The Capabilities of the Electric Telegraph
    We understand the electric telegraph will shortly be applied to several domestic purposes. The experiment will first be tried at one of the large houses at the Albert Gate, Hyde Park. A servant will be stationed in one of the garrets, and another servant will be placed in the cellar, and a communication will be sent through the telegraph for the latter to bring up a bottle of wine. Should this be found to answer, wires will then be hung from floor to floor, and an anxious mother in the back parlour will be able to learn in a second what is going on in the nursery without any of the trouble of going up there. By this method, seven flights of stairs- will be cleared in one Sentence ; and the house, once brought down from its extreme height, may have a chance of finding a tenant.
    The only difficulty in families working the telegraph, will be procuring servants who know the electric alphabet, but this will soon be got over, now that the schoolmaster is so much more "at home" than he used to be. It is expected that in large establishments, where several servants are kept, a saving of fifty per cent, will be effected maids-of-all-work alone, whilst it stands to reason a stair-carpet will last twice as long under the new régime of messages being carefully delivered by the electric telegraph.
    Several eating-houses, too, intend working an electric telegraph, so as to bring the cuisine on a greater level with the dining-room. The clamorous speaking-pipe, in that case, will be dispensed with, and the inconvenience of hearing every other minute "One Mock," or "Two Greens" bawled out whilst you are ruminating over a piece of green fat, or are in the depths of a leading article, will no longer be felt by the tympanum of those gentlemen who prefer silence to noise.
    By this method, also, gentlemen at taverns, where there is singing in the evening, will be enabled to hear a song right through without any of those interruptions in the middle of it of "Two Rabbits," or "Chop well done," which are proverbial for destroying the sentiment, and mutilating the melody, of the finest bacchanalian songs.
    Lastly, the lonely condition of the tollmen on Waterloo Bridge - who are at present in a very depressed state, owing to the opening of Hungerford Bridge - might be humanely bettered, if an electric telegraph were established along the lamp-posts on either parapet of the bridge. They might then know what it was to hear the voice of their fellow-man, and be cheered in their solitude by exchanging with one another those speculative remarks about the weather, which, in minds constituted for society, make up one half of the amenities of life.

Punch, Jul.-Dec. 1845