The Victorian Internet Read Online Free PDF Page B

almost all his attention on shipboard," Richard recalled. Sidney remembered that his brother was "full of the subject
     of the telegraph during the walk from the ship, and for some days afterward could scarcely speak about anything else." Morse
     immediately set to work building an electric telegraph.
    F OUR YEARS LATER, in 1836, a young Englishman experienced a similar epiphany. William Fothergill Cooke was the son of a professor
     of anatomy who found himself at loose ends after resigning his commission in the Indian army, and took to making anatomical
     wax models of dissected cadavers for use in medical training. While studying anatomy in Heidelberg, he happened to attend
     a lecture about electricity, and before long he too had decided to try his hand at building an electric telegraph.
    The lecture Cooke attended included a demonstration of an experimental telegraph system that had been invented by Baron Pavel
     Lvovitch Schilling, a Russian diplomat, in the mid-1820S. Based on a galvanometer, it used combinations of the left and right
     swings of the galvanometer needle to indicate letters and numbers. Just as Ron­alds had done in Britain, Schilling promoted
     his invention to his superiors in government, and after many years of lobbying he managed to arrange a demonstration in i836
     in the presence of Czar Nicholas, who was very impressed and gave his approval for the construction of an official network.
     But Schilling died shortly afterward, and his telegraphic ambitions died with him.

    William Fothergill Cooke, one of the British inventors of the electric telegraph.
    However, Professor Muncke of Heidelberg University had a copy of one of Schilling's galvanometers, which he liked to use to
     demonstrate the principle of electromagnetism. After attending such a demonstration, Cooke was "struck with the wonderful
     power of electricity and strongly impressed with its applicability to the practical transmission of telegraphic intelligence."
     Realizing that this phenomenon might, as he put it, "be made available to purposes of higher utility than the illustration
     of a lec­ture," Cooke (who had been looking around for a way to make his fortune) immediately abandoned anatomy and decided
     to build an electric telegraph based on an improved version of Schilling's apparatus.
    Within three weeks he had built a prototype that combined three of Baron Schilling's needle telegraphs in a single device.
     It used a system of switches to control three needles via six wires. Each needle could be made to tilt to the left or the
     right, or could remain unmoved, and different combinations of the three needles' positions signified different letters.
    Having built prototypes that were capable of sending messages over wires thirty or forty feet long, Cooke, who had by this
     time returned to England, was eager to try out his apparatus over greater distances. His friend Burton Lane, a solicitor at
     Lincoln's Inn in London, gave him the use of his office for three days so that he could lay out a mile of wire. "I had to
     lay out this enormous length of 1,760 yards in Burton Lane's small office, in such a manner as to prevent one part touching
     another; the patience required and the fatigue undergone was far from trivial," Cooke wrote in a letter to his family. Worse
     still, the result was disappointing: His apparatus simply didn't work with longer wires. After a week, he had outstayed his
     welcome, and Lane wanted his office back.
    Meanwhile in New York, Morse, working independently, had come up against exactly the same problem. Although his telegraph
     worked over short distances, all his experiments with longer wires had failed. Each man realized that there was more to the
     electric side of building a telegraph than first suspected, and neither had the scientific training to get past this hurdle.
    In fact, the problem had already been solved by Joseph Henry, an American physicist, who had managed to get a battery and
     an