Phillip returned to Shropshire before dawn.

The carriage ride from the crash site had been silent; even Henry barely spoke. The wheels clattered over the uneven road, but Phillip barely heard them. His thoughts stayed fixed on the wreckage—twisted metal, crushed timber, the quiet rows of linen sheets. No design flaw. No broken axle. No cracked wheel. Nothing mechanical betrayed him.

It was the oldest enemy of all: distance.

When the carriage finally stopped outside the main workshop at Shropshire Foundry, the lamps were still lit inside. Apprentices were sorting plates for the next shipment to Portsmouth. The air smelled of coal dust, hot iron, and morning frost. Henry climbed down after Phillip, rubbing his eyes, but Phillip didn't wait for him. He walked straight toward the drafting room.

Inside, the familiar space greeted him—long tables, shelves of rolled blueprints, chalkboards filled with half-finished calculations. Normally, he found comfort here. Not tonight.

He dropped his coat on a stool and pulled down the blinds. The room dimmed until only the glow of the oil lamp on his drafting table remained. He stood there for a moment, hands on the table's edge, steadying himself.

Then he pulled a fresh sheet of vellum from the shelf.

Unlike steam engines and iron hulls, Phillip didn't need to conceptualize the telegraph from imagination. He already knew it. He had seen museum diagrams, technical papers, even hobbyist kits sold for children in his world. He understood how Samuel Morse had refined the system, how early electromagnets worked, how the simplest form of telegraphy reduced communication to pulses: on, off, long, short.

He understood it—but he had never built one with his own hands.

Tonight, he would.

Henry entered quietly, closing the door behind him. He didn't ask questions. He pulled a chair beside the table and waited.

Phillip dipped his pen in ink and drew the first component: a simple electromagnet—a soft iron core wrapped tightly with copper wire. When current passed through it, the core would magnetize. When current stopped, the magnetism would vanish.

Henry leaned forward. "That's… a coil?"

"A magnet," Phillip said, "but only when current flows."

"So the message is the current?"

"No. The message is how long the current flows."

Understanding crept slowly into Henry's expression. "Long and short intervals."

Phillip nodded. "Patterns. If we standardize them, we create a language. Messages carried by electrical impulse."

He moved to the next part: the receiver. A hinged metal lever—nothing more than a carefully balanced piece of iron—would sit near the electromagnet. When the coil energized, the lever would click downward. When the current stopped, a spring pulled it back up.

Click. Release.

Click. Release.

Each sound a symbol.

Each sequence a word.

Henry stared at the sketches. "So it won't print letters?"

"It doesn't need to. Operators can listen. Or we can add a marking stylus for paper tape later." Phillip began drawing the small lever, the spring, the stop pin. "This is enough for now. A sound you can hear from across a room."

He paused, remembering the rows of bodies on the field.

"We just need something fast."

The next drawing took up most of the page. A sending key—a simple metal lever that closed an electrical circuit when pressed. Elegant in its minimalism. A button, essentially. Press to send current. Release to stop.

Henry watched quietly as Phillip drew the contacts, the conduction plate, the wooden mounting block to insulate it from the desk. "You make it sound simple," he said softly.

"It is simple," Phillip answered. "That's why it works."

"But no one has built one," Henry said. "Not in Britain. Not anywhere."

Phillip kept drawing. "Then we build the first."

It wasn't arrogance. It wasn't ambition. It was necessity.

He sketched two distant stations, connected by a thin line.

"Copper wire," Phillip said. "As thin as we can draw it, insulated with resin or cloth. Strung across poles from station to station."

Henry frowned slightly. "How long can the wire be before the signal disappears?"

Phillip paused. This world lacked standardized batteries. It lacked dynamo generators. Electrical science was still a curiosity for universities and miners. "We'll need a power source. Something stable. Something we can reproduce."

"Galvanic cells?" Henry suggested.

Phillip nodded slowly. "Yes. Zinc and copper plates in acid. Crude, but enough. Early telegraph systems relied on them."

He paced once across the room, thinking. "We start with a single line. Only a few miles. From Shropshire station to the next village. If that works, we expand. Pole by pole, mile by mile."

Henry pulled out his own notebook. "What about weather? Rain might short the wire. Wind might pull it down."

Phillip nodded. "We coat it. We anchor it. But first we prove the concept."

He sat again and drew a side view of a telegraph pole—simple timber, crossbar at the top, ceramic insulators to prevent electrical grounding. The design wasn't ornate. It didn't need to be. "This is all we require," Phillip said. "A path for current."

"And the message?" Henry asked.

Phillip wrote a sequence beside the receiver.

Long. Short. Short. Long.

A single letter from the code he remembered.

Henry read it. "What does that mean?"

"It's the letter 'C'," Phillip said.

Henry looked at him. "And what's special about C?"

Phillip didn't answer for a moment. The letter wasn't special. It was simply the first one that came to mind—because he had seen a mother crying over a linen sheet that morning while asking the constables:

"Can someone—can someone tell me if my child was on that train?"

Child.

Communication.

Connection.

He folded the thought away.

Henry tapped the sketch lightly. "If this works… trains will never collide again."

Phillip stopped drawing.

"No," he said. "Not never. But far less likely. The system is only as strong as the men who operate it. But we can give them the tool they need."

He resumed drawing—a more complete diagram, showing a sending station on one end, a receiving station on the other. He marked the copper wire, labeled the galvanic cells, sketched the code key, the electromagnet, the sounder plate.

He labeled the page:

Electric Telegraph — Prototype No. 1

Henry leaned back. "What will you need to build it?"

"Copper wire," Phillip said. "A lot of it. We'll pull it at the foundry. Need it thin but uniform."

Henry nodded and wrote it down.

"Soft iron cores," Phillip continued. "We can machine them here. Coils must be wound tightly. No gaps."

"Wooden stands?"

"Any carpenter can manage that."

"And… power?"

Phillip paused. "We'll need acid. And a safe place to store it."

Henry sighed. "That part will be unpopular."

Phillip didn't disagree.

They worked through the night—testing small coils, checking resistance using crude galvanometers, measuring wire lengths. Henry fetched tools without being asked. Apprentices drifted in, drawn by the sound of work, and Phillip assigned them tasks. For once, there was no tension, no rivalry between machinists and draftsmen. Everyone sensed this was something new.

Something world-changing.

By sunrise, the first crude electromagnet sat on the table. A simple iron rod wrapped in copper wire, connected to a small battery cell Henry had improvised from zinc, copper, and vinegar solution.

Phillip tapped the wire ends together.

The iron rod pulled a metal sliver toward itself.

Henry let out a breath.

"It works."

Phillip didn't celebrate. He simply adjusted the coil and tested again.

"It must work over miles," he said. "Not inches."

But even he couldn't deny what he felt—a quiet, steady surge beneath his ribs. Not triumph.

Resolve.

He looked toward the window, where the first light of day broke over Shropshire's hills.

"Pack what we need," Phillip said. "We begin constructing the first line this week."

Henry nodded. "Where to?"

Phillip didn't hesitate.

"To the station nearest the crash."

Henry understood.

They would rebuild trust where it had broken.

Phillip lifted the small iron rod again—the first piece of a system that could save thousands of lives. A machine not of war, not of industry, but of connection.

"The railway failed because it could not speak," he said quietly.

He looked at the coil.

"Then we will teach it."

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