The First Electric Telegraph

David McCullough, dean on popular histories, takes 'The Greater Journey ...

In 1858, Thomas G. Appleton famously remarked, "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." But we are an impatient people, and many of us have insisted on going while still very much alive.

Historian David McCullough has more than 9 million copies of his books in print. He won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Pulitzer prizes for his biographies "Truman" in 1992 and "John Adams" in 2001.

Now, McCullough offers a panorama of the aspirations and experiences of Americans, both illustrious and ordinary, who traveled to the City of Light between 1830 and 1900. Many of them undertook not only a physical but a metaphysical excursion, "The Greater Journey" that would transform them into citizens of the world.

The book opens with description of a typical trans-Atlantic crossing in the 1830s, aboard a packet sailing vessel when a 3,000-mile odyssey could last up to six weeks. (A decade later, steamers would reduce the crossing to a brisk 17 days.) Enduring seasickness and bad food, Americans stumbled ashore at the port of Le Havre, where they were simultaneously charmed by such an "old" city, and appalled by its infamous bureaucracy and passport control.

From there, a 15-passenger stagecoach would whisk them 110 miles to Paris in just 24 hours. The most memorable stop en route was Cleveland's sister city, Rouen, where the new arrivals had their first encounter with a Gothic masterpiece, the city's Catholic cathedral, "with its immense scale and elaborate evocations of sainthood and ancient sanctions, and for the Americans, virtually all of whom were Protestants, it was a surprisingly emotional experience."

The initial glimpse of Paris itself left many underwhelmed. In the 1830s, the sprawling capital was still a medieval city, a warren of crowded, crooked and filthy streets. But Parisians were friendly and welcoming, even if they knew little about the New World.

The newcomers spotted few drunks and no chewing tobacco, but a proliferation of dogs, prostitutes and soldiers. And they commented on the odd business hours: everything -- shops, cafes and restaurants, opera and theaters -- seemed always to be open, even on Sundays!

The principals in McCullough's account were serious: "Work was their reason for being there, and they never lost sight of that." Samuel F.B. Morse hoped to hone his skills as a painter, and executed an ambitious rendering of "The Gallery at the Louvre" (1831-33). Morse failed to achieve recognition as a history painter, but his stay in Paris nevertheless inspired him to invent the electric telegraph, and to devise the code that bears his name.

Looking Out to Sea at St Margaret-at-Cliffe | Coupon Clipping

History of St Margaret’s Bay

The readiest source of information about the history of St Margaret’s is a booklet titled "St Margaret’s Bay The Piccadilly of the Sea." This was originally written by J Harris Stone and published in 1910. An updated version was produced by John Jewell in 1980 and the latest revision by Jean Richardson was published in 2001. Copies of the booklet are available from the Village Shop at £2.50 each.

Here are some extracts:

"The Bay lies within the parish of St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe which appears in the Domesday Book as Sancta Margharita. From that time forward until the sixteenth century very little is known about the history of the parish, which is contained in a pocket of land around the South Foreland, to the south of the Dover/Deal road, and is bordered by three miles of the English Channel. To some extent the village can be described as off the map. There was no great house or noble family to record its history while its population was very small and few of them could read or write, so that it is doubtful whether any record was made.

……From Saxon times until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Priors of St Martins in Dover controlled the parish…It was at Dover that a start was made on compiling the Domesday Book. The Priors were the ones who built the village church some time between 1140 and 1296, on a Saxon foundation. Perhaps this great church and the surrounding village was used as a summer retreat for Benedictine monks and it has always been a puzzle to understand why such a small village should have such a large church…….

In 1367 a hermit monk, one Nicholas de Legh, is said to have kept a light burning in a cave to warn mariners of the dreaded Goodwins and Archbishop Langham granted forty days’ indulgence to all who contributed to the maintenance of the hermitage…..

In the parish records there is an interesting account dated 1696 of a shepherd who, being lost one night, fell over the cliff and was mortally injured, but he lived long enough to bequeath to the parish five roods of land to pay for the tolling of a curfew bell at 8 p.m. from Michaelmas to Lady Day in order to warn travellers if they walked too near the edge of the cliff……..Throughout the following centuries the villagers were concerned in smuggling.

The history and progress of the electric telegraph, with descriptions of some of the apparatus

Philosophical magazine, a journal of theoretical, experimental and applied physics

The electric telegraph

American journal of science, the first scientific journal in the United States : devoted to the geological sciences and to related fields

History, theory, and practice of the electric telegraph