Heroes of the Telegraph

On his return home, Professor Thomson was among those who received the honour of knighthood for their services in connection with the enterprise. He deserved it. By his theory and apparatus he probably did more than any other man, with the exception of Mr. Field, to further the Atlantic telegraph. We owe it to his admirable inventions, the mirror instrument of 1857 and the siphon recorder of 1869, that messages through long cables are so cheap and fast, and, as a consequence, that ocean telegraphy is now so common. Hence some account of these two instruments will not be out of place. Sir William Thomson's siphon recorder, in all its present completeness, must take rank as a masterpiece of invention. As used in the recording or writing in permanent characters of the messages sent through long submarine cables, it is the acknowledged chief of 'receiving instruments,' as those apparatus are called which interpret the electrical condition of the telegraph wire into intelligible signals. Like other mechanical creations, no doubt its growth in idea and translation into material fact was a step-by-step process of evolution, culminating at last in its great fitness and beauty. The marvellous development of telegraphy within the last generation has called into existence a great variety of receiving instruments, each admirable in its way. The Hughes, or the Stock Exchange instruments, for instance, print the message in Roman characters; the sounders strike it out on stops or bells of different tone; the needle instruments indicate it by oscillations of their needles; the Morse daubs it in ink on paper, or embosses it by a hard style; while Bain's electro-chemical receiver stains it on chemically prepared paper. The Meyer-Baudot and the Quadruple receive four messages at once and record them separately; while the harmonic telegraph of Elisha Gray can receive as many as eight simultaneously, by means of notes excited by the current in eight separate tuning forks.