IT’S still difficult to believe an anonymous 18th century Scot from Renfrewshire, identified only as “CM”, was already working on his own functional electrostatic messaging system (a true forerunner of electronic mail) in 1753 – less than a decade after the last Jacobite rebellion (1745), almost 50 years before the invention of the Voltaic Pile (1799), and almost a century before the first Electric Telegraph Company was formed (1845).
Professor Colin Vincent of St. Andrews University said he has “no doubt that the mobile phone and the internet are direct descendants of CM’s paper”, though it should be noted that this early “method to convey intelligence” lay undisturbed until its popular rediscovery by Sir David Brewster, who republished it in 1854 along with these words: “Here we have an electric telegraph upwards of a hundred years old, which at the present day would convey intelligence expeditiously, and we are constrained to admit that CM was the inventor of the electric telegraph. Everything done since is only improvement.”
In the mid-19th century, there were serious efforts to quickly attribute CM’s paper to two possibly mythical Renfrewshire locals called Charles Marshall and Charles Morrison, but the project triggered an immediate rebuttal from other CM enthusiasts. George Blair was scathing in Notes and Queries (S.II, Vol. X – 1860), saying he had “little or no doubt” that confident CM-identity narratives were part of “a deliberate hoax”, albeit attached to an authentic Scottish invention, and that we still “have no more reason to believe it was Charles Marshall” or “any other name beginning with the letters CM”.
