telegraph was still too costly for general purposes. In 1845, however, Cooke and Wheatstone succeeded in producing the single needle apparatus, which they patented, and from that time the electric telegraph became a practical instrument, soon adopted on all the railway lines of the country. In the meantime a priority dispute arose between Cooke and Wheatstone. An arrangement was come to in 1843 by which several patents were assigned to Cooke, with the reservation of a mileage royalty to Wheatstone; and in 1846 the Electric Telegraph Company was formed in conjunction with Cooke, the company paying £120,000 for Cooke and Wheatstone's earlier patents. Cooke later tried to obtain an extension of the original patents, but the judicial committee of the Privy Council decided that Cooke and Wheatstone had been sufficiently remunerated. The Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts was awarded on equal terms to Cooke and Wheatstone in 1867; and two years later Cooke was knighted, Wheatstone having had the same honour conferred upon him the year before. A civil list pension was granted to Cooke in 1871. He died on 25 June 1879. In May 1994, British Rail Telecommunications named locomotive 20075 Sir William Cooke. See also Samuel Morse Notes References Attribution Further reading External links - See Appendix, Chapter III Biography of Sir William Fothergill Cooke Biography from the Institution of Engineering and Technology 1806 births 1879 deaths 19th-century British inventors People from Ealing Telegraph engineers and inventors