HENRY AND THE TELEGRAPH. 2G5 



Lomond, a very ingenious and inventive meclianic, who lias made an 

 improvement of the jenny for spinning cotton. In electricity he has 

 made a remarkable discovery. Yon write two or three words on a paper; 

 he takes it with him into a room, and turns a machine inclosed in a cylin- 

 drical case, at the top of which is an electrometer, — a small fine pith ball ; 

 a wire connects with a similar c^dinder and electrometer in a distant 

 apartment ; and his wife by remarking the corresponding motions of 

 the ball, writes down the words they indicate. From which it appears 

 that he has formed an alphabet of motions. As the length of the wire 

 makes no difference in the eifect, a correspondence might be carried on 

 at any distance." * 



1794. M. Eeiser, at Geneva, arranged a line of 36 insulated wires, 

 each separately connected at the receiving-station with a small grat- 

 ing of narrow tin-foil strips pasted on glass, from which a letter or 

 figure had been cut, so as to represent the character by the passage of 

 the electric spark over the series of narrow spaces. On a square plate 

 were fastened 36 of these independent gratings, representing the 26 let- 

 ters and 10 numerals. " The instant the discharge is made through the 

 wire, the spark is seen simultaneously at each of the interruptions or 

 breaks of the tin-foil constituting the letter, and the whole letter is 

 rendered visible at once." The sparks were transmitted through the 

 selected wire and its corresponding symbol from a small electrical ma- 

 chine kept in operation at the sending station, t 



1795. Tiberius Cavallo, in England, experimented with electric signals 

 of various kinds (explosive and otherwise) through a long and tolerably 

 fine copper wire (about the fortieth of an inch in diameter) insulatefl by 

 successive coatings of pitch, linen strips, woolen cloth, and oil painting. 

 He/ound a Leyden jar of about one square foot, suihcieut for the re- 

 quired electric spark, if the length of the wire did not exceed 200 feet. 

 He remarks: "By sending a number of sparks at different inter- 

 vals of time according to a settled plan, any sort of intelligence might 

 be conveyed iustantaneousiy from the place in which the phial is sit- 

 uated. With respect to the greatest distance to which such communi- 

 cation might be extended, I can only say that I never tried the experi- 

 ment with a wire of communication longer than about 250 feet ; but from 

 the results of those experiments, and from the analogy of other facts, I 

 am led to believe that the above-mentioned sort of communication might 

 be extended to two or three miles, and probably to a much greater dis- 

 tance."! 



* Travels during the years 1787, 1788, and 1789, in the Kingdom of France. By Avtlixir 

 Yomip;. 2 vols. 8vo. Dublin, 179:^, vol. 1, p. 135. Of the work as repnblislied in Pink- 

 ertou's Collection of Foija{/es and Travels, 4to. Loudon, 1809, vol. iv, p. 139. 



tVoigt'a Magazin, etc. 1794, vol. ix, part 1, p. 183; also Moigno's Tclegraphie 

 £lcciriqtie, part ii, chap. 1, p. (il. 



tA Complete Treatise on Electricity, in 3 vols. 8vo. Loudon, 1795; vol. iii, note No, 

 viii, pp. 295, 29(5. The first two volumes of this work had passed through three earlier 

 editions. 



