Richard Atwood Glass

Sir Richard Atwood Glass (1820 – 22 December 1873) was an English telegraph cable manufacturer and a Conservative politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1868 to 1869.

Richard Atwood Glass, 1866 engraving (The Illustrated London News)

Biography

Glass was born in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, in Southern England, the son of Francis Glass. He was educated at King's College London.[1] In 1846 with George Elliot, he provided capital for an insolvent wire-rope manufacturers Heimann & Kuper, and by 1851 the firm was trading as Glass, Elliott & Company. The company produced submarine communications cables and in 1854 ran a circuit from Denmark to Sweden and undertook the manufacture of long cables for the French Mediterranean Telegraph Company of J W Brett. The cables with a resin-insulated conducting wire protected by an armour of iron wire proved to be long-lasting, and in the later 1850s the company introduced anti-corrosive compounds to coat the finished cable. The firm merged with the Gutta-Percha Company in 1864, and Glass became managing director of the resulting Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company.[2] Glass's company provided half of the first transatlantic telegraph cable and all the cable laid by the Great Eastern in 1866. Glass was knighted for these services on 26 November 1867.[1][3]

In the 1868 general election Glass was elected Member of Parliament for Bewdley. He was unseated on 16 February 1869 when the election was declared void.[4]

Glass lived at Ashurst in Dorking, Surrey. He died on 22 December 1873, aged 53, of chronic Bright's disease at his home at South Stoneham, Hampshire.[5]

References
  1. William Retlaw Williams. The parliamentary history of the county of Worcester : including the city of Worcester, and the boroughs of Bewdly, Droitwich, Dudley, Evesham, Kidderminster, Bromsgrove and Pershore, from the earliest times to the present day, 1213-1897 ; with biographical and genealogical notices of the members
  2. Distant Writing - A History of the Telegraph Companies in Britain between 1838 and 1868
  3. "No. 23191". The London Gazette. 27 November 1866. p. 6468.
  4. Leigh Rayment's Historical List of MPs – Constituencies beginning with "B" (part 3)
  5. Anita McConnell, ‘Glass, Sir Richard Atwood (1820–1873)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, September 2004 accessed 16 August 2010
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