Heroes of the Telegraph

J >> J. Munro >> Heroes of the Telegraph

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

HEROES OF THE TELEGRAPH

By J. MUNRO

Author of 'ELECTRICITY AND ITS USES,' PIONEERS OF ELECTRICITY,' 'THE
WIRE AND THE WAVE'; AND JOINT AUTHOR OF 'MUNRO AND JAMIESON'S
POCKET-BOOK OF ELECTRICAL RULES AND TABLES.'

(Note: All accents etc. have been omitted. Italics have been converted
to capital letters. The British 'pound' sign has been written as 'L'.
Footnotes have been placed in square brackets at the place in the text
where a suffix originally indicated their existence.)

PREFACE.

The present work is in some respects a sequel to the PIONEERS OF
ELECTRICITY, and it deals with the lives and principal achievements of
those distinguished men to whom we are indebted for the introduction of
the electric telegraph and telephone, as well as other marvels of
electric science.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER
I. THE ORIGIN OF THE TELEGRAPH
II. CHARLES WHEATSTONE
III. SAMUEL MORSE
IV. SIR WILLIAM THOMSON
V. SIR WILLIAM SIEMENS
VI. FLEEMING JENKIN
VII. JOHANN PHILIPP REIS
VIII. GRAHAM BELL
IX. THOMAS ALVA EDISON
X. DAVID EDWIN HUGHES

APPENDIX.
I. CHARLES FERDINAND GAUSS
II. WILLIAM EDWARD WEBER
III. SIR WILLIAM FOTHERGILL COOKE
IV. ALEXANDER BAIN
V. DR. WERNER SIEMENS
VI. LATIMER CLARK
VII. COUNT DU MONCEL
VIII. ELISHA GRAY

CHAPTER I.

THE ORIGIN OF THE TELEGRAPH.

The history of an invention, whether of science or art, may be compared
to the growth of an organism such as a tree. The wind, or the random
visit of a bee, unites the pollen in the flower, the green fruit forms
and ripens to the perfect seed, which, on being planted in congenial
soil, takes root and flourishes. Even so from the chance combination of
two facts in the human mind, a crude idea springs, and after maturing
into a feasible plan is put in practice under favourable conditions, and
so develops. These processes are both subject to a thousand accidents
which are inimical to their achievement. Especially is this the case
when their object is to produce a novel species, or a new and great
invention like the telegraph. It is then a question of raising, not one
seedling, but many, and modifying these in the lapse of time.

Similarly the telegraph is not to be regarded as the work of any one
mind, but of many, and during a long course of years. Because at length
the final seedling is obtained, are we to overlook the antecedent
varieties from which it was produced, and without which it could not
have existed? Because one inventor at last succeeds in putting the
telegraph in operation, are we to neglect his predecessors, whose
attempts and failures were the steps by which he mounted to success?
All who have extended our knowledge of electricity, or devised a
telegraph, and familiarised the public mind with the advantages of it,
are deserving of our praise and gratitude, as well as he who has entered
into their labours, and by genius and perseverance won the honours of
being the first to introduce it.

Let us, therefore, trace in a rapid manner the history of the electric
telegraph from the earliest times.

The sources of a river are lost in the clouds of the mountain, but it is
usual to derive its waters from the lakes or springs which are its
fountain-head. In the same way the origins of our knowledge of
electricity and magnetism are lost in the mists of antiquity, but there
are two facts which have come to be regarded as the starting-points of
the science. It was known to the ancients at least 600 years before
Christ, that a piece of amber when excited by rubbing would attract
straws, and that a lump of lodestone had the property of drawing iron.
Both facts were probably ascertained by chance. Humboldt informs us
that he saw an Indian child of the Orinoco rubbing the seed of a
trailing plant to make it attract the wild cotton; and, perhaps, a
prehistoric tribesman of the Baltic or the plains of Sicily found in the
yellow stone he had polished the mysterious power of collecting dust. A
Greek legend tells us that the lodestone was discovered by Magnes, a
shepherd who found his crook attracted by the rock.

However this may be, we are told that Thales of Miletus attributed the
attractive properties of the amber and the lodestone to a soul within
them. The name Electricity is derived from ELEKTRON, the Greek for
amber, and Magnetism from Magnes, the name of the shepherd, or, more
likely, from the city of Magnesia, in Lydia, where the stone occurred.

