ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH-SCIENTIFIC ERIAL VOYAGE OF MESSRS. BARRAL AND BIXIO CONCLUSION.

SUCH is the latest and greatest improvement of the Electric Telegraph.

It has been objected to this system of Mr. Bain, that it provides a superfluity of power; that the exigencies of communication do not demand the extraordinary celerity and facility of despatch which it supplies; that to use it for the common purposes of telegraphic communication, is like employing a steamengine to thread a needle.

The answer to this is obvious. The public have not yet become familiar with the capabilities and the uses of this vast agent of intercommunication, which will soon show itself to bear to the post-office the same relation as the stocking-loom does to the knitting-needle, or the spinning frame to the distaff. They are now restrained from calling into play the functions of the Electric Telegraph by the excessive cost of transmission. To send a communication from London to Edinburgh or Glasgow, costs at the rate of eight-pence per word. Using round numbers, a letter of moderate length, say one consisting of 300 words, would therefore cost ten pounds, and the answer to it, supposing it of equal length, as much more. Now, except in cases of the very highest importance, such a tariff constitutes an absolute prohibition. But with telegraphs working on the system adopted in England, it is difficult to see how this can be avoided. The tariff may be too high, and some reduction of its amount might increase the profits of the company, by augmenting the quantity of business done in a greater ratio than the diminution of the rate of charge. But such an extent of communication as we contemplate, and as we feel assured will, sooner or later, be realized, would

telegraphic messages may, in some measure, be estimated from the state of telegraphic business in the United States. There a tariff, considerably lower than that which is established in England, has been adopted; and we find, accordingly, that the amount of the communications is increased in an enormous proportion, and that their character is altogether different. While, for example, no London journal, save the Times, is able to afford a daily telegraphic despatch of the French news, exceeding a few lines in length, and that only from Dover to London, the New York journals, the price of which is only one penny, while that of the London journals is five pence, receive by telegraph complete and detailed reports of the proceedings of Congress at Washington.

During the trial of Professor Webster at Boston, on the charge of murder, which produced so much excitement in the United States and in Europe, a complete report of the examination of witnesses, and the speeches of counsel, was forwarded every night by telegraph, from Boston to New York, and appeared in the morning journals the next day.

Now, the telegraphic tariff in America, though inferior to that adopted in Europe, is very far above what it might, and no doubt will be reduced to, when the improved and accelerated method of transmission, which we have described, shall be adopted.

The methods now used in America are those of Morse, and the earlier improvements of Bain. The method of transmitting a written report by the application of the perforated ribbon of paper, which we have described, has been only recently patented in that country, and has not yet been brought into operation, consequently the celerity of communication, which would enable the transmission to be accomplished at a vastly re

The London journals had the spirit, not long ince, to try, by experiment, whether the adantage to be derived from a long and detailed telegraphic despatch daily transmitted From Paris would, to use a commercial term, Day. A contract was, as we are assured, made with the telegraphic establishment, and a sum of more than £400 per month was actually paid for such daily communication. It was found, however, that the advantage was not adequate to the expense, for even at this price the intelligence was obliged to be conveyed in so compressed a style as to be deprived of its principal attraction.

Even the daily despatch of the Times, now published, consists, as will be perceived by reference to that journal, of a few heads of news, a sort of table of contents to the detailed despatch which is to follow. Such communications can have no interest or utility, except in cases where events of great importance have to be announced, a circumstance which it is evident can never be of daily occurrence.

By means of two conducting wires it is impossible, with the telegraphs now used in England, to transmit more than twelve hundred words per hour, and although that average capability be claimed for the existing system, we doubt extremely whether it can be realized one day with another. But assuming it to be practicable, it would follow that in a day of twelve hours two conducting wires could not transmit more than fourteen thousand four hundred words, which would be equivalent to 144 despatches of the average length of 100 words. Now it is clear that any reduction of the tariff which would give anything approaching to full play to the demands of the public, once awakened to the advantages which such a system of communication would offer, would create a demand for transmission far exceeding the powers of any practicable number of conducting wires. But with a system constructed on the principle adopted by Mr. Bain, a single wire is capable of transmitting about 20,000 words. per hour, and two wires would therefore transmit 40,000 per hour, being thirty-three times more than can now be transmitted.

By the adoption of this system, therefore, the tariff of transmission might, with the same profit, be reduced in a ratio of about thirty to one, so that a despatch, the transmission of which would now cost a pound, would be sent at the cost of eight-pence.

