William Fothergill Cooke | |
|---|---|
 William Fothergill Cooke | |
| Born | 4 May 1806 Ealing, England |
| Died | 25 June 1879(1879-06-25) (aged 73) Farnham, England |
| Known for | Electrical telegraph |
| Awards | Albert Medal(1867) |
Sir William Fothergill Cooke (4 May 1806 – 25 June 1879) was an English inventor. He was, withCharles Wheatstone, the co-inventor of theCooke-Wheatstone electrical telegraph, which was patented in May 1837. Together withJohn Ricardo he founded theElectric Telegraph Company, the world's first public telegraph company, in 1846. He was knighted in 1869.
He was born atEaling,Middlesex; his father, William Cooke, was a surgeon there, and later was appointed professor of anatomy at theUniversity of Durham. He was educated atDurham School and at theUniversity of Edinburgh, and at the age of 20 entered theIndian Army.[1]
After five years' service in India Cooke returned home; then studied medicine in Paris, and atHeidelberg underGeorg Wilhelm Munke. In 1836 he saw electric telegraphy, then only experimental: Munke had illustrated his lectures with a telegraphic apparatus on the principle introduced byPavel Schilling in 1835. Cooke decided to put the invention into practical operation with the railway systems; and gave up medicine.[1]
Early in 1837 Cooke returned to England, with introductions toMichael Faraday andPeter Mark Roget. Through them he was introduced to Charles Wheatstone, who in 1834 gave theRoyal Society an account of experiments on thevelocity of electricity. Cooke had already constructed a system of telegraphing with three needles on Schilling's principle, and made designs for a mechanical alarm. He had also made some progress in negotiating with theLiverpool & Manchester Railway for the use of his telegraphs. Cooke and Wheatstone went into partnership in May 1837; Cooke handled the business side.[1]
Wheatstone and Cooke's first patent was taken out within a month and was "for improvements in giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by means of electric currents transmitted through electric circuits". Cooke now tested the invention, with theLondon & Blackwall Railway, theLondon & Birmingham Railway, and theGreat Western Railway companies, successively allowing the use of their lines for the experiment. A five needle model of telegraph was given up as too expensive. In 1838 an improvement reduced the number of needles to two, and a patent for this was taken out by Cooke and Wheatstone.[2]
Before a parliamentary committee on railways in 1840, Wheatstone stated that he had, with Cooke, obtained a new patent for a telegraphic arrangement; the new apparatus required only a single pair of wires. But the telegraph was still too costly for general purposes. In 1845, however, Cooke and Wheatstone succeeded in producing the single needle apparatus, which they patented, and from that time the electric telegraph became a practical instrument, soon adopted on all the railway lines of the country.[2]
In the meantime a priority dispute arose between Cooke and Wheatstone. An arrangement was come to in 1843 by which several patents were assigned to Cooke, with the reservation of a mileage royalty to Wheatstone; and in 1846 theElectric Telegraph Company was formed in conjunction with Cooke, the company paying £120,000 for Cooke and Wheatstone's earlier patents.[3]
Cooke later tried to obtain an extension of the original patents, but the judicial committee of the Privy Council decided that Cooke and Wheatstone had been sufficiently remunerated. TheAlbert Medal of theRoyal Society of Arts was awarded on equal terms to Cooke and Wheatstone in 1867; and two years later Cooke was knighted, Wheatstone having had the same honour conferred upon him the year before.[3]
Acivil list pension was granted to Cooke in 1871. He died on 25 June 1879.[3]
In May 1994,British Rail Telecommunications named locomotive20075Sir William Cooke.[4]
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Burnley, James (1887). "Cooke, William Fothergill". InStephen, Leslie (ed.).Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 12. London:Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 102–103.
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