PORTHCURNO (ENGLAND), Feb 21 � Newly discovered documents have revealed the first telegraph messages and joy when England was linked for the first time with India on 23 June, 1870, via thousands of km of cables laid painstakingly below the seas, reducing time from months to minutes.
The sylvan Porthcurno valley in Cornwall, located on the Atlantic coast 506 km south-west of London, was the unlikely place of a revolution that enabled Britain and its former colonies to communicate with each other.
Museum officials told a visiting PTI correspondent that Porthcurno was the hub of international cable communications from 1870 to 1970, and a training college for the communications industry until 1993.
Now a museum housing rare equipment and details of the history of telegraph, Porthcurno has been granted millions of pounds in funding to develop an international education programme.
Among its rare archives discovered last week is a collection of the first telegraph messages sent from Porthcurno and Mumbai (then Bombay). Until that landmark day, communication between England and India was unreliable, and often took months.
According to the document, the first message was dispatched on the night of 23 June, 1870, and a reply was received in 5 minutes, which was a technological feat at the time. The message was called a �complimentary telegram� between the �Managing Director in London and the Manager in Bombay�.
The first message was from �Anderson to Stacey: How are you all?�, to which the reply was: �All well�. � PTI
