212 Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



which must puzzle the onlooker unacquainted with that strange 

 mixture of Stuart arid Barclay, of Colyear and Darwin blood. 



The first sign of the reawakening of the old tastes is the endeavour 

 of Galton in 1849 to design a printing telegraph. The account of this 

 instrument was printed in 1849, but post-dated in the publication June 

 1850, two months after Galton had left for Africa. The pamphlet gives 

 very extensive details of the mechanical parts of the apparatus. In 

 order to appreciate what the " teletype" meant in those days, we must 

 remind the reader that telegraphy, then recently introduced into this 

 country, was not carried on by the Post Office but by a number of 

 commercial companies, and a printing telegraph had not yet been 

 achieved. Galton's instrument looks cumbersome with our modern 

 experience of tape instruments, but there are some ingenious ideas 

 involved. How far it was ever actually constructed it is now perhaps 

 impossible to say, but from the wording it might be supposed that 

 portions at least had been actually made ; Galton speaks of the instru- 

 ment as the result of many experiments 1 , and dealing with his method 

 of intensifying the mechanical effect of the slight touch of a needle he 

 writes : 



" It is very interesting to watch such a series in operation ; how the delicate, 

 scarcely perceptible touch of the first arm causes an influence that travels on, almost as 

 if by instinct through the whole series ; how each arm hands it to the one beyond it ; 

 its available power increasing at each delivery 2 ." 



If the whole or parts were constructed, they do not appear to have 

 been preserved, or at least to have reached the Galton Laboratory with 

 the long series of his models and other instruments, which we possess. 

 Galton's teletype involves three wires to connect sending and receiving 

 stations. The needle of a galvanometer may remain stationary, turn 

 to right or turn to left. Thus each wire can send three signals, or the 

 system of three wires 27 signals, enough for the complete alphabet. Now 

 consider a lever in the form of a rectangular frame balanced about a 

 median line or axis; suppose a key slightly longer than the parallel sides 

 of the rectangle turning on the same axis, then if the frame be horizontal 

 and the key pass over the perpendicular edge of the side of the frame 

 it will depress it, when itself depressed. The depression causes contact 



1 The Teletype: a printing Electric Telegraph, by Francis Galton, Esq., M.A., Trin. 

 Coll., Cambridge. John Weale, 1850, p. 32. 



2 Ibid., p. 10. 



