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THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF TELEGRAPHS. 199
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Transcript
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
. ¦ •¦ The Word " Telegraph" (Derived Fr...
of two methods of communicating intelligence , one of which , was adopted many centuries afterwards by Bisliop Wilkins , who
describes the plan according * to the British alphabet in his curious ¦ work entitled " Mercuryor the Secret and Swift Messenger . " In
, addition to these alphabetic systems , which depended merely upon the number or alternate display and concealment of lights , Bishop
Wilkins describes one which rested upon the relative position of two lihts attached to two long poles , and which , he says , " for
its quickness g and speed is much to be preferred before any of the rest . "
Although the Marquis of Worcester , in his " Century of Inventions" 1663 tells us " How at a window , as far as the eye can
discover , black and , white , a man may hold discourse with his correspondent without noise made or notice taken , " yet the earliest
well-defined plan of telegraphic communication appears to have been invented by Dr . Hook , whose genius as a mechanical inventor
has perhaps never been surpassed . This ingenious man delivered , on the 21 st of May , 1684 , a
discourse to the Royal Society , showing how to communicate one _' s mind at distances of thirtyfortya hundred , or a hundred and
, , twenty miles , in as short a time almost as a man can write what he would have sent . The learned doctor , however , took to his
aid the then recently invented telescope ( or , as Bishop Wilkins calls it " Galileushis perspective . " ) This subject appears to have
, , occupied Dr . Hook ' s attention for some time , and the recent siege of Vienna by the Turks evidently revived the matter in his mind .
About sixteen or twenty years after Hook ' s paper , M . Amontous , of the Royal Academy of Paris , brought forward a very similar plan
in France , which was worked after the following manner . People were placed in several stations at a certain distance from one
another , and , by the help of a telescope , a man in one station was enabled to see a signal made in the next before liim ; he was then
required immediately to make the same signal , so that it might be seen by persons in the station after him . The signals used
were either large letters of the alphabet , or iigures of various shapes to represent them : the latter being the more valuable , as by
a change of key , the nature of the communication might be kept a secret from those actually employed in making the signals .
Amontous tried this method in a small tract of land before several persons of the highest rank at the Court of France . But though
Hook ' s invention and Amontous ' s modification were published all over Europeand the former as early as 1684 , yet they were not
practically a , pplied to any useful purpose until the time of the French revolution .
The ' telegraph then brought into use , in either 1793 or 1794 , was the invention of M . Chappeand though in general principles it was
, very similar to the machine invented by Hook , yet in detail it was
greatly superior . His first station was on the roof of the Palace
The Rise And Progress Of Telegraphs. 199
THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF TELEGRAPHS . 199
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), Nov. 1, 1859, page 199, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01111859/page/55/
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