These properties of amber and lodestone appear to have been widely
known. The Persian name for amber is KAHRUBA, attractor of straws, and
that for lodestone AHANG-RUBA attractor of iron. In the old Persian
romance, THE LOVES OF MAJNOON AND LEILA, the lover sings--

'She was as amber, and I but as straw:
She touched me, and I shall ever cling to her.'

The Chinese philosopher, Kuopho, who flourished in the fourth century,
writes that, 'the attraction of a magnet for iron is like that of amber
for the smallest grain of mustard seed. It is like a breath of wind
which mysteriously penetrates through both, and communicates itself with
the speed of an arrow.' [Lodestone was probably known in China before
the Christian era.] Other electrical effects were also observed by the
ancients. Classical writers, as Homer, Caesar, and Plutarch, speak of
flames on the points of javelins and the tips of masts. They regarded
them as manifestations of the Deity, as did the soldiers of the Mahdi
lately in the Soudan. It is recorded of Servius Tullus, the sixth king
of Rome, that his hair emitted sparks on being combed; and that sparks
came from the body of Walimer, a Gothic chief, who lived in the year
415 A.D.

During the dark ages the mystical virtues of the lodestone drew more
attention than those of the more precious amber, and interesting
experiments were made with it. The Romans knew that it could attract
iron at some distance through an intervening fence of wood, brass, or
stone. One of their experiments was to float a needle on a piece of
cork, and make it follow a lodestone held in the hand. This arrangement
was perhaps copied from the compass of the Phoenician sailors, who
buoyed a lodestone and observed it set towards the north. There is
reason to believe that the magnet was employed by the priests of the
Oracle in answering questions. We are told that the Emperor Valerius,
while at Antioch in 370 A.D., was shown a floating needle which pointed
to the letters of the alphabet when guided by the directive force of a
lodestone. It was also believed that this effect might be produced
although a stone wall intervened, so that a person outside a house or
prison might convey intelligence to another inside.

This idea was perhaps the basis of the sympathetic telegraph of the
Middle Ages, which is first described in the MAGIAE NATURALIS of John
Baptista Porta, published at Naples in 1558. It was supposed by Porta
and others after him that two similar needles touched by the same
lodestone were sympathetic, so that, although far apart, if both were
freely balanced, a movement of one was imitated by the other. By
encircling each balanced needle with an alphabet, the sympathetic
telegraph was obtained. Although based on error, and opposed by Cabeus
and others, this fascinating notion continued to crop up even to the
days of Addison. It was a prophetic shadow of the coming invention. In
the SCEPSIS SCIENTIFICA, published in 1665, Joseph Glanvil wrote, 'to
confer at the distance of the Indies by sympathetic conveyances may be
as usual to future times as to us in literary correspondence.' [The
Rosicrucians also believed that if two persons transplanted pieces of
their flesh into each other, and tattooed the grafts with letters, a
sympathetic telegraph could be established by pricking the letters.]

Dr. Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth, by his systematic researches,
discovered the magnetism of the earth, and laid the foundations of the
modern science of electricity and magnetism. Otto von Guericke,
burgomaster of Magdeburg, invented the electrical machine for generating
large quantities of the electric fire. Stephen Gray, a pensioner of the
Charterhouse, conveyed the fire to a distance along a line of pack
thread, and showed that some bodies conducted electricity, while others
insulated it. Dufay proved that there were two qualities of
electricity, now called positive and negative, and that each kind
repelled the like, but attracted the unlike. Von Kleist, a cathedral
dean of Kamm, in Pomerania, or at all events Cuneus, a burgher, and
Muschenbroek, a professor of Leyden, discovered the Leyden jar for
holding a charge of electricity; and Franklin demonstrated the identity
of electricity and lightning.

The charge from a Leyden jar was frequently sent through a chain of
persons clasping hands, or a length of wire with the earth as part of
the circuit. This experiment was made by Joseph Franz, of Vienna, in
1746, and Dr. Watson, of London, in 1747; while Franklin ignited spirits
by a spark which had been sent across the Schuylkill river by the same
means. But none of these men seem to have grasped the idea of employing
the fleet fire as a telegraph.

The first suggestion of an electric telegraph on record is that
published by one 'C. M.' in the Scots Magazine for February 17, 1753.
The device consisted in running a number of insulated wires between two
places, one for each letter of the alphabet. The wires were to be
charged with electricity from a machine one at a time, according to the
letter it represented. At its far end the charged wire was to attract a
disc of paper marked with the corresponding letter, and so the message
would be spelt. 'C. M.' also suggested the first acoustic telegraph,
for he proposed to have a set of bells instead of the letters, each of a
different tone, and to be struck by the spark from its charged wire.

