His greatest contribution to the annals of Indian history was to come in 1850, when he was appointed by the Company to string up the country’s—and indeed Asia’s—first telegraph line between Kolkata (then Calcutta) and Diamond Harbour in the city’s suburbs.
At a length of just 27 miles (43.5km), the line might seem like a humble beginning. But remarkably, the “official” Kolkata-Diamond Harbour line had been preceded, a decade earlier, by O’Shaughnessy’s own private and experimental line of 21 miles. Sitting in a corner of the country, thousands of miles away from Samuel Morse in the US and English telegraph pioneers William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, the doctor had developed a telegraphy system of his own.
O’Shaughnessy’s initial designs were unique and called for messages to be received by imparting a series of electrical shocks to the operator—thankfully, he would import and adopt more conventional methods in time. But it would take 10 years and the patronage of governor general Lord Dalhousie before his ideas were taken seriously.
Meteoric rise
Success was instant. By 1856, the network had expanded to 46 receiving stations. “The First War of Independence in 1857 failed because of this telegraph technology. Lord Dalhousie once said that the telegraph saved India,” says C.V. Gopinath, who recently retired as senior deputy director general of telegraph services and ex-officio additional secretary to the government of India after 40 years of service.
Gopinath, one of the first qualified engineers to join the department, is proud of the service rendered by the telegraph network. “After the war in 1857, and even after the telephone system was aunched in India in 1882, the telegraph remained the most popular system of communication.”
An undated photo of phonogram operators at the Delhi CTO. (Hindustan Times)
Gopinath reckons that this was because the telegram was cheap—to this day, a telegram can be sent for as little as Rs3.50—and more reliable than the telephone system. There was a time, he says, when the acronym STD, which stands for subscriber trunk dialling, used to be referred to as “subscriber, trying and dying”.
According to David Arnold’s book Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, by 1939, India had 100,000 miles of telegraph lines carrying 17 million telegraphic messages a year. Arnold says in the book, which was published in 2000, that while the system was adopted early on by the colonial military, “by the early twentieth century neither government officials nor nationalist politicians seemed able to function without a daily diet of telegrams”.
Therefore, in the early years after Independence, India had already developed into a powerhouse in terms of telegraph traffic. In 1953, on the occasion of the centenary of the Indian telegraph system, the posts and telegraph department published a book called Story of the Indian Telegraphs: A Century of Progress.
Betrayed optimism