oO 
7 HE TELEGRAPH. 
and it was agreed that Larrey should take it with him to Paris 
and exhibit it before the Institute. 
The apparatus was indeed shown before the Institute, but 
no report upon it was made by the examining committee. Iso 
doubt Chappe’s telegraph seemed to the Academy to meet all 
requirements. 
At the time that Soemmering was elected a member of the 
Academy of Sciences at Munich, there was a Russian officer 
named Baron Pawel Lwowitsch Schilling (of Cronstadt) 
attached in a military capacity to the embassy there. He wit¬ 
nessed Soemmering’s experiments in 1810, and was so struck 
by the utility of the invention, that he forthwith began to 
make galvanism and its applications his favourite study. 
It was about this period (23rd of August, 1810) that Soem¬ 
mering invented the first electric bell, which may be thus de¬ 
scribed :—The gas rises in two tubes full of water and accumu¬ 
lates beneath, a kind of -inverted glass spoon at one end of a 
lever, the motion of which releases the catch of another lever. 
By the action of the latter a leaden ball is allowed to fall upon 
a bell and so the alarm is produced. This little apparatus gave 
much pleasure to Soemmering. It is not figured in the descrip¬ 
tion of Soemmering’s telegraph in the journal of the Munich 
Academy of Sciences published in 1811, which contains merely 
the short description we have just given. 
On the 7th of September, 1810, Soemmering and Schilling, 
in their telegraphic experiments, made use of wires covered 
with a solution of india-rubber overlaid with a varnish. This 
was doubtless the first time that a soluble insulating material 
was applied to conducting wires. Soemmering carried the 
insulated wire several tinfes round the house in which he was 
then living at Leyden. 
In the spring of 1812, Schilling, by constant attempts to 
improve the insulation of the conductors, had so far suc¬ 
ceeded that he was able to transmit the current without loss 
to considerable distances under water. The war about to 
1 egin between France and Russia made Schilling wishful to be 
able to connect the battle-field with fortified places by means 
of a cable of this kind. He wished also to fire mines across 
streams, and the method he adopted to inflame the powder was 
for that time rather remarkable. It consisted in igniting two 
