CHAPTER X. 



THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 



In the year 1617 Strada, an Italian Jesuit, 

 proposed to telegraph news without wires by 

 means of two sympathetic needles made of 

 loadstone so balanced that when one was 

 turned the other would turn with it. Each 

 needle was to have a dial with the letters on it. 

 This would have been very nice if it had only 

 worked, but it was not based on any known 

 law of nature. 



Many attempts at telegraphing with elec- 

 tricity were made by different people during 

 the eighteenth century. About 1748 Franklin 

 succeeded in firing spirits by means of a wire 

 across the Schuylkill River, using, as all the 

 other experimenters had done, frictional elec- 

 tricity. In 1753 an anonymous letter was writ- 

 ten to Scott's Magazine describing a method 

 by which it was possible to communicate at a 

 distance by electricity. The writer proposed 

 the use of a wire for each letter of the alpha- 

 bet, that should terminate in pith balls at the 

 receiving end, and under the balls were to be 

 strips of paper corresponding to the letters of 



