CQUniversity's Professor Denis Cryle has spent years on a biography of Sir Charles Todd, builder of the Overland Telegraph Line, which linked the Australian continent via Adelaide and Darwin to the international telegraph routes 140 years ago.

The achievement has been compared to the NBN broadband wiring of Australia, linking us all to the internet.

Professor Denis Cryle - set to address a large audience in Adelaide

Now Professor Cryle is scheduled to address a packed audience of more than 150 people for 'The Sir Charles Todd Symposium', a National Science Week event scheduled for August 17 at the University of Adelaide, to celebrate South Australia's science and technology history.

In his synopsis for the address, Professor Cryle notes his role as a biographer is to reassemble the "complex sequence of events, the dramatis personae, and the key scenes, which are characterised as much by breakdowns in communication as by co-operation or connection".

"In following the path of other researchers, I am ever mindful of Todd's technical and planning abilities, but am also seeking equally to introduce personal and social perspectives to the story."

Professor Cryle has previously anticipated this year's 140th anniversary of the Overland Telegraph, saying:

"It was by any measure a risky and remarkable venture which culminated in the wiring of a continent ... for it changed the speed with which we received information, reinforced distant authority while enfranchising local markets and permitted regular exchanges between the imperial centre in London and the periphery."

Professor Cryle notes that Todd's persistence ultimately helped lay the groundwork for the unification of the Australian colonies in 1901.

"Today communication scholars like myself, are also interested in understanding the international networks forged by the telegraph.  Dubbed the ‘Victorian internet' these lightning lines, as James Carey described them, and as James Gleick recently reminds us, were not just about copper insulators and iron poles, but a technology of empire and a portent of modern globalisation."