THE TECHNOLOGIST. [July 1, 1865, 



538 THE PROGRESS OF 



Light"is no laggard. If we could raise a luminous signal to such a 

 height above the earth as the nearest star, or even the nearest meteor,- 

 we might make it, like the comet, speak to a whole hemisphere at 

 once. But we could not even thus speak round the globe in the fairest 

 weather. Accordingly, when luminous or illuminated signals, such as 

 rockets and moving arms, have been employed, as they were in our 

 Admiralty semaphore and in the French telegraph till recently, it has 

 been necessary to repeat the signal from station to station, for the cur- 

 vature of the earth's surface hid comparatively near points from each 

 other, even in the clearest atmosphere ; whilst, worst of all, illuminated 

 signals were nearly useless at night, and they as well as luminous ones 

 were totally so in fogs or cloudy weather. 



Electricity is free from those objections. It is far swifter than sound 

 or light. It is not afraid of the dark ; it is not alarmed at the sea, and 

 it can travel in all weathers. One could almost imagine that our old 

 ballad writers, such as the author or authors of Gill Morice, prefigured 

 it in their half-goblin messenger, of whom we are told— 



"And when he came to broken bridge, 



He bent his bow and swam; 



And when he came 10 grass growing. 



Set down his feet and ran. 



And when he came to Greenwood Hall, 



"Would neither knock nor call ; 



But set his bent bow to his breast, 



And lightly leaped the wall." 



The highway for this subtle spirit, which, together with the 

 generating and propelling electromotive apparatus at the one end, and 

 the receiving and recording instruments at the other, constitutes the 

 electric telegraph, is in one sense the lineal descendant of the older 

 methods of speaking and writing to a distance. 



Directly it is the child of the penny post, and the grandchild of the 

 railway locomotive, to which it shows its affinity by clinging to the 

 railway. The locomotive is the child of the river-steamer, which is 

 the child of the mining steam-pump, which is the child of the thermo- 

 meter and the air-pump, and that brings us to the early part of the 

 XVIIth century. If we go further back we shall find in its genealogi- 

 cal line, the printing press, the mariner's compass, and gunpowder. 



Let no one suppose that this most imperfect genealogy is offered as 

 explaining why the world had to wait till the middle of the nineteenth 

 century for its electric telegraph. It might have come centuries sooner, 

 or centuries later, and by a totally different descent from that which it 

 followed. History is the record of the one possibility out of thousands, 

 which God selected and made the actual fact, and we must ever regard 

 it with the eyes of optimists, and believe it to have been the best. But 

 this opinion is often more a matter of faith than of sight, and we con- 



