86 
THE TELEGRAPH. 
1837, and they determined to begin by a preliminary trial of 
their telegraph on a line of some length. A trial was 
accordingly made on the 25th July, 1837, at the terminus of 
the London and Birmingham Railway, on wires a mile and a 
quarter long, connecting Euston Square and Camden Town. 
This was the first time that such an experiment had been 
made in England with an electrical apparatus. This experi¬ 
ment was made thirteen days before the decease of Schilling, 
who died at St. Petersburg on the 7th of August, without 
having been made acquainted with the introduction of his 
telegraph into England. 
On the 19th of November, 1837, Cooke and Wheatstone 
executed a deed of partnership, and on the 12th of December 
they sent a description of their apparatus to the Patent Office. 
In this description it was not called a new invention, but an 
improvement. The essential parts were in fact founded on 
the same principle as Schilling’s invention, that is to say, on 
the deviation of a magnetic needle under the influence of coils. 
Professor Wheatstone had greatly improved the apparatus, as 
indeed might have been expected from so accomplished a man 
of science, and the needles were now kept vertical instead of 
being horizontal. The Abbe Moigno, in quoting a communi¬ 
cation made to the French Academy of Sciences, says that 
Schilling also had used as many as five vertical needles in his 
apparatus. Schilling, however, never had vertical needles in 
his instrument. 
The first apparatus made on Wheatstone’s plan had five 
needles ; these were soon reduced to two, and on some lines 
only one needle was used. 
In justice to Cooke, we must state that it was by his efforts 
and his zeal that the telegraph was established in England. 
After all that had been done in Europe before the month of 
September, 1837, by Schilling, Sleinheil, Gauss and Weber, 
Cooke and Wheatstone, it is painful to remark that the 
American artist, Morse, should have been regarded by all 
Europe as the inventor of the electro-magnetic telegraph, 
although he had but made one poor experiment (4th September, 
1837)." 
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born in 1791, and was 
the eldest of three brothers. His father, the Rev. Jedediah 
