March 30, 1882] 
NATURE 
S15 
were much prized by their owners, for the quality and 
temper of the steel, and much cost was lavished on the 
ornaments of the handles and sheaths. The making of 
a good sword was regarded as a very serious tas‘, and 
the maker had to conform to certain rules of conduct 
from the commencement to the end of the operation. 
The external ornaments offered endless scope to the skill 
and care of the worker in metals. Great importance is 
attached to the maker’s name, which is engraved above 
the guard. It was a common saying of the Japanese, 
that the swords of celebrated makers, such as Namino- 
hira Yukiyasu, Masamune, and others, could not return 
to their scabbards, unless they had been dipped in blood ; 
the sword maker’s occupation is now gone, not so their 
fellow-artists, the sword-mounters. Their skillin working 
metals can always be turned to good account. 
Many other works in metal in the gallery deserve men- 
tion, but we cannot refer to them here. They all exhibit 
the patience, skill, imagination, and love of his craft 
which distinguished the Japanese artist of old. It is to 
be feared that he is now abandoning these qualities, and 
seeking a more rapid road to fortune by shoddy foreign 
imitations, and that beautiful works requiring the patience 
and loving care of years—such, for instance, as the small 
cabinet shown in Grafton Street, which was made for the 
third Shégun of the last dynasty, and which is probably 
the finest work of its kind in existence—will soon be 
things of the past. 
ELECTRICITY AT THE CRYSTAL PALACE 
Ill. Land Telegraphy. 
fe oS regard to the leading part played by our 
country in the rise and development of the tele- 
graph, it was only to be expected that the display of 
historical apparatus at the Crystal Palace should be a 
very good one. Thanks to the antiquarian zeal of Mr. 
W. H. Preece, F.R.S., and his active interest in all that 
pertains to the history of his profession, the Post Office 
bas become the careful custodian of all the early tele- 
graphs employed in England, and the stall of H.M. 
Postmaster General is rich in these relics of the past. 
Indeed, there is the nucleus here of an interesting museum 
of telegraphic apparatus ; and it is to be hoped that such 
a museum will one day be established. The Society of 
Telegraph Engineers and Electricians have now their 
Konald’s Library of Electrical Works, which is practically 
open to all inquirers. A public museum of electrical 
appliances, rendered historical by the lapse of time, would 
be a supplementary institution of inestimable value. 
One of the most interesting of these relics is the 1816 
telegraph of Sir Francis Ronald himself, kindly lent by 
Mr. Latimer Clark, together with a portion of the copper 
conductor which Ronald threaded through a glass tube, 
protected by a wooden trough, and buried in his garden 
at Hammersmith. It was a frictional electric telegraph, 
and indicated letters by the divergence of two pith balls, 
after a plan somewhat similar to the suggestion of ‘ C.M.” 
in the Scots Magazine for 1759. This device is fully 
described in Ronald’s ‘‘ Electrical Telegraph,” 1836, the 
first work published in England on the subject. A copy 
of this work is po-sessed by Mr. Latimer Clark, who we 
may also mention has lately acquired a forgotten book on 
the history of telegraphs (non-electrical), published in 
1797 for the author, Mr. J. Gamble : 
On August 5, 1816, the British Admiralty expressed 
their opinion to Sir Francis Ronalds that “telegraphs of 
any kind were then wholly unnecessary,” and the inven- 
tion of Ronalds was neglected. Nevertheless, being 
worked by static electricity, it is doubtful if it ever would 
have become a practical success. The “ fossil’’ telegraph 
of Messrs. Cooke and Wheatstone, laid between Euston 
and Camden Town in 1837, was the first practical tele- 
graph in operation, and a specimen of it is shown by the 
Post Office. The line was’ formed of copper wires 
covered with cotton and pitch, and inlaid in triangular 
lengths of wood, which were buried underground. It 
was worked in connection with Cooke and Wheatstone’s 
Five Needle Telegraph, the parent of the present single 
and double needle instruments, now used in railway 
signalling. 
Especially interesting also are the porcelain tubes em- 
ployed by Samuel Morse as insulators, and the lead type, 
cast by that inventor as early as December, 1832, for his 
electromagnetic telegraph, now known as the Morse 
inker. The original Cooke and Wheatstone needle in- 
struments, and the apparatus designed to compete with 
them, for example, Alexander Bain’s I. and V. telegraph, 
in which the alphabet is formed by the movement of two 
pointers attached to circular magnets moving inside coils ; 
the Highton gold leaf telegraph, in which a strip of gold 
leaf inclosed in a glass tube traver-es the field of a per- 
manent magnet, and forms part of the line-circuit. When 
a current passes through the leaf it moves to right or 
left, according to the polarity. Henley’s Magneto Tele- 
graph, the Wheatstone ABC instrument, and the Bell 
receiver of Sir Charles Bright, are also shown. This last 
appeals to the ear rather than the eye, by striking two 
bells of different pitch, and is the forerunner of the 
modern class of “sounders” which are superseding 
writing telegraphs on land-lines in America and England, 
owing to their clean and rapid working, and the ease 
with which a clerx can listen to the message and write it 
down at the same time. 
Space would fail us; if we were to refer to all the his- 
torical apparatus exhibited by the Post Office. There the 
visitor will be ab'e to trace the development of the electric 
telegraph in this country from the earliest attempts, and 
on the same table he will see at work the latest improved 
apparatus for transmitting and receiving messages. The 
Wheatstone automatic instrument, which is capable of 
sending 200 words per minute, and is chiefly used for 
press intelligence, the American duplex, on the Morse 
system, and the Pneumatic Despatch, for forwarding 
written telegrams from St. Martins le Grand to local 
stations in the City, are all in operation. 
Before leaving the Post Office stall we ought to men- 
tion an imported curiosity, which excited a great deal of 
interest when first displayed in the Norwegian Section of 
the recent Paris Electrical Exhibition, and to which we 
drew attention some months ago. This is a sample of 
a telegraph post from Norway, which has been pierced 
through and through by the beaks of the black and 
green Norwegian woodpeckers. Two of these marau- 
ders are stuffed and mounted on the perforated pole 
which is the witness to their strength of beak and per- 
severance. The explanation of the singular attack is 
that the birds, hearing the vibration of the wires 
as they tremble in the wind, mistake it for the hum 
of insects within the post, and courageously peck their 
way into the coveted feast. It matters not whether the 
timber is fresh or old; and I have been assured by a 
Norwegian telegraph engineer, that he has found several 
newly erected posts perforated ina single night. Bears 
in the mountain districts are also said to attack the foot 
of the posts, tooth and nail, under the impression that 
there are bees within ; and after the experiments of Mr. 
C. V. Boys on the influence of tuning forks on spiders 
(see NATURE, vol. xxiii. p. 149), the deception of these 
animals is quite intelligible. The authenticated fact that 
wolves are scared away from whole districts in Norway 
on the appearance of a telegraph line there, is not so 
easily understood, unless it be thit the wires are held to 
be some kind of siare. This explanation is supported 
by the custom of Norweyian farmers of running a cord on 
poles round their homesteads to keep off the wolves, and 
it is stated that an entire peninsula was kept clear of 
wolves by spanning its nec’s in this fashion. 
