THE TECHNOLOGIST. [Jolt 1, 1865 



536 THE PROGRESS OF 



flutters some flags from his mast-head, whilst the stranger does the same, 

 and the landsman wonders to seethe faces of those on board brighten or 

 sadden as the streamers blow out in the wind. And at length, when at 

 midnight he nears his own shores, he looks anxiously forth till the 

 lighthouse appears, and its revolving lamp sweeping the horizon, fixes 

 on him for a moment like the eye 'of a mother, and welcomes him back 

 to his native land. 



No telegraphic message which electric wires have transmitted, is 

 more memorable than that famous one which Nelson sent round the 

 English fleet before Trafalgar, when the flags signalled " England 

 expects every man to do his duty." None is sadder than that 

 displayed when a Greenland whaler returns to one of our Northern 

 ports undressed in flags, and the weeping mothers and wives, the sisters 

 and daughters and sweethearts know afar off that some dire calamity 

 has befallen the vessel ! None begets more gloom, than when a ship at 

 Bea, about to be visited by the boat of another, hoists the yellow flag to 

 tell of pestilence aboard ! None is more exasperating to brave seamen 

 than when a manifest slaver telegraphs through a false flag a cowardly 

 lie, and escapes justice for a season 1 None is more painfully startling 

 than when the waves cast ashore that strangest, saddest, slowest and 

 most uncertain of message-carriers, a corked bottle, with some scrap of 

 pencil-writing inside, placed there just before the ship from which it 

 -was flung went down. All across the Atlantic and back again, round 

 and round in the whirl of the Gulf stream, some such telegraphic 

 bottles have floated, and for long, like the spectre Dutchman, have 

 sought a haven in vain, but in the end they have reached a port, and 

 delivered their news of a far country and a forgotten time. 



It would be easy to draw a similar picture of the significance and 

 value of audible signals from the church bell to the cannon boom, — 

 but you can draw it for yourselves. Assuming, then, that special sights 

 and sounds shall be the letters, the words, or the full utterances of our 

 telegraphic alphabet and language, we may divide telegraphs into two 

 great classes — 



1. Fixed or stationary, 



2. Locomotive or propulsory. 



Of the first, we cannot stop to consider — the finest example perhaps, 

 is the lighthouse, with its stately tower, through the day passively 

 warning and guiding the mariner, and its bright lamp through the 

 night actively keeping watch and ward over the sea ; now glaring with 

 menacing crimson eye on some ship wilfully rushing to destruction, 

 and then its eye, no longer blood-shot, piloting with affectionate 

 encouraging glance the home- returning mariner, who has gone so 

 slowly round the world that he scarcely knows his first harbour 



The second, or moving telegraph demands a twofold division, 

 according as the telegraphic message-carrier is itself, on the one hand, 



