Wanjek, Christopher .”Ringside Seat to the Universe’s First Split Second.” NASA. In the 1920s a dedicated research station was set up by the GPO seven miles away in Dollis Hill; during the Second World War the world’s first electronic computer, ‘Colossus’, was designed and constructed there by Tommy Flowers and other GPO engineers. From the start the GPO had trouble with competitive pirate radio broadcasters who found ways to deliver electronic messages to British receivers without first obtaining a GPO licence. In 1846, the Electric Telegraph Company, the world’s first public telegraph company, was established in the UK and developed a nationwide communications network. This applied to telegraph and telephone switching stations. The General Post Office then licensed all existing telephone networks. The Post Office commenced its telephone business in 1878, however the vast majority of telephones were initially connected to independently run networks. Due to its regulatory role, as well as its expertise in developing long-distance communication networks, the GPO was contracted by the BBC, and the ITA in the 1950s and 60s, to develop and extend their television networks. The GPO ran the nation’s telegraph and telephone systems, as well as handling some 5.9 billion items of mail each year, while branch post offices offered an increasing number of financial, municipal and other public services alongside those relating to postage.

In 1900 there were nearly 22,000 post offices operating across the United Kingdom: 906 were classified as head post offices and 255 as associated branch offices, in addition to which there were 4,964 town sub-offices and 15,815 country post offices. By 1900 house-to-house mail delivery was taking place across England (and was close to being in place in Scotland and Ireland). 1909 saw the establishment of the Research Section of the Telegraph Office, which had its origins in innovative areas of work being pursued by staff in the Engineering Department. Gradually more financial services were offered by post offices, including government stocks and bonds in 1880, insurance and annuities in 1888, and war savings certificates in 1916. In 1909 old age pensions were introduced, payable at post offices. In 1855 a network of 920 post offices and 9,578 sub-offices were in place around the country. Employing over 250,000 people and with an annual revenue of £32 million, the Post Office in 1914 is said to have been ‘the biggest economic enterprise in Britain and the largest single employer of labour in the world’. The GPO installed several automatic telephone exchanges from several vendors in trials at Darlington on 10 October 1914 and Dudley on 9 September 1916 (rotary system), Fleetwood (relay exchange from Sweden), Grimsby (Siemens), Hereford (Lorimer) and Leeds (Strowger).

The GPO wished to standardise on the Strowger switch (also called SXS or step-by step) but the basic SXS exchange was not suitable for a large city like London until the Director telephone system was developed by the Automatic Telephone Manufacturing Company in the 1920s. The first London Director exchange, HOLborn, cutover on Saturday 12 November 1927, BIShopgate and SLOane exchanges were to follow in six weeks, followed by WEStern and MONument exchanges. The concept rover, called AREE (Automation Rover For Extreme Environments), is a great example of counterintuitive problem solving. In the case of Venus, the chief problem facing engineers is the planet’s merciless thermal environment. By virtue of the same Act of Parliament (the Post Office (Revenues) Act 1710), the functions of the ‘general letter office and post office’ in the City of London were set out, and the establishment of ‘chief letter offices’ in Edinburgh, Dublin, New York and the Leeward Islands was enjoined. By 1863, 2,500 post offices were offering a savings service. These distribution services were considered in law as forms of electronic post offices. Subsequently, contracts for carrying mail began to be awarded to new large-scale shipping lines: the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company ran ships out of Southampton to the West Indies and South America, the British and North American Royal Mail Steam-Packet Company (aka the Cunard Line) covered the North Atlantic route, while the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company provided services on eastward routes to the Mediterranean, India and Australia.

The development of marine steam propulsion inevitably affected the packet ship services. At some considerable cost the Post Office resolved to build and operate its own fleet of steam vessels, but the service became increasingly inefficient. The theory was used to expand state control of the mail service into every form of electronic communication possible on the basis that every sender used some form of distribution service. Still, the quick uptake Office 365 is seeing definitely shows that people are willing to sign up for a monthly service in order to access to a piece of software they find useful. In 1838 the Money Order Office was established, to provide a secure means of transferring money to people in different parts of the country (or world), and to discourage people from sending cash by post. Since the 1780s these had been run on behalf of the Post Office by private contractors, who depended on supplementary income from fee-paying passengers in order to make a profit; but in the 19th-century steamships began to lure the passengers away.