like manner the recording style covers over with blue lines all the surface of the paper excepting what forms the letters, thus

which may represent the letter O, as if written with white paint on a shaded ground. These electro-chemical telegraphs may, upon the principles we have described, transmit to a distance copies of profiles, or portraits, or outline drawings of any kind.

guage, and printed upon paper with considerable rapidity and precision. The paper and ink are self-supplied from a store which lasts for a considerable time. Plumbago or vermilion are considered preferable to printing ink, as they do not require to be so frequently replenished. Mr. Brett arranges his letters on the type wheel in the order of the frequency of their occurrence, which is as follows -e, t, a, i, o, n, s, h, r, w, d, l, c, f, m, u, b, g, p, j, y, k, v, x, q, z. He assures us, that messages may be printed more rapidly than a well-practiced person could write them; and that after a little experience, “a clerk might manipulate upon the finger keyboard upwards of 150 letters in a minute."

The art of photography has for a long time been employed in France for the detection and identification of thieves and other criminals. When the culprit is brought into the police office, his picture is instantaneously taken, and though he has learned to put his features on these occasions into contortions, The American printing telegraph of Mr. yet the artist never fails to catch them in House is a very complex but ingenious and their natural state. Mr. Gardiner, the gover- useful instrument. It has at the transmitnor of Bristol goal, has recently introduced ting station a key-board with each letter of the same practice. His apparatus cost only the alphabet upon a key. When the operator £10, and the expense of working it is not presses down the key with the letter A, for above £5 per annum. The following case, example, the same letter A, which is a type which he has published, shows the great upon a dial or wheel at the recording stavalue of his plan, which he is anxious to tion, is brought by the electric current into a have introduced throughout the kingdom. certain position, and having in its passage to "J. H. came into the Bristol goal upon com- this position received ink from the inking apmitment for trial, a perfect stranger to me paratus, a band or ribbon of paper is pressed and my officers. He was well attired, but against it and receives an impression of the very illiterate. The state of his hands conletter. The next letter of the message is vinced me that he had not done any hard brought into its position in the same way, work, while the superiority of his appearance and as the ribbon of paper is drawn forward, over his attainments led me to suspect that its impression is made next to the letter A he was a practiced thief. I forwarded his which preceded it. The advance of the likeness to several places, and soon received ribbon, the inking of the type, and the presinformation that he had been convicted in sure of the paper against it, are produced by London and Dublin. The London officer an apparatus moved by the operator, at the who recognized him by his portrait was sub-recording station, by the action of a treadle. poenaed as a witness, picked him out from among thirty or forty other prisoners, and gave evidence on his trial in October 1854, which led the Recorder to sentence him to six years' penal servitude." This admirable process may now be extended by means of the copying telegraph. We can not convey a photograph along a wire with its lights and shades, but an outline either of the whole person, or of the head, or profile, may be easily transmitted, and there can be no doubt that an outline of the culprit, even if the face is not seen at all, may often be sufficient for his identification.

The next telegraph that attracts our particular notice is the printing telegraph of Mr. J. Brett, who received a Council Medal at the Great Exhibition for this and other inventions connected with telegraphic communications which he exhibited. By this telegraph communications are sent in any lan

Grove's battery is used as the electric power, and about thirty cyclindrical pairs are requir ed to produce the effect for a distance of 100 miles. This apparatus was first employed in 1849 upon the line between Philadelphia and New York. It is now in use on upwards of 1,358 miles of the American lines, and messages printed at the rate of from thirty to thirty-five words, or from 165 to 200 letters per minute, have been printed in common Roman character at a distance of 500 miles. The celerity of transmission must no doubt depend on the skill of the operator, for we are informed by Mr. Turnbull, that on one occasion 365 letters per minute, or upwards of six per second, were transmitted from New York to Utica, a distance of 240 miles. The average number, however, as we have stated already, is from thirty to thirty-five words per minute, or 500 letters, when, as a newspaper, abbreviations are allowed. In the

stantly forming, each surpassing its predeces- | sons who erected a real modern telegraph, sor in the extent and grandeur of its schemes. In all the American telegraphs the despatches are conveyed by a single conducting wire. They all write or print their despatches, the telegraph of House in actual letters, and those of Morse and Bain in a cipher, Morse by indenting short and long lines upon a paper ribbon, and Bain, as we have seen, by writing them upon chemical paper. The following was the extent of their lines in 1853 and 1854.

