HISTORY. 
§3 
On Sunday the 11th of June, the conventional signal given 
by the needle apparatus being well known to the members of 
the commission, the first telegraphic despatch was sent from 
Breguet at Bouen to the commissioners at Paris. 
The signal apparatus was afterwards tested, when another 
conversation took place between the stations. The time 
required to effect these different communications may be com¬ 
pared with what would be expended in writing the characters 
in a large hand. 
Such is the history of the first trial of electric telegraphy in 
France. The causes which so long retarded the adoption of 
the electric telegraph in France will never be fully known. 
Injustice has certainly been done to M. Foy, who, as early as 
1842, went to England for the purpose of there studying 
Wheatstone’s electric telegraph. • But when Arago himself 
publicly expressed in the Chamber his doubts of the possibility 
of transmitting the current in a single circuit from Paris to 
Havre, it was allowable for the director of the aerial telegraph 
to hesitate. Moreover, the interests of the aerial telegraph were 
opposed to the introduction of a system that would supersede 
it. The slow progress of the electric telegraph when first 
introduced into France was due to the influence of certain 
personages, and the system did not begin to develop until 
De Vougy became director-in-chief of the telegraph lines on 
the 28th October, 1853. Aerial telegraphy continued in use 
until 1855, when after having been of some service in the 
Crimea it was there superseded. It died hard, however, and 
there were some inventors, such as Dr. Jules Guyot, whose 
interest led them to advocate the old system in a way which at 
the present day we should think strange. Dr. Guyot, who 
was justly considered a learned man of his time, must indeed 
have been blinded by his own interests, when the words we 
are about to quote were written by him on the 30th of April, 
1846 (observe the date), in a paper addressed to the Chamber 
of Deputies, in defence of the aerial telegraphs then threatened 
with destruction by the government proposition in which a 
credit for 408,650 francs (£16,346) was requested, for the pur¬ 
pose of replacing the aerial by the electric telegraph on the 
line to Lille. 
We shall give only short quotations from this lengthy 
