Notable Events Of The Nineteenth Century Part 10

Considerable progress was made in telegraphy in the after part of the eighteenth century. This progress related to the transmission of visible messages through the air. In the time of the French Revolution such contrivance occupied the attention of military commanders and of governing powers. A certain noted engineer named Chappe invented at this epoch a telegraph that might be properly called successful.

Chappe was the son of the distinguished French astronomer, Jean Chappe d'Auteroche, who died at San Lucar, California, in 1769. This elder Chappe had previously made a journey into Siberia, and had seen from that station the transit of Venus in 1761. Hoping to observe the recurring transit, eight years afterward, he went to the coast of our then almost unknown California, but died there as stated above.

The younger Chappe, being anxious to serve the Revolution, invented his telegraph; but in doing so he subjected himself to the suspicions of the more ignorant, and on one notable occasion was brought into a strait place--both he and his invention. The story of this affair is given by Carlyle in the second volume of his "French Revolution." One knows not whether to smile or weep over the graphic account which the crabbed philosopher gives of Chappe and his work in the following extract:

"What, for example," says he, "is this that Engineer Chappe is doing in the Park of Vincennes? In the Park of Vincennes; and onward, they say, in the Park of Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau, the a.s.sa.s.sinated deputy; and still onward to the Heights of Ecouen and farther, he has scaffolding set up, has posts driven in; wooden arms with elbow-joints are jerking and fugling in the air, in the most rapid mysterious manner! Citoyens ran up, suspicious. Yes, O Citoyens, we are signaling; it is a device, this, worthy of the Republic; a thing for what we will call far-writing without the aid of postbags; in Greek it shall be named Telegraph. '_Telegraphe sacre_,' answers Citoyenism.

For writing to Traitors, to Austria?--and tears it down, Chappe had to escape and get a new legislative Decree. Nevertheless he has accomplished it, the indefatigable Chappe; this his Far-writer, with its wooden arms and elbow-joints, can intelligibly signal; and lines of them are set up, to the North Frontiers and elsewhither. On an Autumn evening of the Year Two, Far-writer having just written that Conde Town has surrendered to us, we send from the Tuileries Convention-Hall this response in the shape of a Decree: 'The name of Conde is changed to _Nord-Libre_ (North Free). The Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the country.' To the admiration of men!

For lo! in some half-hour, while the Convention yet debates, there arrives this new answer: 'I inform thee (_Je t'annonce_), Citizen President, that the Decree of Convention, ordering change of the name Conde into North Free; and the other, declaring that the Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the country, are transmitted and acknowledged by Telegraph. I have instructed my Officer at Lille to forward them to North Free by express.' Signed, Chappe."

This successful telegraph of Engineer Chappe was not an electric telegraph, but a sunlight telegraph. Is it in reality any more wonderful to use the electrical wave in the transmission of intelligible symbols than to use a wave of light? Such seems to have been the opinion of mankind; and the coming of the electric telegraph was long postponed. The invention was made by slow approaches. In our country the notion has prevailed that Morse did all--that others did nothing; but this notion is very erroneous.

We are not to suppose that the Chappe method of telegraphing became extinct after its first successful work. Other references to what we _suppose_ to be the same instrument are found in the literature of the age. The wonder is that more was not written and more accomplished by the agency of Chappe's invention. In the fall of the year 1800, General Bonaparte, who had been in Egypt and the East, returned to Europe and landed at Frejus on his way to Paris, with the dream of universal dominion in his head. In the first volume of the _Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte_, his secretary M. de Bourrienne, writing of the return to France says:

"We arrived in Paris on the 24th Vendemiaire (the sixteenth of October). As yet he (Napoleon) knew nothing of what was going on; for he had seen neither his wife nor his brothers, who were looking for him on the Burgundy Road. The news of our landing at Frejus had reached Paris _by a_ _telegraphic despatch_. Madame Bonaparte, who was dining with M. Gohier when that despatch was communicated to him, as President of the Directory, immediately set off to meet her husband," etc. We should be glad to know in what particular form that "telegraphic despatch" was delivered! But such are Bourrienne's words!