the increase in little more than a year being 17,017 miles. The capital employed upon these lines is about a million and a half sterling.

A line of enormous magnitude, uniting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, has been projected from Natchez in the State of Mississippi to San Francisco in California, a distance of 2,400 miles, and a Company is said to be organized to carry out this scheme with a capital of upwards of a million sterling. When this line is completed, and Newfoundland joined by a submarine or transmarine telegraph with the old world, a message may be conveyed from Europe to the Pacific in less than a day.

This great extension of telegraphic com

munication in America arises from the exten

sive use which is made of it by all classes of society as a method of transmitting and receiving intelligence. The price of a message of ten words sent ten miles is about five pence, and for greater distances it is about 0035 pence per mile. The messages of the government have always the precedence, those for detecting criminals come next, then death messages, then cases of sickness. Important news by the press are next sent. Commercial men use the telegraph to a great extent, some houses paying even £200 per annum. Parties converse with one another at the distance of 500 or 700 miles. Sales are effected by itabsent friends correspond with their families -medical consultations pass along the wire, and in the towns near New York, invitations to a party, inquiries about health, and even jokes, all tremble along the copper line.

As one of the earliest inventors of telegraphic apparatus, and one of the first per

we must name M. Steinhill of Munich. The Bavarian telegraph, as this may be called, is an application of the discoveries of Oersted, Faraday, and Schweigger. In a copper wire about eight English miles long, and three-fourths of a line thick, M. Steinhill produced a voltaic current by the action of a rotatory magneto electric machine, similar to that of Clarke. The conducting wire terminates at different stations in multipliers of from 400 to 600 coils of very fine and insulated wire, in the middle of each of which is a magnetic needle placed on a vertical axis terminated by two points. The deviation of this needle from its primitive position by the electric current affords the means of obtaining telegraphic signals. As visible signals, however, appeared to M. Steinhill to be imperfect, from their requiring the constant attention of the operator, he placed on the side of his two magnetic needles two bells with different sounds, and by changing the direction of the current, he could ring either of these bells at pleasure. By means of the deviation of the needle, he gave motion to two pointed tubes containing a particular kind of ink, so that at each stroke upon the bell one of the tubes pressed its point upon a ribbon of paper revolving with an uniform motion, and made a mark corresponding to the needle and bell to which it was attached. The marks of each point were, of course, formed in the same line, so that we have two lines of marks upon one ribbon of paper. By combining the sounds and marks to the extent of four, M. Steinhill has obtained a spoken and a written alphabet, comprehending all the letters which are necessary to write every word of the German language. These are exhibited in the following diagram, and if we conceive each four marks to be joined by lines, we shall see how they become more distinct as signals :

ABDEF G H CH SCHIK L M N O P ::::::.

....

Ꭱ Ꮪ Ꭲ Ꮩ Ꮃ Ꮓ

...

The ten numerals are distinguished in a similar manner. This telegraph was established in July, 1837, and consequently it must have been invented, and its invention known, some time before. It commenced at the observatory of M. Steinhill in the Lerchenstrass of Munich, where the conducting wire was united to a plate of copper six inches square, buried in the ground. From

this the wire passed over the houses to the Academy of Sciences, where the second station was established. From this it went to the Royal Observatory at Bogenhausen, where there was a third station, and where the wire terminated in a plate of copper six inches square buried in the ground.

percha to the insulation of the wires, and laid down a telegraphic line to cross the Rhine at Cologne.