The identity of 'C. M.,' who dated his letter from Renfrew, has not been
established beyond a doubt. There is a tradition of a clever man living
in Renfrew at that time, and afterwards in Paisley, who could 'licht a
room wi' coal reek (smoke), and mak' lichtnin' speak and write upon the
wa'.' By some he was thought to be a certain Charles Marshall, from
Aberdeen; but it seems likelier that he was a Charles Morrison, of
Greenock, who was trained as a surgeon, and became connected with the
tobacco trade of Glasgow. In Renfrew he was regarded as a kind of
wizard, and he is said to have emigrated to Virginia, where he died.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, many other suggestions of
telegraphs based on the known properties of the electric fire were
published; for example, by Joseph Bozolus, a Jesuit lecturer of Rome, in
1767; by Odier, a Geneva physicist, in 1773, who states in a letter to a
lady, that he conceived the idea on hearing a casual remark, while
dining at Sir John Pringle's, with Franklin, Priestley, and other great
geniuses. 'I shall amuse you, perhaps, in telling you,' he says,'that I
have in my head certain experiments by which to enter into conversation
with the Emperor of Mogol or of China, the English, the French, or any
other people of Europe ... You may intercommunicate all that you wish at
a distance of four or five thousands leagues in less than half an hour.
Will that suffice you for glory?'

George Louis Lesage, in 1782, proposed a plan similar to 'C. M.'s,'
using underground wires. An anonymous correspondent of the JOURNAL DE
PARIS for May 30, 1782, suggested an alarm bell to call attention to the
message. Lomond, of Paris, devised a telegraph with only one wire; the
signals to be read by the peculiar movements of an attracted pith-ball,
and Arthur Young witnessed his plan in action, as recorded in his diary.
M. Chappe, the inventor of the semaphore, tried about the year 1790 to
introduce a synchronous electric telegraph, and failed.

Don Francisco Salva y Campillo, of Barcelona, in 1795, proposed to make
a telegraph between Barcelona and Mataro, either overhead or
underground, and he remarks of the wires, 'at the bottom of the sea
their bed would be ready made, and it would be an extraordinary casualty
that should disturb them.' In Salva's telegraph, the signals were to be
made by illuminating letters of tinfoil with the spark. Volta's great
invention of the pile in 1800 furnished a new source of electricity,
better adapted for the telegraph, and Salva was apparently the first to
recognise this, for, in the same year, he proposed to use it and
interpret the signals by the twitching of a frog's limb, or the
decomposition of water.

In 1802, Jean Alexandre, a reputed natural son of Jean Jacques Rousseau,
brought out a TELEGRAPHE INTIME, or secret telegraph, which appears to
have been a step-by-step apparatus. The inventor concealed its mode of
working, but it was believed to be electrical, and there was a needle
which stopped at various points on a dial. Alexandre stated that he had
found out a strange matter or power which was, perhaps generally
diffused, and formed in some sort the soul of the universe. He
endeavoured to bring his invention under the eye of the First Consul,
but Napoleon referred the matter to Delambre, and would not see it.
Alexandre was born at Paris, and served as a carver and gilder at
Poictiers; then sang in the churches till the Revolution suppressed this
means of livelihood. He rose to influence as a Commissary-general, then
retired from the army and became an inventor. His name is associated
with a method of steering balloons, and a filter for supplying Bordeaux
with water from the Garonne. But neither of these plans appear to have
been put in practice, and he died at Angouleme, leaving his widow in
extreme poverty.

Sommering, a distinguished Prussian anatomist, in 1809 brought out a
telegraph worked by a voltaic battery, and making signals by decomposing
water. Two years later it was greatly simplified by Schweigger, of
Halle; and there is reason to believe that but for the discovery of
electro-magnetism by Oersted, in 1824 the chemical telegraph would have
come into practical use.

In 1806, Ralph Wedgwood submitted a telegraph based on frictional
electricity to the Admiralty, but was told that the semaphore was
sufficient for the country. In a pamphlet he suggested the
establishment of a telegraph system with public offices in different
centres. Francis Ronalds, in 1816, brought a similar telegraph of his
invention to the notice of the Admiralty, and was politely informed that
'telegraphs of any kind are now wholly unnecessary.'

