CHARLES WILKES.
Professor S. F. B. Morse,
Capitol, Washington.
MODE OF CROSSING BROAD RIVERS, OR
OTHER BODIES OF WATER, WITHOUT WIRES.
The following extract from Professor Morse’s letter to the Secretary of the Treasury, and by him submitted to the House of Representatives, Dec. 23, 1844, in relation to this interesting subject, will sufficiently illustrate it:
“In the autumn of 1842, at the request of the American Institute, I undertook to give to the public in New York a demonstration of the practicability of my telegraph, by connecting Governor’s Island with Castle Garden, a distance of a mile; and for this purpose I laid my wires properly insulated beneath the water. I had scarcely begun to operate, and had received but two or three characters, when my intentions were frustrated by the accidental destruction of a part of my conductors by a vessel, which drew them up on her anchor, and cut them off. In the moments of mortification, I immediately devised, a plan for avoiding such an accident in future, by so arranging my wires along the banks of the river as to cause the water itself to conduct the electricity across. The experiment, however, was deferred till I arrived in Washington; and on December 16, 1842, I tested my arrangement across the canal, and with success. The simple fact was then ascertained, that electricity could be made to cross a river without other conductors than the water itself; but it was not until the last autumn that I had the leisure to make a series of experiments to ascertain the law of its passage. The [following diagram] will serve to explain the experiment.
Fig. 31.
A, B, C, D, are the banks of the river; N, P, are the battery; E is the electro magnet; w w, are the wires along the banks, connecting with copper plates, f, g, h, i, which are placed in the water. When this arrangement is complete, the electricity, generated by the battery, passes from the positive pole, P, to the plate h, across the river through the water to plate i, and thence around the coil of the magnet, E, to plate f, across the river again to plate g, and thence to the other pole of the battery, N. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, indicate the distance along the bank measured by the number of times of the distance across the river.