Odd historical facts

Whilst recently doing some research, I came across a few odd historical facts that I thought might be of interest to some of my regular blog readers:

• By 9th July 1839 the world's first commercial telegraph line was built between Paddington and West Drayton. It used equipment invented by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone of King's College, London,

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• The first electrically-powered fax machine - Alexander Bain's Electric Printing Telegraph - was patented in 1843 ... the year before Morse Code was used for the first time to transmit a message.

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• In 1849 the world's first central telegraph station was opened by the Electric Telegraph Company in Founders' Court, Lothbury in the City of London.

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• The first ever undersea telegraph cable was laid between England and France in 1850 by HMS Widgeon.

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• The first underground railway in the world opened on 10th January 1863 ... six months before the Battle of Gettysburg was fought! The railway (the Metropolitan Railway) ran between Paddington and Farringdon and used gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives.

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• The last public hanging in London took place on 26th May 1868 a Newgate Prison. The executed man was the Fenian Michael Barrett, who had taken part in the Clerkenwell explosion that had killed 12 people. It is know that some people travelled on the Metropolitan Railway to go to see the execution as Farringdon station was less than ten minutes walk from the prison!

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• The first telephone call in London was made on 10th March 1876. It was made from Brown’s Hotel at 33 Albemarle Street in Mayfair to Ravenscourt Park, a distance of approximately five miles.

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• The first telephone exchange in London opened in 1879 in Coleman Street. It was run by Bell and had thirteen subscribers. It was followed a few months later by a second exchange that was run by Edison and situated in Lombard Street. It connected ten offices in the City. It is interesting to note that this was the same year in which the Battles of Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift took place.

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• The first underwater telephone cable was laid between England and France in 1891 by HMTS Monarch. By April of that year it was possible to make telephone calls to and from London and Paris.

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• The first deep-level underground railway line in London was opened in 1890 between King William Street and Stockwell. It was operated by the City and South London Railway and used electric locomotives that pulled carriages that were nicknamed 'the padded cells' because of their upholstered seats and small opaque windows.

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• The first practical gas turbine engine (i.e. one that used less power to work that it produced) was built in 1903 by Norwegian, Ægidius Elling. It used rotary compressors and turbines and produced 11hp. By 1912 he had developed a gas turbine that had separate compressors and turbines in series. (Sir Frank Whittle based his early gas turbine designs on Elling's work.)

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• The first patent for a mobile telephone was taken out in 1917 by Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt although the first practical mobile telephone was not demonstrated until 1973, when John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola made a telephone call using a Motorola DynaTAC that weighed 2kg.