That future, however, has little place for the humble and hardy telegraph. The Indian genius has moved on.
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Mary Jane, salted water and wires
The Indian telegraph system owes its origins to a pioneering Irish doctor of whom little is known. A brief history
The story of the Indian telegraph is one rich with personalities. From governer-general Lord Dalhousie, who unilaterally sourced funding for the first telegraph line in 1851, to the hundreds upon hundreds of workers who strung wires and built towers up and down the length and breadth of the country.
But standing tall over all these people is William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, the enterprising Irishman whose life was marked by several innovations, including the Indian telegraph.
O’Shaughnessy would overcome birth into a poor family—in 1809—by excelling in his studies and winning a seat at the prestigious University of Edinburgh. He graduated in medicine in 1829 and then, failing to win a licence to practise, opened a private forensic toxicology laboratory.
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The doctor’s first brush with fame came in 1831, when he published a landmark letter in The Lancet, the medical journal, outlining the results of his tests on blood samples from cholera victims. O’Shaughnessy suggested that cholera patients suffered from extreme dehydration and lack of salts in their blood. A more detailed paper would follow that would revolutionize treatment of the disease. Today’s commonplace practice of using rehydration salts to revive severe diarrhoea patients can be traced to O’Shaughnessy’s pioneering work.
The doctor’s good work eventually earned him an invitation to join the Bengal Army in Kolkata in 1833 as an assistant surgeon and subsequently, as a professor at the Calcutta Medical College.
Six years later, the doctor would make his next landmark medical discovery. During a meeting of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta in 1839, O’Shaughnessy read out his paper, On the Preparations of the Indian Hemp, or Gunjah.
In 1841, during a brief trip back to England, the doctor took back with him samples of hemp to be planted at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Once again, the medical profession took note. Hemp was heralded as a wonder drug and physicians on both sides of the Atlantic experimented with concoctions made from cannabis.
When O’Shaughnessy returned to India in 1844, it was as a Fellow of the Royal Society. With two key discoveries and several medical textbooks behind him, he then focused on his non-medical pursuits.
While an official career move meant that O’Shaughnessy was now assay master at the Kolkata mint in charge of developing a single system of coinage in India, he also dabbled in telegraphy on the side.
His efforts would bear fruit in 1851, when he was officially asked to lay an experimental telegraph line, the first in the country, between Kolkata and Diamond Harbour. It was a success and the doctor was made the first superintendent-general of telegraphs.