To the American reader the name of Karl Friedrich Gauss may have an unfamiliar sound. Gauss was already a youth of fourteen when Morse was born, though the latter outlived the German mathematician by seventeen years. Gauss was a professor of Mathematics at Gottingen, where he pa.s.sed nearly the whole of his life. In the early part of the century he distinguished himself in astronomy and in other branches of physical science. He then became interested in magnetic and electrical phenomena, and in 1833, with the a.s.sistance of Wilhelm Eduard Weber, one of his fellow-professors, who died in 1891, he erected at Gottingen a magnetic observatory. There he began to experiment with the subtle agent which was soon to be placed at the service of mankind.

The observatory was constructed without the use of iron, in order that the magnetic phenomena might be studied under favorable conditions.

Humboldt and Arago had previously constructed laboratories without using iron--for iron is the great disturber--and from them Gauss obtained his hint. Weber was also expert in the management of magneto-electrical currents. Gauss, with the aid of his co-worker, constructed a line of telegraph, and sent signals by the agency of the magnetic current to a neighboring town. This was nearly ten years before Morse had fully succeeded in like experimentation.

It appears that the German scientists regarded their telegraph as simply the tangible expression or apparatus to ill.u.s.trate scientific facts and principles. It was for this reason, we presume, that no further headway was made at Gottingen in the development of telegraphy. It was also for the additional reason that men rarely or never accept what is really the first demonstration and exemplification of a new departure in scientific knowledge. Such is the timidity of the human mind--such its conservative attachment to the known thing and to the old method as against the new--that it prefers to stay in the tumble-down ruin of bygone opinions and practices, rather than go up and inhabit the splendid but unfamiliar temple of the future.

Gauss and Weber were left with their scientific discovery; and, indeed, Morse in the New World of practicality and quick adaptations, was about to be rejected and cast out. The sorrows through which he pa.s.sed need not here be recounted. They are sufficiently sad and sufficiently humiliating. His unavailing appeals to the American Congress are happily hidden in the rubbish of history, and are somewhat dimmed by the intervention of more than half a century. But his humiliation was extreme. Smart Congressmen, partisans, the ignorant flotsam of conventions and intrigues, heard the philosopher with contempt. A few heard him with sympathy; and the opinion in his favor grew, as if by the pressure of shame, until he was finally supported, and in a midnight hour of an expiring session of Congress, or rather in the early morning of the fourth of March, 1843, the munificent appropriation of $30,000 was placed at his disposal for the construction of an experimental line between Was.h.i.+ngton and Baltimore.

The one thing was done. A new era of instantaneous communication between men and communities at a distance the one from the other was opened--an era which has proved to be an era of light and knowledge.

Nor may we conclude this sketch without noting the fact that, not a few of the members of the House of Representatives who voted the pittance for the construction of the first line of actual working telegraph in the world, went home to their const.i.tuents and were ignominiously beaten for re-election--this this for the slight service which they had rendered to their country and the human race!

When in New York City, turn thou to the west out of Fifth avenue into Twenty-second street, to the distance of, perhaps, ten rods, and there on a little marble slab set in the wall of a house on the north side of the street, read this curious epitaph:

"In this house lived Professor S.F.B, Morse for thirty years and died!"

THE NEW LIGHT OF MEN.

By the law of nature our existence is divided between daylight and darkness. There is evermore the alternate baptism into dawn and night.

The division of life is not perfect between suns.h.i.+ne and shadow; for the suns.h.i.+ne bends around the world on both horizons, and lengthens the hemisphere of day by a considerable rim of twilight. To this reduction of the darkness we must add moons.h.i.+ne and starlight. But we must also subtract the influence of the clouds and other incidental conditions of obscuration. After these corrections are made, there is for mankind a great band of deep night, wherein no man can work.

Whoever goes forth at some noon of night, when the sky is wrapped with clouds, must realize the utter dependence of our kind upon the light.

How great is the blessing of that sublime and beautiful fact which the blind Milton apostrophizes in the beginning of the Third Book of _Paradise Lost_:

"Hail, holy Light! offspring of heaven first-born!

Or of Eternal coeternal beam, May I express thee unblamed? since G.o.d is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate!

