This was beautifully exemplified in that marvel of ingenuity, the magneto-electro letter showing telegraph, which was particularly applicable for private telegraph uses.
From 1837 Wheatstone appears to have devoted a good deal of time to submarine telegraphy, and in 1844 experiments were made in Swansea bay with the assistance of Mr. J. D. Llewellyn.
Wheatstone also had a share in the perfecting of the magneto-electric machines which have culminated in the modern dynamo.
In 1837 he devised a method of combining several armatures on one shaft so as to generate currents which were continuous instead of intermittent, and in 1867 he described to the Royal Society a method of making such machines self-exciting as to their magnetism by the use of a shunt circuit.
The use of a main circuit for the purpose had been described by Werner Siemens one month earlier, but the machine described by Wheatstone had been constructed for him by Mr. Stroh in the preceding summer.
Wheatstone was also the inventor of electro-magnetic clocks for indicating time at any number of different places united on a circuit.
It was he who called attention to Christy’s combination of wires, now commonly known as Wheatstone’s bridge—in which an electric balancing of the currents is obtained and worked out in its applications to electrical measurements.
He was one of the first in Great Britain to appreciate the importance of ohms simple law of the relation between electro-motive force resistance of conductors and resulting current—the law which is to-day the foundation of all electrical engineering.
Wheatstone contributed to numerous scientific journals and publications.
All his published papers were collected in 1879 by the Physical Society of London.