The greatest engineering problem facing Australia - the tyranny of distance - had a solution: the electric telegraph, and its champion was the sheep-farming state of South Australia. In two years, Charles Heavitree Todd, leading hundreds of men, constructed a telegraph line across the centre of the continent from Port Augusta to Port Darwin.
At nearly 3,000 kilometres long and using 36,000 poles at '20 to the mile', it was a mammoth undertaking, but at last, in October 1872, Adelaide was linked to London. The Overland Telegraph Line crossed Aboriginal lands first seen by John McDouall Stuart just 10 years before and messages which previously took weeks to cross the country now took hours. Passing through eleven new repeater stations, built in the remotest parts of Australia, the line joined the vast global telegraph network, and a new era was ushered in. Each station held a staff of six and they became centres of white civilization and the cattle or sheep industry as the Australia Aboriginal people were displaced. The unique stories of how men and women lived and/or died on the line range from heroic, through desperate, to tragic, but they remain an indelible part of Australia's history.
Bill is one of the founders of Boffins and has been involved in selecting the books we stock since our beginning in 1989. His favourite reading is history, with psychology, current affairs, and business books coming close behind. His hobbies are reading, food, reading, drinking, reading, and sleeping.
2022 is the 150th anniversary of the completion of the overland telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin, perhaps the greatest engineering feat of nineteenth century Australia. “Twenty to the Mile” is a fascinating history of the two year project which involved erecting poles at 80 metres apart and stringing wires across 3,000 kilometres of central Australia and building repeater stations at every 250 km point. All of this in recently explored territory, in some of the harshest environments on earth, using only horses and camels and carts. Joined with an undersea cable to Java, the first message in morse code from London to Adelaide was received on 22 August 1872. Adelaide became a hub of the nineteenth century information system, though which the other states sent to and received telegrams from the other side of the world. This wonderful book, full of contemporary photographs, is the story of this amazing project, and of Charles Todd, the colourful astronomer and meteorologist from Cambridge University who became South Australia’s Superintendent of Telegraphs and led the project.