Or hear'st thou rather, pure ethereal stream, Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the sun, Before the heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of G.o.d, as with a mantle, didst invest The rising world of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless infinite."

How then shall man overcome the darkness? It is one of the problems of his existence. He is obliged with each recurring sunset of his life to enter the tunnel of inky darkness and make his way through as best he may to the morning. What kind of lantern shall he carry as he gropes?

The evolution of artificial light and of the means of producing it const.i.tutes one of the most interesting chapters in the history of our race. Primeval man knew fire. He learned in some way how to kindle fire. The lowest barbarian may be defined as a fire-producing animal.

The cave men of ancient Europe kindled fires in their dark caverns.

The lake dwellers had fires, both on sh.o.r.e and in their huts over the water. Wherever there was a fire there was artificial light. The primitive barbarian walked around the embers of his fire and saw his shadow stretching out into the gloom of the surrounding night.

With the slow oncoming of a better estate, the early philosophers of mankind invented lamps. Very rude indeed were the first products in this kind of art. Note the character of the lamps that have survived to us from the age of stone. Still they are capable of holding oil and retaining a wick. Further on we have lamps from the age of bronze, and at last from the age of iron. Polite antiquity had its silver lamps, its copper lamps, and in a few instances its lamps of gold. The palaces of kings were sometimes lighted from golden reservoirs of oil.

Such may be seen among the relics preserved to us from the civilizations of Western Asia. The palace of Priam, if we mistake not, had lamps of gold.

The Great Greeks were the makers of beautiful lamps. In the age of the Grecian ascendancy the streets of Athens and of some other h.e.l.lenic cities were lighted by night. The material of such illumination was oil derived either from animals or from vegetable products, such as the olive. In the forms of Greek lamps we have an example of artistic beauty not surpa.s.sed or equaled in modern time; but the mechanical contrivance for producing the light was poor and clumsy.

Rome lighted herself artificially. She had her lamps and her torches and her chandeliers, as we see in the relics of Herculaneum and Pompeii. A Roman procession by night was not wanting in brilliancy and picturesqueness. The quality of the light, however was poor, and there was always a cloud of smoke as well as of dust hovering about Roman processions and triumphs.

The earlier Middle Ages improved not at all; but with the Renaissance there was an added elegance in the apparatus of illumination.

Chandeliers were made in Italy, notably in Venice, that might rival in their elegance anything of the present age. The art of such products was superior; but the old barbaric clumsiness was perpetuated in the mechanical part. With the rise of scientific investigation under the influence of inductive philosophy, all kinds of contrivances for the production of artificial light were improved. The ingenuity of man was now turned to the mechanical part, and one invention followed another with a constant development in the power of illumination.

We can but remember, however, that until the present age many of the old forms of illuminating apparatus have been retained. In the ruder communities such things may still be seen. Civilization in its progress from east to west across our continent followed a tallow candle. The light of it was seen by night through the window of the pioneer's cabin. The old forms of hanging lamps have hardly yet disappeared from the advance posts of the marching column. But meanwhile, other agencies have been discovered, and other forms of apparatus invented, until the branch of knowledge relating to illumination has become both a science and an art.

Within the memories of men still living, a great transformation has occurred. Animal oils have virtually ceased to be employed as the sources of light. The vegetable world is hardly any longer drawn upon for its products. Already before the discovery of petroleum and its multifarious uses the invention by chemical methods of illuminating materials had begun. Many kinds of burning fluid had been introduced.

The reign of these was short-lived; coal oil came in at the door and they flew out at the window. Great was the advantage which seemed to come to mankind from the use of kerosene lamps. Those very forms of illumination which are now regarded as crude in character and odious in use were only a generation ago hailed with delight because of their superiority to the former agents of illumination. Thus much may suffice for all that precedes the coming of the New Light of men. The new light flashes from the electrical glow. The application of electricity to purposes of illumination marks an era in human progress. The electrical light is, we think, high up among the most valuable and striking stages of civilized life in the nineteenth century. It is best calculated to affect favorably the welfare of the people, especially in great cities. The illumination of a city by night, making its streets to be lighted as if by day, is a more interesting and important fact in human history than any political conflict or mere change of rulers.