D

would be developed, and a much greater reduction of expenses effected.

When the powers of this improved telegraph shall be brought into full operation, and when this mode of intercommunication shall be available by the public in all parts of Europe, great changes in the social and

commercial relations of the centres of commerce and population must be witnessed. Hitherto the use of the telegraph on the Continent has been limited to the government. The public has been altogether excluded from it. Such a system, however, cannot be of long duration, and the precursors of a speedy change are already apparent. A project of law has been presented to the Legislative Assembly by the French Government, to open the telegraph to commerce and the public. Lines of electric telegraph have been constructed, and are already in operation, along the principle lines of railway in France. A commission has been appointed by the Belgian Government, to report upon the means which ought to be adopted to construct lines of electric telegraph throughout that kingdom. Lines of considerable extent are in operation in the Prussian States, and still more extended systems are in preparation. Measures are in progress for the establishment of lines of electric telegraphs in the territories of Austria, Saxony, Bavaria, Wirtemburg, Baden, and all the lesser states of Germany. The Emperor of Russia has issued orders, for the construction of lines of telegraphic wires to connect St. Petersburgh with Moscow, and with the Prussia, Saxon, and Austrian lines of telegraph.

The measures for sinking a system of conducting wires in the channel between Dover and Calais are in progress. Of the ultimate practicability of this project there seems no ground for doubt. In the United States wires have been already sunk in several arms of the sea, under which a never-ending stream of dispatches passes, and although the width of these pieces of water is in no case so considerable as that of the Straits of Dover, difficulties of the same kind as those encountered in the latter case have been successfully surmounted.

When Dover shall have been united with Calais, by the realization of this project, and when the various lines now in progress, and contemplated, on the Continent shall be completed, London will be connected by continuous lines of telegraphic communication

Vienna, Trieste, Munich, Augsburgh, Stuttgard, and the towns along the right bank of the Rhine, from Cologne to Basle; also with Amsterdam, the Hague, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and every part of Belgium; also with Boulogne, Lille, Valenciennes, Paris, Strasburgh, Bourdeaux, Lyons, Marseilles, and all the intermediate towns.

On the arrival of the Indian mail at Marseilles the leading journals of London,at a cost which would appear fabulous, have obtained their dispatches by means of special couriers riding express from Marseilles to Boulogne, and by express steamers from Boulogne to Folkestone. All this will be changed. The agent of the Times at Marseilles will receive from the Alexandrian steamer the dispatches ready perforated on the ribbon of paper (a process which may be executed before their arrival); he will take it to the telegraph office, where it will be attached to the instrument, and will be transmitted direct to London at the rate of 20,000 words per hour on each wire. Two wires will, therefore, transmit three columns of the Times in eight minutes!!

If a London merchant desire to dispatch an important communication to his correspondent at Hamburg or Berlin, he will be able to do so, and to obtain an answer in five minutes, provided the letter and answer do not exceed a thousand words, and that his correspondent is ready without delay to reply.

If the Foreign Secretary desire to send an important dispatch to the British minister at Vienna, he is obliged at present to expedite it by a queen's messenger traveling express. He will then have only to get it perforated on a ribbon of paper in characters known only to himself and the ambassador, and to forward it to Vienna at the rate of three hundred words minute. per

A project has been announced in the journals, which might be justly regarded as the creature of some candidate for Bedlam, if, after what we have stated as being actually practised, we could dare to pronounce anything of the kind impracticable. The project we allude to is, to carry a telegraphic communication across the Atlantic! It is proposed to encase a number of wires in a coating which will not be affected by sea water, and to sink it in the ocean! One extremity of this electric cable is to be fixed at New York or Boston, and the other, we presume, at Galway!

On the

of the first meeting of the

Dr. Lardner, in a speech delivered in the Rotunda, startled the public by a prediction. that "the day was at hand when a railway across Ireland, from Dublin to Galway, o some other western port connected with a line of Atlantic steamers, would render Ireland one stage on a great highway, connecting London with New York." It is a fact sufficiently curious, that this prediction has been literally verified; but what would have been said at that time, had the Doctor hinted at the bare possibility of an electric wire crossing Ireland, and forming a part of one continuous wire uniting these capitals, along which, streams of intelligence, political, commercial, and social, would be constantly flowing?

