Faster communications aided the fight against crime, making it increasingly difficult for criminals to disappear or to use distance to evade justice.
At the same time, however, it has also allowed them to plan more carefully and has made new types of crime possible.
On New Year's Day 1845, John Tawell travelled to Slough - to murder his mistress. They met and he emptied the contents of a phial of poison into her drink. When she started screaming, Tawell panicked and ran.
Neighbours saw him hurrying up the road towards the station, where a train was about to depart for London. Settling back in his seat as the train pulled out of Slough, Tawell must have thought he had escaped and that once in London he could disappear. He had forgotten that now the message could travel faster than the train.
The stationmaster at Slough spotted the man in the long Quaker coat seen boarding the train - and then heard about the murder. He telegraphed ahead to London to watch out for the 'kwaker' (there was no Q in the needle telegraph) riding in the rearmost second class carriage. Detectives were waiting for Tawell at Paddington, shadowed him back to his lodgings and arrested him there.
He was later found guilty of murder and hanged.
West Drayton isn't usually thought of as a centre of intrigue and innovation but in 1839 this minor town West of London had its moment of glory.
The place was chosen as one of the two terminals of the first commercial, electric telegraph service in the world. Handily situated 13.5 miles from London's Paddington station on the Great Western Railway line, it was chosen as the best location for a full-scale test of Cooke and Wheatstone's five-needle telegraph system.
The telegraph station building was a very unimpressive wooden cabin, with a maze of seemingly jumbled cables fed through the roof. However, the test proved a great success and the railway agreed to extend the complete operation a further five miles to Slough.
It was nonetheless, ahead of its time and the service was shut down in 1848 being considered unimportant and unprofitable!
The police telephone box was made famous by the TV programme 'Doctor Who'. The Doctor used one, called the 'Tardis', as a ship to travel through space and time. In the programme the box was much larger on the inside than the outside, but in reality it provided just enough space for a policeman to make a call in bad weather, or lock up a criminal while waiting for transport.
Smaller police telephone pillars gave the bobby on the beat a more compact direct line to the local police station. The station could also call up a policeman in the street by flashing a light on the top of the device to attract his attention; this method was also used on the boxes.
Police boxes and pillars were phased out in the 1970s as the police became increasingly reliant on hand-held radios instead.
Alan Burt, a retired CID officer, was born in 1946. In his early life he travelled around the country with his family, before his father retired from the services and they settled in Weymouth.
He joined the Dorset Police force aged eighteen and as a cadet, one of his tasks was to answer the switchboard dealing sometimes with 999 calls.
Once he became an officer he travelled around the district, keeping in touch with the station using public call boxes. He explains how this method worked.
Play the audio clip and view the transcript to learn more. A new window will open.Alan Burt, a retired CID officer, was born in 1946. In his early life he travelled around the country with his family, before his father retired from the services and they settled in Weymouth.
He joined the Dorset Police force aged eighteen as a cadet and before long became a constable.
He remembers how the phone helped improve making police enquiries, particularly chasing dangerous criminals who had fled the country.
Play the audio clip and view the transcript to learn more. A new window will open.