"The pieces that the First Consul charged me to examine did not contain enough of detail to justify an opinion. Citizen Beauvais (friend and associate of Alexandre) knows the inventor's secret, but has promised him to communicate it to no one except the First Consul. This circumstance might enable me to dispense with any report; for how judge of a machine that one has not seen and does not know the agent of? All that is known is that the telegraphe intime consists of two like boxes, each carrying a dial on whose circumference are marked the letters of the alphabet. By means of a winch, the needle of one dial is carried to all the letters that one has need to use, and at the same instant the needle of the second box repeats, in the same order, all the motions and indications of the first.
"When these two boxes are placed in two separate apartments, two persons can write to and answer one another, without seeing or being seen by one another, and without any one suspecting their correspondence. Neither night nor fog can prevent the transmission of a dispatch.... The inventor has made two experiments--one at Portiers and the other at Tours--in the presence of the prefects and mayors, and the record shows that they were fully successful. To-day, the inventor and his associate ask that the First Consul be pleased to permit one of the boxes to be placed in his apartment and the other at the house of Consul Cambaceres in order to give the experiment all the éclat and authenticity possible; or that the First Consul accord a ten minutes' interview to citizen Beauvais, who will communicate to him the secret, which is so easy that the simple expose of it would be equivalent to a demonstration, and would take the place of an experiment.... If, as one might be tempted to believe from a comparison with a bell arrangement, the means adopted by the inventor consisted in wheels, movements, and transmitting pieces, the invention would be none the less astonishing.... If, on the contrary, as the Portier's account seems to prove, the means of communication is a fluid, there would be the more merit in his having mastered it to such a point as to produce so regular and so infallible effects at such distances.... But citizen Beauvais ... desires principally to have the First Consul as a witness and appreciator.... It is to be desired, then, that the First Consul shall consent to hear him, and that he may find in the communication that will be made to him reasons for giving the invention a good reception and for properly rewarding the inventor."
But Bonaparte remained deaf, and Alexandre persisted in his silence, and died at Angers, in 1832, in great poverty, without having revealed his secret.
As, in 1802, Volta's pile was already invented, several authors have supposed an application of it in Alexandre's apparatus. "Is it not allowable to believe," exclaims one of these, "that the electric telegraph was at that time discovered?" We do not hesitate to respond in the negative. The pile had been invented for too short a time, and too little was then known of the properties of the current, to allow a man so destitute of scientific knowledge to so quickly invent all the electrical parts necessary for the synchronic operation of the two needles. In this telegraphe intime we can only see an apparatus analogous to the one described by Guyot, or rather a synchronism obtained by means of cords, as in Kircher's arrangement. The fact that Alexandre's two dials were placed on two different stories, and distant, horizontally, fifteen meters, in nowise excludes this latter mode of transmission. On another hand, the mystery in which Alexandre was shrouded, his declaration relative to the use of a fluid, and the assurance with which he promised to reveal his secret to the First Consul, prove absolutely nothing, for too often have the most profoundly ignorant people--the electric girl, for example--befooled learned bodies by the aid of the grossest frauds. From the standpoint of the history of the electric telegraph, there is no value, then, to be attributed to this apparatus of Alexandre, any more than there is to that of Comus or to any of the dreams based upon the properties of the magnet.
The history of the electric telegraph really begins with 1753, the date at which is found the first indication of a telegraph truly based upon the use of electricity. This telegraph is described in a letter written by Renfrew, dated Feb. 1, 1753, and signed with the initials "C.M.," which, in all probability, were those of a savant of the time--Charles Marshall. A few extracts from this letter will give an idea of the precision with which the author described his invention:
"Let us suppose a bundle of wires, in number equal to that of the letters of the alphabet, stretched horizontally between two given places, parallel with each other and distant from each other one inch.
"Let us admit that after every twenty yards the wires are connected to a solid body by a juncture of glass or jeweler's cement, so as to prevent their coming in contact with the earth or any conducting body, and so as to help them to carry their own weight. The electric battery will be placed at right angles to one of the extremities of the wires, and the bundle of wires at each extremity will be carried by a solid piece of glass. The portions of the wires that run from the glass support to the machine have sufficient elasticity and stiffness to return to their primitive position after having been brought into contact with the battery. Very near to this same glass support, on the opposite side, there descends a ball suspended from each wire, and at a sixth or a tenth of an inch beneath each ball there is placed one of the letters of the alphabet written upon small pieces of paper or other substance light enough to be attracted and raised by the electrified ball. Besides this, all necessary arrangements are taken so that each of these little papers shall resume its place when the ball ceases to attract.
FIG. 1.--LESAGE'S TELEGRAPH.
"All being arranged as above, and the minute at which the correspondence is to begin having been fixed upon beforehand, I begin the conversation with my friend at a distance in this way: I set the electric machine in motion, and, if the word that I wish to transcribe is 'Sir,' for example, I take, with a glass rod, or with any other body electric through itself or insulating, the different ends of the wires corresponding to the three letters that compose the word. Then I press them in such a way as to put them in contact with the battery. At the same instant, my correspondent sees these different letters carried in the same order toward the electrified balls at the other extremity of the wires. I continue to thus spell the words as long as I judge proper, and my correspondent, that he may not forget them, writes down the letters in measure as they rise. He then unites them and reads the dispatch as often as he pleases. At a given signal, or when I desire it, I stop the machine, and, taking a pen, write down what my friend sends me from the other end of the line."