Curiosities of Science. 



him to express the most useful and significant words with a 

 single touch of the needle." 



After Strada and his commentators comes Henry Van Etten, 

 who shows how " Claude, being at Paris, and John at Rome, 

 might converse together, if each had a needle touched by a 

 stone of such virtue that as one moved itself at Paris the other 

 should be moved at Rome :" he adds, " it is a fine invention, 

 but I do not think there is a magnet in the world which has 

 such virtue ; besides, it is inexpedient, for treasons would be 

 too frequent and too much protected. (Recreations Mathema- 

 tiques: see 5th edition, Paris, 1660, p. 158.) Sir Thomas Browne 

 refers to this " conceit" as " excellent, and, if the effect would 

 follow, somewhat divine ;" but he tried the two needles touched 

 with the same loadstone, and placed in two circles of letters, 

 " one friend keeping one and another the other, and agreeing 

 upon an hour when they will communicate, " and found the tra- 

 dition a failure that, "at what distance of place soever, when 

 one needle shall be removed unto any letter, the other, by a 

 wonderful sympathy, will move unto the same." (See Vulgar 

 Errors, book ii. ch. iii.) 



Glanvill's Vanity of Dogmatizing, a work published in 1661, 

 however, contains the most remarkable allusion to the prevail- 

 ing telegraphic fancy. Glanvill was an enthusiast, and he clearly 

 predicts the discovery and general adoption of the electric tele- 

 graph. "To confer," he says, "at the distance of the Indies 

 by sympathetic conveyance may be as usual to future times as 

 to us in a literary correspondence." By the word " sympathe- 

 tic" he evidently intended to convey magnetic agency ; for he 

 subsequently treats of "conference at a distance by impreg- 

 nated needles," and describes the device substantially as it is 

 given by Sir Thomas Browne, adding, that though it did not 

 then answer, " by some other such way of magnetic efficiency 

 it may hereafter with success be attempted, when magical his- 

 tory shall be enlarged by riper inspection ; and 'tis not unlikely 

 but that present discoveries might be improved to the perform- 

 ance." This may be said to close the most speculative or my- 

 thical period in reference to the subject of electro-telegraphy. 



Electricians now began to be sedulous in their experiments 

 upon the new force by friction, then the only known method 

 of generating electricity. In 1729, Stephen Gray, a pensioner 

 of the Charter-house, contrived a method of making electrical 

 signals through a wire 765 feet long ; yet this most important 

 experiment did not excite much attention. Next Dr. Watson, 

 of the Royal Society, experimented on the possibility of trans- 

 mitting electricity through a large circuit from the simple fact of 

 Le Mourner's account of his feeling the stroke of the electrified 

 fires through two of the basins of the Tuileries (which occupy 



