Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty | Page 9

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,