Item 90
Current bid: $110 |
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Item: 90 Description: Cooke’s Sleeve. If you collect insulators, you might want to consider owning the very first one ever patented. That’s this jewel. William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone of England invented the first commercial application for the telegraph…. nearly a decade before Samuel Morris came on the scene. In the 1830’s, their telegraph lines used buried, insulated, cable. But the quality of the cable wasn’t good and their lines often failed due to leakage. In 1842, Cooke then invented, and patented, this insulator for overhead use. It’s a very inefficient design as the telegraph wire had to be threaded through the insulator. View 1: The groove in the insulator was for a staple to affix the insulator to wood. The wire was then threaded through the hole shown in View 2 and View 3. View 4 shows the opposite side of this insulator from View 1. View 5 shows the flat back-side of the insulator which allowed it to rest on the wood surface of a pole or beam. The sleeve measures one-and-three-eighths inches thick by 3 inches long. This example is Grade B-Plus for small flakes on each end. About 200 of these are known in the hobby. For a good history of early British telegraphy, search “Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph” on Wikipedia. Estimate: $150 - $200 Open: $85 Current bid: $110 |
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