138 
a few yards and a totally different affair to send it a thousand miles. 
Experiments which had been made under the auspices of the Russian 
government, by Professor Jacobi, of the University of Dorpat, had 
led to the inference that the law of the conducting power of wires 
originally discovered in Germany was correct; and, in addition, 
a corroborative memoir had been read by Lenz before the Imperial 
Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg. At this time, so little was 
known in England as regards this important point, that some of 
the most eminent natural philosophers connected with universities 
there embraced the opposite view. I may not be able to make the 
precise point in dispute clear; it was this: A current passing 
through a certain length of wire suffers a certain amount of loss. If 
it should go through a wire a thousand times as long, will the loss 
be a thousand times as great? The Russians said, yes; the Eng- 
lish said, no. If the former was the case, it was universally con- 
cluded that the electric telegraph would not be practicable for any 
considerable distance. A series of experiments was made in the 
University of New York which established beyond all question the 
truth of the Russian view. But at that time the higher mathemat- 
ics were cultivated in our laboratory as well as mere experimenting ; 
and, on submitting the results to such a mathematical discussion, 
the paradoxical conclusion was brought out that it is a necessary 
consequence of that law that, after a certain length of wire has 
been used, the losses become imperceptible. Encouraged by this, 
a party of gentlemen went with the inventor of the telegraph to a 
rope-walk, near Bloomingdale, one summer morning and there 
tested the truth of these conclusions on lengths of wire varying 
from one to some hundreds of miles. The losses of the currents 
were measured by the quantity of the gas set free in the decompo- 
sition of water. The result was completely successful, and tele- 
graphing for any distance became an established certainty.”’ 
Joseph Saxton was elected a member of the American Philosoph- 
ical Society on October 20, 1837, shortly after his return from 
London to assume the office of constructor and curator of the 
standard weighing apparatus of the Philadelphia Mint; a position 
which had been tendered to him by the Director, Dr. R. M. Patter- 
son. Before going abroad he had made several inventions of note, 
and, in association with Isaiah Lukens,* had constructed the clock 
* Elected to the Amer. Philos. Soc., October 20, 1820. 
