126 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



The labors of the year 1848 comprise some 1,800 observed transits of 

 stars, 800 comparisons of chronometers by coincidences of beats taken 

 at the stations, 5,000 transits over wires, for determining the personal 

 equations of the officers of the Survey, many thousand exchanges 

 of personal clock signals, and 600 star-transit signals. If even this 

 prodigious accumulation of statistics was considered a gain of many 

 fold over the old method of obtaining astronomical longitudes, what 

 shall we say of the automatic process employed in 1849, where one 

 night's exchange of star signals between Philadelphia and the Seaton 

 Station, printed automatically on a single sheet of paper, is worth 

 the whole list of statistics collected by the Coast Survey between 

 Philadelphia and Washington in 1847? 



"In my report of December 15, 1848, feeling the responsibility under 

 which I acted, I spoke with caution on the subject of the comparative 

 excellence of the automatic printing method; though some of my 

 friends thought that its merits were overrated. I appealed to the ex- 

 periments that were to be made in the campaigns of 1849 for a test of 

 the new method. That which was then anticipation only, is now re- 

 ality ; and I am able to say, from recent trials, between Cambridge 

 and Washington, and between the Seaton Station under my care at 

 Washington, and the stations at Philadelphia, and at Hudson, Ohio, 

 that the excellence of the new method surpasses all that I ventured 

 to hope for in December last. I then ventured 1o claim for the auto- 

 matic printing method a tenfold gain over the old one. I now find 

 that one transit over one wire is worth four wires by the old method, and 

 that ten transits over wires may now be printed, where one was done be- 

 fore ; making a gain by the new or automatic method of some forty fold. 

 I mean by this the gain from multiplication of transit over wires, and 

 superior precision of each. We cannot in one night obtain the advan- 

 tage of the average of the meteorological peculiarities of forty." 



After enumerating the registers of Morse, of Mitchell, and the 

 chemical method of registering with the main circuit, he says : " The 

 fourth form of the register is Mr. Saxton's invention of this year. It 

 is somewhat on the plan of his celebrated ruling-machine. The 

 cylinder now before the Association contains the culmination of the 

 planet Neptune and the stars near his parallel, printed by me at the 

 Seaton Station, August 11, 1849. It might seem that the subject of 

 the place of the planet Neptune is foreign to the purpose of telegraph 

 operations. Such is not the case ; for we have used this planet as a 

 fundamental star. I take occasion, therefore, to remark, that the ob- 

 servations of the culmination of Neptune on four nights in the month 

 of August at the Seaton Station, by Pourtales and myself, show that 

 my ephenieris, published by Prof. Henry in the Smithsonian Con- 

 tributions to Science, agrees \vith the heavens within half a second 

 of arc. From this close agreement it may be inferred, that, if the 

 Neptune of Prof. Peirce's theory and my elements were conceived to 

 be a planet, placed side by side in the heavens with the true one 

 ever since its discovery, the two would form a double star of an order 

 so close that not even the great Cambridge refractor could detect 

 their duplicity. 



