141 
Then follows the extract in Latin, with the English 
translation in verse attached. 
It will be acknowledged by anyone familiar with the 
instrument, that the dial telegraph of Cooke and Wheat- 
stone, invented subsequently to their first upright needle 
form, m_ost curiously carries out the ideal description of this 
old author, and it will be seen that the date at which his 
work is written was nearly 200 years prior to the first 
attempt made to communicate at a distance by means of 
magnetic needles. 
The following dates may be incidentally mentioned on 
this point. First, in 1788, Du Fay succeeded in transmit- 
ting the electricity from an excited glass tube to the distance 
of 1256 feet along a wet packthread. Then in 1748 Franklin 
set fire to spirits of wine by means of a current of electricity 
passed through the water of the Shuylkill river. Neither 
of these experiments were however undertaken with any 
idea of transmitting signals, the first attempts of this kind 
being perhaps those of Lesage and of Lomond, in 1774 and 
1787 respectively, who used the divergence of pith balls to 
indicate letters. These are all of course experiments with 
statical electricity, and we have to come down to Yolta with 
his discovery of the Voltaic Pile in 1800 for the means of 
applying dynamical electricity for the purpose in question. 
Then through Oersted’s discovery of the action of electrical 
currents on the magnetic needle, in 1819, and Ampere’s 
suggestion, in 1820, that this action should be used in sig- 
nalling, we come to Cooke and Wheatstone’s first patent for 
a telegraphic instrument in 1887 ; bringing us through a 
journey of just about 200 years in order to arrive at our 
practical realisation of this vision of the old writer. 