About the beginning of the eighth decade of this century the project of introducing the electric light for general purposes of illumination began to be agitated. It was at once perceived that the advantages of such lighting were as many as they were obvious. The light is so powerful as to render practicable the performance of many mechanical operations as easily by night as by day. Again, the danger of fire from illuminating sources is almost wholly obviated by the new system.

The ease and expedition of all kinds of night employment are greatly enhanced. A given amount of illumination can be produced much more cheaply by electricity than by any means of gas lighting or ordinary combustion. Among the first to demonstrate the feasibility of electric lighting was the philosopher Gramme, of Paris. In the early part of 1875 he successfully lighted his laboratory by means of electricity. Soon afterward the foundry of Ducommun & Co., of Mulhouse, was similarly lighted. In the course of the following year the apparatus for lighting, by means of carbon candles was introduced into many of the princ.i.p.al factories of France and other leading countries of Europe. It may prove of interest in this connection to sketch briefly the princ.i.p.al features of the electric light system, and to trace the development of that system in our own and other countries.

Lighting by electricity is accomplished in several ways. In general, however, the principle by which the result is accomplished is one, and depends upon the resistance which the electrical current meets in its transmission through various substances. There are no perfect conductors of electricity. In proportion as the non-conductive quality is prevalent in a substance, especially in a metal, the resistance to the pa.s.sage of electricity is p.r.o.nounced, and the consequent disturbance among the molecular particles of the substance is great.

Whenever such resistance is encounted in a circuit, the electricity is converted into heat, and when the resistance is great, the heat is, in turn, converted into light, or rather the heat becomes phenomenal in light; that is, the substance which offers the resistance glows with the transformed energy of the impeded current. Upon this simple principle all the apparatus for the production of electric light is produced.

Among the metallic substances, the one best adapted by its low conductivity to such resistance and transformation of force, is platinum. The high degree of heat necessary to fuse this metal adds to its usefulness and availability for the purpose indicated. When an electrical current is forced along a platinum wire too small to transmit the entire volume, it becomes at once heated--first to a red, and then to a white glow--and is thus made to send forth a radiance like that of the sun. Of the non-metallic elements which offer similar resistance, the best is carbon. The infusibility of this substance renders it greatly superior to platinum for purposes of the electric light.

Near the beginning of the present century it was discovered by Sir Humphry Davy that carbon points may be rendered incandescent by means of a powerful electrical current. The discovery was fully developed in the year 1809, while the philosopher just referred to was experimenting with the great battery of the Royal Inst.i.tution of London. He observed--rather by accident than by design or previous antic.i.p.ation--that a strong volume of electricity pa.s.sing between two bits of wood charcoal produces tremendous heat, and a light like that of the sun. It appears, however, that Davy at first regarded the phenomenon rather in the nature of an interesting display of force than as a suggestion of the possibility of turning night into day.

For nearly three-quarters of a century the discovery made by Sir Humphrey lay dormant among the great ma.s.s of scientific facts revealed in the laboratory. In the course of time, however, the nature of the new fact began to be apprehended. The electric lamp in many forms was proposed and tried. The scientists, Niardet, Wilde, Brush, Fuller, and many others of less note, busied themselves with the work of invention. Especially did Gramme and Siemens devote their scientific genius to the work of turning to good account the knowledge now fully possessed of the transformability of the electric current into light.

The experiments of the last named two distinguished inventors brought us to the dawn of the new era in artificial lighting. The Russian philosopher, Jablokhkoff, carried the work still further by the practical introduction of the carbon candle. Other scientists--Carre, Foucault, Serrin, Rapieff, and Werdermann--had, at an earlier or later day, thrown much additional information into the common stock of knowledge relative to the illuminating possibilities of electricity.

Finally, the acc.u.mulated materials of science fell into the hands of that untutored but remarkably radical inventor, Thomas A. Edison, who gave himself with the utmost zeal to the work of removing the remaining difficulties in the problem.

