Heroes of the Telegraph

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Author Of 'Electricity And Its Uses,' Pioneers Of Electricity,' 'The Wire And The Wave'; And Joint Author Of 'Munro And Jamieson's Pocket-Book Of Electrical Rules And Tables.'

(Note: All accents etc. have been omitted. Italics have been converted to capital letters. The British 'pound' sign has been written as 'L'. Footnotes have been placed in square brackets at the place in the text where a suffix originally indicated their existence.)

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But spark or frictional electric telegraphs were destined to give way to those actuated by the voltaic current, as the chemical mode of signalling was superseded by the electro-magnet. In 1820 the separate courses of electric and magnetic science were united by the connecting discovery of Oersted, who found that a wire conveying a current had the power of moving a compass-needle to one side or the other according to the direction of the current.

La Place, the illustrious mathematician, at once saw that this fact could be utilised as a telegraph, and Ampere, acting on his suggestion, published a feasible plan. Before the year was out, Schweigger, of Halle, multiplied the influence of the current on the needle by coiling the wire about it. Ten years later, Ritchie improved on Ampere's method, and exhibited a model at the Royal Institution, London. About the same time, Baron Pawel Schilling, a Russian nobleman, still further modified it, and the Emperor Nicholas decreed the erection of a line from Cronstadt to St. Petersburg, with a cable in the Gulf of Finland but Schilling died in 1837, and the project was never realised.

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