298 Mr. W. H. Preece [Feb. 13, 



Professor of Natural Philosophy at King's College, and then com- 

 menced that career of electrical investigation, that wave of success on 

 whose crest he moved until it broke on the shore " of that country 

 from whose bourn no traveller returns." The many electrical inven- 

 tions by Wheatstone which were brought forth after 1834 Vere 

 derived more or less from his telegraphic achievements. He was not- 

 an electrical investigator ; no one could be while Faraday existed. 

 He was essentially a practical man, who applied the discoveries of 

 others to the wants and purposes of mankind. Somebody has said 

 that nothing is easier than the discovery of yesterday. Nothing is 

 more difficult than the discovery of to-morrow ! The telegraph itself 

 was no new idea. The scroll of time bears the names of Lomond, Le 

 Sage, Soemmering, Ronalds, Ampere, Schilling, and others, but it was 

 only in the year 1837 that all these fingerposts led up to that point 

 where two men met who made telegraphs practical. 



In 1837 Cooke, Morse, Steinheil, and Wheatstone all focussed the 

 labours of previous inventors, and gave the starting point from 

 which telegraphy became what it is. Cooke and Wheatstone went 

 hand in hand. Wheatstone was the brilliant, fertile, ingenious man 

 of science. Cooke was the sanguine, energetic, practical man of busi- 

 ness. When Cooke came to England from Heidelberg he was 

 (through Roget and Faraday) brought into contact with Wheat- 

 stone, and he found that Wheatstone had cracked the Columbus 

 egg — he had discovered the possibility of bridging over space. All 

 previous attempts to apply electricity to useful purposes had failed, 

 from the difficulty of obtaining sufficient force at a distance to 

 be productive of effect. By applying the laws of Ohm to the facts of 

 Ampere and Oersted, Wheatstone succeeded in finding the proper 

 basis for arranging wires and magnets in such proportions as to 

 produce evident effects. The electrical effects utilized for telegraph 

 purposes are very numerous. The one upon which Cooke and 

 Wheatstone worked was the simple fact that whenever a current of 

 electricity passes in the neighbourhood of a magnet, such as the 

 mariner's compass, that magnet was deflected ; and Wheatstone 

 arranged five mariners' compass needles in a horizontal row, each 

 needle deflecting when a current of electricity was sent along the wire 

 to which it was attached, deflecting to the right or left according to 

 the direction of the current. Such deflections or beats to the right 

 or left represented symbols, combinations of which could be translated 

 into letters and words. 



Here is a five-needle hatchment-shaped instrument, made on the 

 principle I have just explained. This was the original kind of speak- 

 ing telegraph instrument. It soon became apparent that five needles 

 were not required to form symbols to represent all the letters, and a 

 four-needle instrument was introduced ; and practice and experience, 

 the great utility tests, proved that when one or other of these four 

 needles became faulty or unworkable, communication could still be 

 readily kept up on the remaining needles. Thus it was soon found 