Edison began his investigations in this line of invention in September of 1878, and in December of the following year gave to the public his first formal statement of results. After many experiments with platinum, he abandoned that material in favor of the carbon-arc _in vacuo_. The latter is, indeed, the essential feature of the Edison light. A small semicircle, or horseshoe, of some substance, such as a filament of bamboo reduced to the form of pure carbon, the two ends being attached to the poles of the generating-machine, or dynamo, as the engine is popularly called, is enclosed in a gla.s.s bulb, from which the air has been carefully drawn, and is rendered incandescent by the pa.s.sage of an electric current. The other important features of Edison's discovery relate to the divisibility of the current, and its control and regulation in volume by the operator. These matters were fully mastered in the Edison invention, and the apparatus rendered as completely subject to management as are the other varieties of illuminating agencies.

It were vain to speculate upon the future of electric lighting. The question of artificial illumination has had much to do with the progress of the human race, particularly when aggregated into cities.

Doubtless the old systems of lighting are destined in time to give place altogether to the splendors of the electric glow. The general effect of the change upon society must be as marked as it is salutary.

Darkness, the enemy of good government and morality in great cities, will, in great measure, be dispelled by the beneficent agent, over which the genius of Davy, Gramme, Brush, Edison, and a host of other explorers in the new continents of science has so completely triumphed. The ease, happiness, comfort, and welfare of mankind must be vastly multiplied, and the future must be reminded, in the glow that dispels the night, of that splendid fact that the progress of civilization depends, in a large measure, upon a knowledge of Nature's laws, and the diffusion of that knowledge among the people.

THE TELEPHONE.

Perhaps no other great invention of man has been within so short a period so widely distributed as the telephone. The use of the instrument is already co-extensive with civilization. The cost at which the instruments are furnished is still so considerable that the poor of the world are not able to avail themselves of the invention; but in the so-called upper circles of society the use of the telephone is virtually universal. It has made its way from the city to the town, from the town to the village, from the village to the hamlet, and even to the country-side where the millions dwell.

The telephone came by a speedy revelation. It was born of that intense scientific activity which is the peculiarity of our age. The antecedent knowledge out of which it sprang had existed in various forms for a long time. The laws of acoustics were among the first to be investigated after a true physical science began to be taught. The phenomena of sound are so universal and experimentation in sound production so easy, that the governing laws were readily discovered.

Acoustics, we think, foreran somewhat the science of heat, as the science of heat preceded that of light. Electricity came last. The telephone is an instrument belonging not wholly, not chiefly, but only in part, to acoustics. It owes its existence to magnetic induction and electrical transmission as much as to the mere action of sound. One foot of the instrument, so to speak, is acoustics, and the other foot electricity. The telephone philosophically considered is an instrument for the conversion of a sound-wave into electrical motion, and its reconversion into sound at a distance. The sound is, as it were, committed to the electrical current and is thus sent to the end of the journey, and there discharged with its message. The possibility of this result lies first of all in the fact of electrical transmission by wire, and in the second place to the mounting of a sound-rider on the electrical saddle for an instantaneous journey with important despatches!

New results in scientific progress generally seem marvelous. The unfamiliar and unexpected thing is always a marvel; but scientifically considered, the telephone does not seem so surprising as at first view. The atmosphere is a conductor of sound. It is the natural agent of transmission, and so far as the natural man is concerned, it is his only agent for the transmission of oral utterance. If the unlearned man have his attention called to the surprising fact of hearing his fellow-man call out to him across a field or from far off on the prairie, he does not think it marvelous, but only natural. Yet how strange it is that one human being can speak to another through the intervening s.p.a.ce!

It is strange that one should see another at a distance; but seeing and hearing at distances are natural functions of living creatures.

The sunlight is for one sense and the sound-wave is for the other. The sound-wave travels on the atmosphere, and preserves its integrity. A given sound is produced, and the same sound is heard by some ear at a distance. All the people of the world are telephoning to one another; for oral speech leaping from the vocal organs of one human being to the ear of another is always telephonic. It is only when this phenomenon of speech at a distance is taken from the soft wings of the air, confined to a wire, and made to fly along the slender thread and deliver itself afar in a manner to which the world has. .h.i.therto been a stranger that the thing done and the apparatus by which it is done seem miraculous. Indeed it is a miracle; for _miraculum_ signifies wonderful.