264 HENRY AND THE TELEGRAPH. 



"Two faithful needles — from the iuformiug touch 

 Of the same parent stone, together drew 



Its mystic virtue ; 



And though disjoined by kingdoms, — though the main 

 Rolled its broad surge betwixt, — and different stai's 

 Beheld their wakeful motions, — yet preserved 

 Their former friendship and remembered still 

 The alliance of their birth." * 



It needed but the later discovery of the galvanic wire for connecting 

 the two needles, to realize comijletely this vision of an "oriental" fancy, 

 and to render it the sober exj)erience of our present every-day life. 



I. — TELEGRAPHS BY ELECTRICITY. 



If the earlier attempts commencing in the last century to apply so-called 

 " static " electricity to the purpose of telegrai)hy may to some appear 

 to j)0ssess only an antiquarian interest, it will be seen that they form 

 the necessary, and by no means insignificant, childhood of our modern 

 systems. Neglecting generally mere speculations, as well as initial con- 

 ceptions of executed schemes, the following comprise the more import- 

 ant experimental devices, in the order of their approximate realization. 



1774. The first electric telegraph of which there is record, is that es- 

 tablished at Geneva by Georges-Louis Lesage. The hue consisted of 

 24 insulated wires for the alphabet, each terminating in a pith-ball elec- 

 troscope duly lettered, for indicating by its excitement the succession 

 forming the words and sentences given by the operator, who employed 

 at the transmitting station a manual conductor from an electrical ma- 

 chine, t 



1787. M. Lomond, at Paris, had a single brass wire extended from one 

 closed apartment to another at some distance from it, in connection with 

 a pith-ball electroscope at each end, by which arrangement he was able 

 to communicate sentences in either direction. Arthur Young, the dili- 

 gent writer on natural and industrial resources, has thus described the 

 apparatus in his journal: October 10, 1787, — " In the evening, to Mons. 



touclied two several needles, when one of the needles so touched began to move, the 

 other thougli at never so great a distance, moved at the same time aud in the same 

 manner. He tells us that the two friends being each of tliem possessed of one of these 

 needles, made a kind of dial-phate, iuscribiug it witli the four-aud-twenty letters, in 

 the same manner as the hoars of the day are marked upon the ordinary dial-plate. 

 They then lixed one of the needles on each of these plates in such a mannt'r that it 

 could move round without impediment, so as to touch any of the four-and-twenty 

 letters. . . . By this means they talked together across a whole continent, and 

 conveyed their thoughts to one auother in an instant over cities or mountains, seas 

 or deserts." {The Spectator, No. '241, Dec. 6, 1711.) A similar idea (probably borrowed 

 from Strada) is found in Daniel Scliwenter's Mathematlsch-pMlosojjhischa Erquickimgs- 

 stunden ; published at Nuremberg in 1(5:5(5, pp. 346, 347. 



*Akeuside, Pleasures of InuKjination (1744), book iii. 



t Lesage, in a letter addressed to Prof. Pierre Pr6vost, of Geneva, dated Berlin, June 

 22, 1782, describing to his friend the details of his telegraph, states that the method of 

 corresponding by means of electricity had been contemplated by him for thirty or 

 thirty-live years. {Traite de Telejraphie £lectrique : par l'Abb6 Moigno, 2d edit. 8vo. 

 Paris, 1852, part ii, chap. 1, p. 59.) 



