The committee might easily add to the views and arguments which they have now presented, others of a highly commanding character—especially those which relate to the extreme value of which the magnetic telegraph would be in the emergencies of war, and its singular adaptedness to render our system of government easily and certainly maintainable over the immense space from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which our territory covers. Doubt has been entertained by many patriotic minds how far the rapid, full, and thorough intercommunication of thought and intelligence, so necessary to a people living under a common representative republic, could be expected to take place throughout such immense bounds. That doubt can no longer exist. It has been resolved and put an end to forever by the triumphant success of the electro magnetic telegraph of Professor Morse, as already tested by the government.
The fact that a bill has been long pending in the House, introduced by the Committee on Commerce, for the extension of the telegraph from Baltimore to New York, renders it unnecessary for this committee to report a bill. Without pronouncing positively on the sufficiency of the provisions of that bill, the committee consider the whole subject worthy the prompt attention of Congress.
Having thus presented their views on the subject referred to them, the committee beg to be discharged from its further consideration.
HISTORY OF TELEGRAPHS,
Employing Electricity in Various Ways for the Transmission of Intelligence.
We presume it will not be uninteresting to the reader, to be presented with an account of the various discoveries, in their chronological order, by which the science of Electricity became known to the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and prepared the way for those more magnificent results, which have been made in this the nineteenth century. We will endeavour to make it as brief as is consistent with the importance of the subject, to enable us to mark the succession of discoveries and improvements through two hundred years.
More than any other branch of experimental philosophy, that of electricity had been most neglected, until the seventeenth century. The attractive power of amber is mentioned by Theophrastus and Pliny, and also later by others.
[16] In the year 1600, William Gilbert, a native of Colchester, and a London physician, published a Latin Treatise, De Magnete, in which he relates a variety of electrical experiments. He increased the list of electric bodies and also of substances upon which electrics could act, and noted some of the circumstances relating to their action. His theory of electricity was, however, very imperfect.