Page "William Fothergill Cooke" Paragraph 31

Hawes was an early proponent of the electric telegraph and had attended these trials, and was pitching for Cooke all along.

Hawes is claimed to have made the first arrangement for the partnership between Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1837, although other sources claim such introductions were made through Peter Mark Roget, examiner in physiology in the University of London.

Benjamin Hawes was husband to Sophia Macnamara Brunel ( 1802 – 1878 ); daughter of the famous engineer Marc Isambard Brunel and sister to Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

It was the latter who founded the Great Western Railway in 1835 and who would eventually lay the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable using the Great Eastern, the celebrated steamship Brunel would come to build later, in the 1850s.

I. K. Brunel was the company engineer for the Great Western Railway, while Stephenson was the engineer for the London and Birmingham Railway.