Masters of Space. Walter Kellogg Towers
Automatic Transmitter.
Before we come to the story of Samuel F.B. Morse and the telegraph which actually proved a commercial success as the first practical carrier of intelligence which had been created for the service of man, we should pause to consider the achievements of Charles Wheatstone. Together with William Fothergill Cooke, another Englishman, he developed a telegraph line that, while it did not attain commercial success, was the first working telegraph placed at the service of the public.
Charles Wheatstone was born near Gloucester in 1802. Having completed his primary schooling, Charles was apprenticed to his uncle, who was a maker and seller of musical instruments. He showed little aptitude either in the workshop or in the store, and much preferred to continue the study of books. His father eventually took him from his uncle's charge and allowed him to follow his bent. He translated poetry from the French at the age of fifteen, and wrote some verse of his own. He spent all the money he could secure on books. Becoming interested in a book on Volta's experiments with electricity, he saved up his coppers until he could purchase it. It was in French, and he found the technical descriptions rather too difficult for his comprehension, so that he was forced to save again to buy a French-English dictionary. With the aid of this he mastered the volume.
Immediately his attention was turned toward the wonders of the infant science of electricity, and he eagerly endeavored to perform the experiments described. Aided by his older brother, he set to work on a battery as a source of current. Running short of funds with which to purchase copper plates, he again began to save his pennies. Then the idea occurred to him to use the pennies themselves, and his first battery was soon complete.
He continued his experiments in various fields until, at the age of nineteen, he first brought himself to public notice with his enchanted lyre. This he placed on exhibition in music-shops in London. It consisted of a small lyre suspended from the ceiling which gave forth, in turn, the sounds of various musical instruments. Really the lyre was merely a sounding-box, and the vibrations of the music were conveyed from instruments, played in the next room, to the lyre through a steel rod. The young man spent much time experimenting with the transmission of sound. Having conveyed music through the steel rod to his enchanted lyre, much to the mystification of the Londoners, he proposed to transmit sounds over a considerable distance by this method. He estimated that sound could be sent through steel rods at the rate of two hundred miles a second and suggested the use of such a rod as a telegraph between London and Edinburgh. He called his arrangement a telephone.
A scientific writer of the day, commenting in a scientific journal on the enchanted lyre which Wheatstone had devised, suggested that it might be used to render musical concerts audible at a distance. Thus an opera performed in a theater might be conveyed through rods to other buildings in the vicinity and there reproduced. This was never accomplished, and it remained for our own times to accomplish this and even greater wonders.
Wheatstone also devised an instrument for increasing feeble sound, which he called a microphone. This consisted of a pair of rods to convey the sound vibrations to the ears, and does not at all resemble the modern electrical microphone. Other inventions in the transmission and reproduction of sound followed, and he devoted no little attention to the construction of improved musical instruments. He even made some efforts to produce a practical talking-machine, and was convinced that one would be attained. At thirty-two he was widely famed as a scientist and had been made a professor of experimental physics in King's College, London. His most notable work at this time was measuring the speed of the electric current, which up to that time had been supposed to be instantaneous.
By 1835 Wheatstone had abandoned his plans for transmitting sounds through long rods of metal and was studying the telegraph. He experimented with instruments of his own and proposed a line across the Thames. It was in 1836 that Mr. Cooke, an army officer home on leave, became interested in the telegraph and devoted himself to putting it on a working basis. He had already exhibited a crude set when he came to Wheatstone, realizing his own lack of scientific knowledge. The two men finally entered into partnership, Wheatstone contributing the scientific and Cooke the business ability to the new enterprise. The partnership was arranged late in 1837, and a patent taken out on Wheatstone's five-needle telegraph.
In this telegraph a magnetic needle was located within a loop formed by the telegraph circuit at the receiving end. When the circuit was closed the needle was deflected to one side or the other, according to the direction of the current. Five separate circuits and needles were used, and a variety of signals could thus be sent. Five wires, with a sixth return wire, were used in the first experimental line erected in London in 1837. So in the year when Morse was constructing his models Wheatstone and Cooke were operating an experimental line, crude and impracticable though it was, and enjoying the sensations of communicating with each other at a distance.
In 1841 the telegraph was placed on public exhibition at so much a head, but it was viewed as an entertaining novelty without utility by the public at large. After many disappointments the inventors secured the cooperation of the Great Western Railroad, and a line was erected for a distance of thirteen miles. But the public would not patronise the line until its utility was strikingly demonstrated by the capture of the "Kwaker."
Early one morning a woman was found dead in her home in the suburbs of London. A man had been observed leaving the house, and his appearance had been noted. Inquiries revealed that a man answering his description had left on the slow train for London. Without the telegraph he could not have been apprehended. But the telegraph was available at this point, and his description was telegraphed ahead and the police in London were instructed to arrest him upon his arrival. "He is dressed as a Quaker," ran the message. There was no Q in the alphabet of-the five-needle instrument, and so the sender spelled Quaker, Kwaker. The clerk at the receiving end could not-understand the strange word, and asked to have it repeated again and again. Finally some one suggested that the message be completed and the whole was then deciphered. When the man dressed as a Quaker stepped from the slow train on his arrival at London the police were awaiting him; he was arrested and eventually confessed the murder. The news of this capture and the part the telegraph played gave striking proof of the utility of the new invention, and public skepticism and indifference were overcome.
By 1845 Wheatstone had so improved his apparatus that but one wire was required. The single-needle instrument pointed out the letters on the dial around it by successive deflections in which it was arranged to move, step by step, at the will of the sending station. The single-needle instrument, though generally displaced by Morse's telegraph, remained in use for a long time on some English lines. Wheatstone had also invented a type-printing telegraph, which he patented in 1841. This required two circuits.
With a working telegraph attained, the partners became involved in an altercation as to which deserved the honor of inventing the same. The quarrel was finally submitted to two famous scientists for arbitration. They reported that the telegraph was the result of their joint labors. To Wheatstone belongs the credit for devising the apparatus; to Cooke for introducing it and placing it before the public in working form. Here we see the combination of the man of science and the man of business, each contributing needed talents for the establishment of a great invention on a working basis.
Wheatstone's researches in the field of electricity were constant. In 1840 he devised a magnetic clock and proposed a plan by which many clocks, located at different points, could be set at regular intervals with the aid of electricity. Such a system was the forerunner of the electrically wound and regulated clocks with which we are now so familiar. He also devised a method for measuring the resistance which wires offer to the passage of an electric current. This is known as Wheatstone's bridge and is still in use in every electrical and physical laboratory. He also invented a sound telegraph by which signals were transmitted by the strokes of a bell operated by the current at the receiving end of the circuit.
The invention of Wheatstone's which proved to be of greatest lasting importance in connection with the telegraph was the automatic transmitter. By this system the message is first punched in a strip of paper which, when passed through the sending instrument, transmits the message. By this means he was able to send messages at the rate of one hundred words a minute. This automatic transmitter is much used for press telegrams where duplicate messages