These steps, however, though very important, were not be to compared with the bold and successful attempt to carry a submarine cable from Dover to Calais. In 1850, the Submarine Telegraph Company made the necessary arrangements with the French and Belgian Governments, and Messrs. Newall and Co., the celebrated wire-rope makers of Gateshead, were intrusted with the manufacture of 24 miles of a wire-cable, to stretch over a distance of 21 miles.* For this purpose, four copper wires, the sixteenth of an inch in diameter, were covered with successive coatings of gutta percha. The wires were then twisted together, and surrounded with a mass of spun yarn soaked in grease and tar, so as to form a compact rope imper

M. Steinhill, to use his own words, "thinks that he has invented the first telegraph in the true sense of the word, that is to say, an apparatus which speaks a language easily comprehended, and which writes what it speaks, or rather what we wish it to speak." We concur with the inventor that this is the character of his telegraph, and we do not hesitate to express our admiration of the sagacity and ingenuity which it displays in all its parts. The fact that the earth may be used as one half of the conductor, is a discovery of vast importance, made, independently we doubt not, by him, but we owe it to Sirvious to water. In order to give strength to William Watson, who, in 1747, completed the circuit at great distances by water, and even by two miles of dry ground. But while we give this well-merited praise to M. Steinhill, we are not prepared to admit that his was the first real telegraph of the modern type." The claims of Professor Morse can not be overlooked, either as an inventor of telegraphic apparatus, or an active introducer of his invention as a national improvement. With all its ingenuity, the Bavarian telegraph had undoubted disadvantages, and we are told "that M. Steinhill himself has abandoned it in favor of a modification of the instrument of Morse."

The first promoters of the Electric Telegraph, sanguine as they were of its ultimate triumph over the prejudices of the railway companies, who at first rejected it, and of supine governments, who were blind to its advantages, and never contributed to its extension, they yet never anticipated that its lines would span wide arms of the sea, and, by crossing even oceans themselves, would girdle the terraqueous globe. The submarine telegraph was not a corollary of the terrestrial. It was a new idea, which it required genius to suggest, and science to realize. Dr. O'Shaughnessy, so early as 1839, succeeded in laying down an insulated conducting wire, attached to a chain-cable in the River Hoogly, which carried the electric current from one bank to another. Another step was made in 1847, by M. Siemens, who first applied gutta

*See Comptes Rendus, &c. tom. vii. p. 590-93. where he has described his invention.

Phil. Trans. 1747, or Priestley's Electricity, pp.102-109.

this combination, and protect it from external injury, ten galvanized wires are twisted round the rope, so as to form a submarine cable. This cable was completed in three weeks, but owing to an accident in laying it down, it suffered a twist or bend, which took it out of the direct line and prevented it from reaching to Saugat, south of Calais. It was necessary, therefore, to add to it another mile of cable, which being immediately done, though the task was not an easy one, the communication between Calais and Dover was completed on the 17th October 1851, and since that time, Great Britain and the Continent of Europe have, by this iron larynx, conversed with each other on every subject which can interest humanity. The expense of the cable was £9,000, and the station at Dover and Calais, £6,000. This line of telegraph belongs to the Chartered Submarine Telegraph Company.

By the private enterprise of Messrs Newall and Company, a still longer submarine cable was stretched across the Irish Channel from Holyhead to Dublin, or rather to Howth. In the deep sea portion of it, the gutta percha rope containing one copper wire, was surrounded by ten twisted iron wires, and the shore ends of the same rope surrounded by six iron wires. Transported from the works at Gateshead on twenty wagons, it was sent by railway to Maryport, where the Britannia carried it to Holyhead. On the 4th of June 1852, it was deposited in the Irish Channel, where the depth of water is 70 fathoms,

* An unsuccessful attempt had been made in 1850, when the cable broke by the action of the waves rubbing it against a ridge of rocks near Calais, at Cape Gris-nez.