Things not generally Known. 



2Cfje Electric 



ANTICIPATIONS OF THE ELECTEIC TELEGEAPH. 



THE great secret of ubiquity, or at least of instantaneous trans- 

 mission, has ever exercised the ingenuity of mankind in various 

 romantic myths ; and the discovery of certain properties of the 

 loadstone gave a new direction to these fancies. 



The earliest anticipation of the Electric Telegraph of this 

 purely fabulous character forms the subject of one of the Pro- 

 lusiones Academiccs of the learned Italian Jesuit Strada, first 

 published at Rome in the year 1617. Of this poem a free 

 translation appeared in 1750. Strada's fancy was this : " There 

 is," he supposes, "a species of loadstone which possesses such 

 virtue, that if two needles be touched with it, and then bal- 

 anced on separate pivots, and the one be turned in a parti- 

 cular direction, the other will sympathetically move parallel 

 to it. He then directs each of these needles to be poised and 

 mounted parallel on a dial having the letters of the alphabet 

 arranged round it. Accordingly, if one person has one of the 

 dials, and another the other, by a little pre-arrangement as to 

 details a correspondence can be maintained between them at 

 any distance by simply pointing the needles to the letters of 

 the required words. Strada, in his poetical reverie, dreamt that 

 some such sympathy might one day be found to hold up the 

 Magnesian Stone." 



Strada's conceit seems to have made a profound impression 

 on the master-minds of the day. His poem is quoted in many 

 works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ; and Bishop 

 Wilkins, in his book on Cryptology, is strangely afraid lest 

 his readers should mistake Strada's fancy for fact. Wilkins 

 writes : " This invention is altogether imaginary, having no 

 foundation in any real experiment. You may see it frequently 

 confuted in those that treat concerning rnagnetical virtues." 



Again, Addison, in the 241st No. of the Spectator, 1712, 

 describes Strada's "Chimerical correspondence," and adds that, 

 " if ever this invention should be revived or put in practice," 

 he " would propose that upon the lover's dial -plate there 

 should be written not only the four-and-twenty letters, but se- 

 veral entire words which have always a place in passionate epis- 

 tles, as flames, darts, die, language, absence, Cupid, heart, eyes, 

 being, drown, and the like. This would very much abridge the 

 lover's pains in this way of writing a letter, as it would enable 



