If a current be now sent through the line, the siphon will move above or below the central line, thus giving a permanent record of the message, which the mirror instrument does not.  The waves written by the siphon above the central line corresponding to the dots of the Morse code, and the waves underneath corresponding to the dashes.

The cost of the transmission of a cablegram varies from one shilling per word, the rate to New York and east of the Mississippi, to ten shillings and seven pence per word, the rate to New Zealand.  In order to minimize that cost as much as possible, the use of codes, whereby one word is made to do duty for a lengthy phrase, is much resorted to.  Of course those code messages form a series of words having no apparent relation to each other, but occasionally queer sentences result from the chance grouping of the code words.  Thus a certain tea firm was once astonished to receive from its agent abroad the startling code message—­“Unboiled babies detested”!

Suppose we now follow the adventures of a few cablegrams in their travels over the world.

A message to India from London by the cable route requires to be transmitted eight times at the following places:  Porthcurno (Cornwall), Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Suez, Aden, Bombay.

A message to Australia has thirteen stoppages; the route taken beyond Bombay being via Madras, Penang, Singapore, Banjoewangie and Port Darwin (North Australia); or from Banjoewangie to Roebuck Bay (Western Australia).

To India by the Indo-European land lines, messages go through Emden, Warsaw, Odessa, Kertch, Tiflis, Teheran, Bushire (Persian Gulf), Jask and Kurrachee, but only stop twice between London and Teheran—­namely, at Emden and Odessa.

Messages from London to New York are transmitted only twice—­at the Irish or Cornwall stations, and at the stations in Canada.  Owing to the great competition for the American traffic, the service between London, Liverpool, and Glasgow and New York is said to be much superior to that between any two towns in Britain.  The cables are extensively used by stock brokers, and it is a common occurrence for one to send a message and receive a reply within five minutes.

During breakages in cables messages have sometimes to take very circuitous routes.  For instance, during the two days, three years ago, that a tremendous storm committed such havoc among the telegraph wires around London, cutting off all communication with the lines connected with the Channel cables at Dover, Lowestoft, etc., it was of common occurrence for London merchants to communicate with Paris through New York.  The cablegram leaving London going north to Holyhead and Ireland, across the Atlantic to New York and back via St. Pierre to Brest and thence on to Paris, a total distance of about seven thousand miles.

Three years ago, when the great blizzard cut off all communication between New York and Boston, messages were accepted in New York, sent to this country, and thence back to Boston.