It is curious to observe how often that, which is regarded as fantastical and chimerical in one age, acquires the character of cold reality in another. Strada, in one of his prolusions, says Addison,

"Gives an account of a chimerical correspondence between two friends by the help of a certain loadstone, which had such a virtue in it, that if these needles so touched began to move, the other, touched by two several needles, when one of though at ever so great a distance, moved at the same time and in the same manner. He tells us that two friends, being each of them possessed of these needles, made a kind of dial-plate, inscribing it with twenty-four letters, in the same manner as the hours of the day are marked upon the ordinary dial-plate. They then fixed one of the needles on each of these plates in such a manner, that it could move round without impediment, so as to point to any of the twenty-four letters. Up

should impute a statement to the effect, that a steam It is a curious circumstance that public rumor voyage across the Atlantic was a physical impossibility, to Dr. Lardner, who, as we have seen, was the first to predict the establishment of steam communication with America, and who made that prediction on an occasion at once so memorable and so

public, in the presence of at least three thousand persons. The calumny, however, being fabricated and circulated by interested parties, amused those who delight to find scientific men committing blunthe authentic reports of the day which appeared in ders; and, although it has been since refuted, and the Times newspaper, of Dr. Lardner's speeches delivered in Dublin in 1836, and in Bristol in 1837, to the very contrary effect, have been republished, the public still clings to what it considers a capital joke against scientific men and their predictions. The Times itself revived the old story in the year 1845, when Dr. Lardner addressed a letter to the editor, in which he reproduced from the Times paper the report of the speech, from which it appeared, that the statement made by him was precisely the reverse. This settled the point for the moment: but

itself

sion to avail themselves of the experience of those who had made ærostation a mere specticle for profit. They thought that to touch pitch they must be defiled, and preferred danger and the risk of failure to such association.

It is now about two months since M. Barral, a chemist of some distinction at Paris, and M. Bixio, a member of the Legislative Assembly (whose name will be remembered in connexion with the bloody insurrection of June, 1848, when, bravely and humanely discharging his duty in attempting to turn his guilty fellowcitizens, from their course, he nearly shared the fate of the Archbishop, and was severely wounded,) resolved upon making a grand experiment with a view to observe and record the meteorological phenomena of the strata of the atmosphere, at a greater height and with more precision than had hitherto been accomplished. But from the motives which we have explained, the project was kept secret, and it was resolved that the experiment should be made at an hour of the morning, and under circumstances, which would prevent it from degenerating into an exhibition. MM. Arago and Regnault undertook to supply the ærial voyagers with a programme of the proposed performance and instruments suited to the projected observations. M. Arago prepared the programme, in which was stated clearly what observations were to be made at every stage of the ascensional movement.

It was intended that the balloon should be so managed as to come to rest at certain altitudes, when barometric, thermometric, hygrometric, polariscropic, and other observations, were to be taken and noted; the balloon after each series of observations to make a new ascent.

The precious instruments by which these observations were to be made were prepared, and, in some cases, actually fabricated and graduated, by the hands of M. Regnault himself.

of exhibition, and who had become familia with the practical management of the ma chine, a much more favorable result woul have ensued. As it was, the two voyager ascended for the first time, and placed them selves in a position like that of a natura philosopher, who, without previous practice should undertake to drive a locomotive, with its train, on a railway at fifty miles an hour rejecting the humble but indispensable aid o an experienced engine-driver.

The necessary preparations having beer made, and the programme and the instru ments prepared, it was resolved to make the ascent from the garden behind the Observa tory at Paris, a plateau of some elevation and free from buildings and other obstacles at day-break of Saturday, the 29th June At midnight the balloon was brought to th spot, but the inflation was not completed un til nearly 10 o'clock, a.m.

It has since been proved that the balloor was old and worn, and that it ought no to have been supplied for such an occasion

It was obviously patched, and it is now known that two sempstresses were employed during the preceding day in mending it, and some stitching even was found necessary after it had arrived at the Observatory.

The net-work, which included and support ed the car was new, and not originally made with a view to the balloon it inclosed, the consequences of which will be presently seen

The night between Friday and Saturday was one of continual rain, and the balloon and its netting became thoroughly saturated with moisture. By the time the inflation had been completed, it became evident that th net-work was too small; but in the anxiety to carry into effect the project, the conse quences of this were most unaccountably overlooked. We say unaccountably, becaus it is extremely difficult to conceive how ex perimental philosophers and practised ob servers, like MM. Arago and Regnault, to say nothing of numerous subordinate scien tific agents who were present, did not antici pate what must have ensued in the uppe regions of the air. Nevertheless, such wa the fact.

the resolution to ascend alone. unaccompa