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

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