The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

Direct communication has also been considerably extended to continental towns. In 1889 the Post Office took over the working of the Submarine Company's cables, and direct communication is now established with a large number of foreign towns. At the present time there are some sixty wires with an aggregate of ninety-five available channels to the Continent. Five additional wires (six channels) are worked from Liverpool to towns in Belgium, France, and Germany, two wires are leased to the Anglo-American Telegraph Company for working to Belgium and Holland, and two to the Indo-European Telegraph Company for transmission of their traffic to South Russia, India, and countries beyond, via Germany. The remainder are worked from the cable room of the Central Telegraph Office in London to Austria, Hungary, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Switzerland. The Hughes simplex and duplex apparatus is chiefly used for cable working. Some of the Hughes duplex circuits not infrequently deal with 150 telegrams hourly, and even this number has been exceeded. A Baudot circuit working four “arms” has at times of pressure disposed of from 250 to 300 telegrams in an hour. The annual daily traffic in telegrams to and from the Continent about the year 1870 was between 4000 and 5000: at the present time it is from 24,000 to 26,000 telegrams. In addition to this, some 3500 telegrams are daily handed over to the cable companies, with whose offices in London there are connecting pneumatic tubes.