The Sloane Porthcorno Valley in Cornwall, located 506 kilometers southwest of London on the Atlantic coast, was the unlikely site of a revolution that enabled Britain and its former colonies to communicate with each other.
Museum officials told a visiting PTI reporter that Porthkurno was an international cable communications center from 1870 to 1970 and a training college for the telecommunications industry until 1993.
Now a museum housing rare equipment and details of the history of the telegraph, Porthcorn has been given millions of pounds in funding to develop international education programs involving community groups in India.
Among these rare archives discovered last week is a collection of the first telegraph messages sent from Porthkurno and Mumbai (then Bombay).
Until this momentous day, communication between England and India was unreliable, and often took months.
According to the document, the first message was sent on the night of June 23, 1870, and a reply was received within 5 minutes, which was the technical feat of the time.
The first message was from Anderson to Stacey: How are you all?, to which the reply was: ‘All good’.
Anderson’s second message was: “Please ask the gentlemen of the press, Bombay, to send a message to the gentlemen of the press, to New York”.
After several messages that night, including to the Governor of Bombay, from Lady Mayo to the Viceroy Lord Mayo, who was based in Shimla, and from the Prince of Wales to the Viceroy, the Bombay-based journalists received a reply.
It was said: From the Indian press to the American press: The Indian press sends its greetings to the American press. Respond quickly.
The document mentions that the Viceroy of India sent a telegram to the US President and “received his reply which reached him in 7 hours and 40 minutes”.
The Viceroy’s message, which was read in the US Congress that evening, was: “The Viceroy of India is speaking directly to the President of the United States by telegraph for the first time. The completion of a long line of unbroken communication will be a sign of lasting alliance between the Eastern and Western worlds”.
Telegraphic communication with India was first established in 1864 by underground telegraph lines from Europe to the head of the Persian Gulf and then an undersea cable to Karachi, but the underground was never satisfactory, prompting efforts to lay more reliable undersea cables.
In 1869, telegraph pioneer John Pender founded the British India Submarine Telegraph Company, tasked with laying submarine cables to India.
The five ships used to lay the thousands of kilometers of cables were the Great Eastern, the William Curie, the Chiltern, the Hawk and the Hibernian.
It took six weeks to lay the cables from Suez to Bombay. This was followed by the laying of the last link from Malta to Portocorno.
It was the first long-distance cable ‘series’, and was opened to much fanfare, museum records show.
After the connection with India was established, Porthkurno was connected to the rest of the world by undersea cables.
At its height, it was the world’s largest station with 14 cables in operation. The telegraphic code name of Porthkurno was ‘PK’.
During the Second World War, the tunnels were dug by Cornish miners to operate the underground building and all the telegraph operations.
The building today houses the museum and archives that started the telecommunications revolution in the late 19th century.
In addition to the £1.44m funding received in January, the museum was this week awarded £35,000 from global communications organization SubOptic to develop education projects with community groups in India, among other countries.
Museum officials said the money will fund an international education program that will benefit patrons beginning in spring 2013.
It will include online learning resources, including video clips, animations and games that will enable users to explore the science of global cable-based communications, as well as its impact on local identity, democracy and culture.
