280 Scientific Meeting in Germany. 



England — an object which they successfully accomplished. On 

 the 12th of June they obtained their patent, and on the 25th 

 July the first trial was made at the London terminus of the North- 

 Western Railway with a wire a mile and a quarter long. About 

 a fortnight previously, Steinheii of Munich had placed the build- 

 ings of the Academy of Sciences in electric communication with 

 the Observatory at Bogenhausen ; and his discovery, the following 

 year, of the possibility of bringing the galvanic current in tele- 

 graphing through the earth, back to the battery, deserves greater 

 recognition than it has yet received. 



Schilling, on his return to St. Petersburgh, had renewed his 

 efforts to turn his telegraph to useful account with more energy 

 than ever. After a series of experiments, he believed he had suc- 

 ceeded in effecting a sufficient isolation of the conducting wire to 

 admit of the transmission of signals through water, and he pro- 

 posed to unite Cronstadt with St. Petersburgh by means of a sub- 

 marine cable. He had got a rope prepared with several copper 

 wires isolated agreeably to his instructions, when death put a stop 

 to his labours on the 7th August 183*7. 



In the course of the summer of that year intelligence reached 

 America of what had been done in Germany and England in the 

 way of electric telegraphy. This news stimulated Samuel F. B. 

 Morse to construct, with the assistance of Dr. Gale, Professor of 

 Chemistry, an apparatus with which he hoped to be able to tele- 

 graph. The subject was not at that time quite new to Morse. 

 He had been twice, over in Europe to improve himself in his pro- 

 fession as a painter, and in the course of his second homeward 

 voyage in 1832, he had had his attention awakened to the possi- 

 bility of electro-magnetic telegraphy by Dr. Jackson, his fellow- 

 passenger on board the Sully. On the 4th September — a month 

 after Schilling's death — he made what he termed a " successful 

 attempt." The speaker was in possession of a sketch prepared by 

 Morse himself of the apparatus with which this successful attempt 

 was effected. By means of a set of fiat-toothed types there was 

 impressed upon a sheet of paper moved horizontally over a cylin- 

 der a set of zigzag marks like the teeth of a saw, which were meant 

 to denote figures. In this manner a set of numbers, was presented 

 to the eye, each denoting a certain word or number for the ascer- 

 tainment of which the receiver of the despatch required to consult 

 a voluminous dictionary. The strip of paper operated upon on 

 the 4th September 1837, represented, in teeth shaped somewhat 