In 1826-7, Harrison Gray Dyar, of New York, devised a telegraph in which
the spark was made to stain the signals on moist litmus paper by
decomposing nitric acid; but he had to abandon his experiments in Long
Island and fly the country, because of a writ which charged him with a
conspiracy for carrying on secret communication. In 1830 Hubert Recy
published an account of a system of Teletatodydaxie, by which the
electric spark was to ignite alcohol and indicate the signals of a code.

But spark or frictional electric telegraphs were destined to give way to
those actuated by the voltaic current, as the chemical mode of
signalling was superseded by the electro-magnet. In 1820 the separate
courses of electric and magnetic science were united by the connecting
discovery of Oersted, who found that a wire conveying a current had the
power of moving a compass-needle to one side or the other according to
the direction of the current.

La Place, the illustrious mathematician, at once saw that this fact
could be utilised as a telegraph, and Ampere, acting on his suggestion,
published a feasible plan. Before the year was out, Schweigger, of
Halle, multiplied the influence of the current on the needle by coiling
the wire about it. Ten years later, Ritchie improved on Ampere's
method, and exhibited a model at the Royal Institution, London. About
the same time, Baron Pawel Schilling, a Russian nobleman, still further
modified it, and the Emperor Nicholas decreed the erection of a line
from Cronstadt to St. Petersburg, with a cable in the Gulf of Finland
but Schilling died in 1837, and the project was never realised.

In 1833-5 Professors Gauss and Weber constructed a telegraph between the
physical cabinet and the Observatory of the University of Gottingen. At
first they used the voltaic pile, but abandoned it in favour of
Faraday's recent discovery that electricity could be generated in a wire
by the motion of a magnet. The magnetic key with which the message was
sent Produced by its action an electric current which, after traversing
the line, passed through a coil and deflected a suspended magnet to the
right or left, according to the direction of the current. A mirror
attached to the suspension magnified the movement of the needle, and
indicated the signals after the manner of the Thomson mirror
galvanometer. This telegraph, which was large and clumsy, was
nevertheless used not only for scientific, but for general
correspondence. Steinheil, of Munich, simplified it, and added an alarm
in the form of a bell.

In 1836, Steinheil also devised a recording telegraph, in which the
movable needles indicated the message by marking dots and dashes with
printer's ink on a ribbon of travelling paper, according to an
artificial code in which the fewest signs were given to the commonest
letters in the German language. With this apparatus the message was
registered at the rate of six words a minute. The early experimenters,
as we have seen, especially Salva, had utilised the ground as the return
part of the circuit; and Salva had proposed to use it on his telegraph,
but Steinheil was the first to demonstrate its practical value. In
trying, on the suggestion of Gauss, to employ the rails of the Nurenberg
to Furth railway as the conducting line for a telegraph in the year
1838, he found they would not serve; but the failure led him to employ
the earth as the return half of the circuit.

In 1837, Professor Stratingh, of Groninque, Holland, devised a telegraph
in which the signals were made by electro-magnets actuating the hammers
of two gongs or bells of different tone; and M. Amyot invented an
automatic sending key in the nature of a musical box. From 1837-8,
Edward Davy, a Devonshire surgeon, exhibited a needle telegraph in
London, and proposed one based on the discovery of Arago, that a piece
of soft iron is temporarily magnetised by the passage of an electric
current through a coil surrounding it. This principle was further
applied by Morse in his electro-magnetic printing telegraph. Davy was a
prolific inventor, and also sketched out a telegraph in which the gases
evolved from water which was decomposed by the current actuated a
recording pen. But his most valuable discovery was the 'relay,' that is
to say, an auxiliary device by which a current too feeble to indicate
the signals could call into play a local battery strong enough to make
them. Davy was in a fair way of becoming one of the fathers of the
working telegraph, when his private affairs obliged him to emigrate to
Australia, and leave the course open to Cooke and Wheatstone.

CHAPTER II.

CHARLES WHEATSTONE.

The electric telegraph, like the steam-engine and the railway, was a
gradual development due to the experiments and devices of a long train
of thinkers. In such a case he who crowns the work, making it
serviceable to his fellow-men, not only wins the pecuniary prize, but is
likely to be hailed and celebrated as the chief, if not the sole
inventor, although in a scientific sense the improvement he has made is
perhaps less than that of some ingenious and forgotten forerunner. He
who advances the work from the phase of a promising idea, to that of a
common boon, is entitled to our gratitude. But in honouring the
keystone of the arch, as it were, let us acknowledge the substructure on
which it rests, and keep in mind the entire bridge. Justice at least is
due to those who have laboured without reward.

Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone were the first
to bring the electric telegraph into daily use. But we have selected
Wheatstone as our hero, because he was eminent as a man of science, and
chiefly instrumental in perfecting the apparatus. As James Watt is
identified with the steam-engine, and George Stephenson with the
railway, so is Wheatstone with the telegraph.

Charles Wheatstone was born near Gloucester, in February, 1802. His
father was a music-seller in the town, who, four years later, removed to
128, Pall Mall, London, and became a teacher of the flute. He used to
say, with not a little pride, that he had been engaged in assisting at
the musical education of the Princess Charlotte. Charles, the second
son, went to a village school, near Gloucester, and afterwards to
several institutions in London. One of them was in Kennington, and kept
by a Mrs. Castlemaine, who was astonished at his rapid progress. From
another he ran away, but was captured at Windsor, not far from the
theatre of his practical telegraph. As a boy he was very shy and
sensitive, liking well to retire into an attic, without any other
company than his own thoughts. When he was about fourteen years old he
was apprenticed to his uncle and namesake, a maker and seller of musical
instruments, at 436, Strand, London; but he showed little taste for
handicraft or business, and loved better to study books. His father
encouraged him in this, and finally took him out of the uncle's charge.

At the age of fifteen, Wheatstone translated French poetry, and wrote
two songs, one of which was given to his uncle, who published it without
knowing it as his nephew's composition. Some lines of his on the lyre
became the motto of an engraving by Bartolozzi. Small for his age, but
with a fine brow, and intelligent blue eyes, he often visited an old
book-stall in the vicinity of Pall Mall, which was then a dilapidated
and unpaved thoroughfare. Most of his pocket-money was spent in
purchasing the books which had taken his fancy, whether fairy tales,
history, or science. One day, to the surprise of the bookseller, he
coveted a volume on the discoveries of Volta in electricity, but not
having the price, he saved his pennies and secured the volume. It was
written in French, and so he was obliged to save again, till he could
buy a dictionary. Then he began to read the volume, and, with the help
of his elder brother, William, to repeat the experiments described in
it, with a home-made battery, in the scullery behind his father's house.
In constructing the battery the boy philosophers ran short of money to
procure the requisite copper-plates. They had only a few copper coins
left. A happy thought occurred to Charles, who was the leading spirit
in these researches, 'We must use the pennies themselves,' said he, and
the battery was soon complete.

In September, 1821, Wheatstone brought himself into public notice by
exhibiting the 'Enchanted Lyre,' or 'Aconcryptophone,' at a music-shop
at Pall Mall and in the Adelaide Gallery. It consisted of a mimic lyre
hung from the ceiling by a cord, and emitting the strains of several
instruments--the piano, harp, and dulcimer. In reality it was a mere
sounding box, and the cord was a steel rod that conveyed the vibrations
of the music from the several instruments which were played out of sight
and ear-shot. At this period Wheatstone made numerous experiments on
sound and its transmission. Some of his results are preserved in
Thomson's ANNALS OF PHILOSOPHY for 1823. He recognised that sound is
propagated by waves or oscillations of the atmosphere, as light by
undulations of the luminiferous ether. Water, and solid bodies, such as
glass, or metal, or sonorous wood, convey the modulations with high
velocity, and he conceived the plan of transmitting sound-signals,
music, or speech to long distances by this means. He estimated that
sound would travel 200 miles a second through solid rods, and proposed
to telegraph from London to Edinburgh in this way. He even called his
arrangement a 'telephone.' [Robert Hooke, in his MICROGRAPHIA, published
in 1667, writes: 'I can assure the reader that I have, by the help of a
distended wire, propagated the sound to a very considerable distance in
an instant, or with as seemingly quick a motion as that of light.' Nor
was it essential the wire should be straight; it might be bent into
angles. This property is the basis of the mechanical or lover's
telephone, said to have been known to the Chinese many centuries ago.
Hooke also considered the possibility of finding a way to quicken our
powers of hearing.] A writer in the REPOSITORY OF ARTS for September 1,
1821, in referring to the 'Enchanted Lyre,' beholds the prospect of an
opera being performed at the King's Theatre, and enjoyed at the Hanover
Square Rooms, or even at the Horns Tavern, Kennington. The vibrations
are to travel through underground conductors, like to gas in pipes.
'And if music be capable of being thus conducted,' he observes,'perhaps
the words of speech may be susceptible of the same means of propagation.
The eloquence of counsel, the debates of Parliament, instead of being
read the next day only,--But we shall lose ourselves in the pursuit of
this curious subject.'

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15