EARLY IDEAS ON MAGNETIC INTERCOMMUNICATION. 383 



attention was to be called by the needle striking against 

 a small bell placed in its path. 1 Schwenter's plan did 

 not, of course, bring telegraphy into the world, centuries 

 ahead of its time. In fact, he tacitly repudiates it him- 

 self in a later publication, 2 wherein, after learnedly ex- 

 plaining how Claudius in Paris and Johannes in Rome 

 can thus communicate with one another, he denies that 

 any magnet in the world has sufficient strength for the 

 purpose; although he says " Thomas de Fluctibus" (prob- 

 ably meaning Fludd) describes a secret stone in his works 

 which is possibly powerful enough, but neglects to men- 

 tion "where it was found and who found it." 



At the same time, no earlier instance having been en- 

 countered, it appears that we may accord to Schwenter 

 the credit of the invention of the first apparatus for (pre- 

 sumably) causing a bell to be sounded by the moving 

 armature of a magnet. 



Nine years later, the feasibility of magnetic communi- 

 cation was elaborately disputed by the celebrated lapidary 

 and mineralogist de Boodt, 3 who says that the notion that 

 the magnetic needle can communicate the secrets of 

 thought between friends fifty-five leagues distant is an 

 error, "because it is very certain that the magnet which 

 has touched an iron needle can cause it to move only 

 through a certain and very small interval, perhaps three 

 or four feet." After that, no one seems to have much 

 faith in the idea; and probably because of his own percep- 

 tion of its absurdity, Famianus Strada selects it as the sub- 

 ject of his parody upon the poem of Lucretius, which, it 

 will be remembered, abounded in references to the mag- 

 net. This he presents with burlesques of Claudian, L,u- 

 :ian and other ancient poets in the Prolusiones Acadetnicae 4 



Schwenter (De Sunde): Steganologia et Steganographia. Nurnberg, 

 1600. 



a Schwenter: Delicise Physico Mathematics. Nurnberg, 1636. 

 3 De Boodt: Gemmarum et Lapidum Hist. etc. Hanovise, 1609. 

 * Strada: Prolusiones Academicae. Rome, 1617. 



