melbourne University Press, Vol. 6, 1976, pp. 226–7. Sutton's’ TV system’, which he called ‘telephany’, used all the latest technology, such as the recently-invented Kerr effect, the Nipkow disc (which Baird was to use in the ‘twenties) and the selenium photocell. But its weak link in the 1870s was that the signal had to be transferred by telegraph lines, as radio had yet to arrive, and these were too slow to transmit the dashing horses of the Melbourne Cup successfully. Personal communication with C. Coogan, CSIRO, Melbourne.
Superintendent of Telegraphs, Report to Parliament, Queensland, 11 March 1878.
G. Linge, Industrial Awakening, ANU Press, Canberra, 1980 gives a pioneering look at some other aspects of manufacturing invention and innovation.
Postmaster-General's Department, Fourth Annual Report, 1913–14, p. 37; and see ref. 21.
‘Early experiments in telephony in Australia’, op. cit., p. 1.
Postmaster-General's Department, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report and Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 1937 and 1941.
The Strowger system demonstrates the converse maxim,x “in the midst of death we are in life”. A. B. Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker, moved to experiment because he believed the exchange girls were diverting calls intended for him to business elsewhere, designed the world's first automatic telephone system by which each digit, step by step, activated and carried through the connection without the aid of the ‘hello girl’. The system was patented in 1891.
Sir Samuel Jones, op. cit., p. 33. Along with Austral Standard Cables Pty., other active local firms were Olympic Cables Pty. Ltd., Conquerer Cables Pty. Ltd., and Beacon Cables.
Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, Senate, 6 June 1901, p. 749.
Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1851–1890, Melbourne University Press, Vol. 5, 1974, p. 22.
ibid., Vol. 6, 1976, p. 357.
Report of Departmental Committee of Inquiry into the Telegraph and Telephone Systems of the States of the Commonwealth, Government Printer, Adelaide, 1901, Recommendations, p. 37.
Postmaster-General's Department, First Annual Report, 1910–11, Government Printer, Victoria, 1911, pp. 13, 25. There were no annual reports for the first nine years of the Department's life.
Postmaster-General's Department, Second Annual Report, 1911–12, Government Printer, Victoria, 1912, p. 24.
A campaign in the early 1950s to recruit British engineers followed a notice in the Annual Report 1948–9 of a “dearth of qualified men”. The campaign of 1971 anticipated adding 50 engineering graduates from Britain.
Postmaster-General's Department, Ninth Annual Report, 1918–19, Victoria, 1920, p. 21.
Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1891–1939, Melbourne University Press, Vol. 7, 1979, pp. 437–9 and Press Cutting Books of H.P. Brown in family possession.
Sir Frank Heath was borrowed from Britain's DSIR in 1925.
January 1924.