Caption:
The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph was an early electrical telegraph system invented by English inventors William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. The receiver consisted of a number of needles which could be moved by electromagnetic coils to point to letters on a board. This feature was liked by early users who were unwilling to learn codes, and employers who did not want to invest in staff training. The two-needle telegraph required three wires, one for each needle and a common return. The coding was somewhat different from the five-needle telegraph and needed to be learned, rather than read from a display. The needles could move to the left or right either one, two, or three times in quick succession, or a single time in both directions in quick succession. Either needle, or both together, could be moved. This gave a total of 24 codes, one of which was taken up by the stop code. Three letters were omitted: J, Q and Z, which were substituted