Elect f 



239 



made an arrangement with the Telegraph Company in Cincin- 

 nati, to extend their circuit through Dr. Locke's house, on the 

 17th inst., and the first experiment was tried with complete suc- 

 cess. Let us give credit to whom credit is due. Without the 

 persevering enterprise of the superintendent of the coast survey, 

 the immediate desideratum might not have been fixed upon. 

 When this was known, however, it was no easy matter to effect 

 it without injuring the performance of the clock. 



" The most expert clock makers and mechanicians, and the 

 most expert telegraph operators and inventors, including Dr. 

 Morse himself, had been consulted. None had succeeded in a 

 mode that was absolutely satisfactory. It required the union of 

 all the arts of electro-magnetism, of clock-making, and of tele- 

 graph registering in the same person, in order to insure success. 

 Dr. Locke had all the requisites. He made the invention. His 

 son made the model. It was attached to a clock made by him- 

 self. It was tried on a register of his own invention and handi- 

 craft. He is, therefore, in every sense, the inventor of the attach- 

 ment. The utility of the invention to the Coast Survey is so 

 great, that one night's work, with the new apparatus and such 

 accompaniment as will necessarily be provided, may perhaps be 

 worth as much in practical results as a whole campaign would be 

 without it. 



"Dr. Locke's attachment may be made to register far smaller 

 subdivisions of time than hundredths of a second. Instead of 



paper 



S 



hke a barrel-organ, with the hours, minutes and seconds traced 

 °u it in a spiral line with such precision, that a second of time 

 may be subdivided into ten thousand parts, all susceptible of dis- 

 tinct measurement with a microscope. Such a portion of time 

 is supposed to be occupied by lightning in traveling eighteen 

 miles. A hundred of them are" taken for lightning to travel from 

 Eastport to New Orleans. One continuous line will next year con- 

 nect these places. The lightning will then take for its passage 

 a line 100 times as long as the smallest portion capable of being 

 measured by Dr. Locke's attachment. K "* 



Dr. Locke's invention consists in part in the evolution of a 

 Perfect time-scale, marked not only with seconds or units of time, 

 but with the larger divisions, as minutes, five minutes, and hours ; 

 and in the entering or imprinting of the exact time of events, as 

 astrono m i m i observations, upon the same time-scale by electro- 

 magnetic or other means, as circumstances may require or permit ; 

 this being done without injuring the rate of going of the clock. 



* The article was written bv Mr Walker, but was curried to the press by his half- 

 brother. Prof. Otis Kendall, of Philadelphia. 



