XXI 



considered. On this point it has been justly remarked by De la Rive* 

 that " the philosopher who was the first to contribute by his labours, as 

 ingenious as they were persevering, in giving to electric telegraphy 

 the practical character that it now possesses, is undoubtedly Mr. Wheat- 

 stone." He has no more claim to the title of " inventor " of the elec- 

 tric telegraph than any one of those who have long preceded him in pro- 

 posing unpractical schemes for transmitting signals to a distant station, 

 first by franklinic, and subsequently by voltaic electricity. The earliest 

 of these appears to be Stephen Gray, who in 1727 suspended by silk 

 threads a wire 700 feet long ; and on applying an excited glass tube to 

 one end of the wire electrification was observed by an assistant to occur 

 at the other end. Similar experiments were made by Dufay a few years 

 subsequently, and by Winckler of Leipsic, by Lemonnier of Paris in 

 1746, and by Dr. "Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, in 1747, one of whose ex- 

 periments had a remarkable (but then unnoticed) bearing on electro-tele- 

 graphy, namely, the employment of the earth to conduct the return cur- 

 rent : he stretched a wire across the Thames, one end of which was 

 attached to the exterior coating of a Ley den jar, while the interior coat- 

 ing was connected to earth through the body of the experimenter, and 

 the other end was held by an assistant, who grasped an iron rod ; the 

 moment the latter dipped the rod in the river both felt a shock. He sub- 

 sequently experimented on much longer circuits, one of which was 10,600 

 feet in length, suspended from wooden poles erected on Shooter's Hill. 

 [Franklin made similar experiments across the Schuykill at Philadelphia 

 in 1748, and De Luc about the same time across the Lake of Geneva. 



The earliest definite scheme for the employment of franklinic electri- 

 city for telegraphic purposes was propounded by " 0. M.," an anonymous 

 writer in the ' Scot's Magazine ' for 1753 ; this required a separate insu- 

 lated conductor for each letter ; and a very similar idea was subsequently 

 carried out at Geneva by Lesage in 1774. Lomond was the first to pro- 

 pose in 1787 the transmission of various signals through a single line- 

 wire ; this he effected by the varied movement of the pith balls of a deli- 

 cate electroscope ; and Cavallo in 1795 proposed to effect the same object 

 by varied combinations of sparks and pauses. In 1816 Francis Eonalds 

 proposed the hopeless scheme of employing two perfectly isochronous 

 clocks to indicate continuously the same letters or numerals at the two 

 stations, the signal intended being indicated by simultaneous sparks at 

 both. This telegraph was offered to the Government by the inventor, who 

 received an official reply from the then Secretary of the Admiralty, that 

 " telegraphs of any kind are now wholly useless, and no other than the 

 one now in use will be adopted" — a conspicuous example of the slow 

 progress proverbially due to the inertia of great bodies. 



The first proposal to employ voltaic electricity for telegraphic purposes 

 appears to have been made by S. T. Scunnering, a surgeon, to the A car 

 * 'Treatise on Electricity,' pt. vii. eh. 1. 



