Twenty to the Mile: The Overland Telegraph Line

The greatest engineering problem facing Australia - the tyranny of distance - had a solution: the electric telegraph, and its champion was the sheep-farming colony of South Australia.

In two years, Charles Heavitree Todd, leading hundreds of men, constructed a telegraph line across the centre of the continent from Port Augusta to Darwin. At nearly 3,000 kilometres long and using 36,000 poles at '20 to the mile', it was a mammoth undertaking but in October 1872, Adelaide was finally linked to...