SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL LABOURS TO 1860. 225 



London firm in its important and well-executed cable 

 undertakings. I shall hereafter return to this second 

 period of our cable - layings , but only briefly review 

 it, as I personally had less share in the labours con- 

 nected with them. 



I now turn to continue the short summary of my 

 scientific and technical labours already brought down 

 to the year 1850. 



In the years 1850 to 1856 I was busily en- 

 gaged with Halske in improving telegraphic apparatus, 

 electrical appliances, and measuring instruments for 

 scientific and technical purposes. It was still a 

 tolerably unploughed field which we worked over, 

 and our activity was accordingly extremely fertile. 

 Our constructions, which were rapidly made known, 

 especially through the Universal Exhibitions in London 

 and Paris, have almost everywhere formed the basis 

 of later contrivances. As already remarked, only a 

 few of these innovations were patented, the majority 

 of them were either not at all, or only in later years, 

 described in journals. This facilitated indeed their 

 general introduction and brought us many orders, but 

 at the same time we lost in many ways the universal 

 acknowledgement of their origination. I shall here 

 only instance a few of the directions which our con- 

 structive activity took. 



Besides the practical development of the Morse 



telegraph for hand use, we were occupied in this 



15 



OF THE 



UNIVERSITY 



