Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

Among the inventions in the class of Telegraphy should also be mentioned the dial and the printing systems. Ever since the electric telegraph was invented, attempts have been made to use the electric influence to operate either a pointer to point out the letters of the message sent on a dial, or to print them on a moving strip of paper; and also to automatically reproduce on paper the handwriting of the sender or writer of the message. The earliest efforts were by Cooke and Prof. Wheatstone of London, in 1836-37; but it was not until 1839, after Prof. Henry had succeeded in perfecting the electromagnet, that dial and printing telegraphs were successfully produced. Dial telegraphs consist of the combination with magnets, armatures and printed dial plate of a clock-work and a pointer, means to set the pointer at the communicating end (which in some instances has been a piano keyboard) to any letter, the current operating automatically to indicate the same letters at the receiving end. These instruments have been modified and improved by Brequet and Froment of France, Dr. Siemens and Kramer, and Siemens and Halske of Germany, Prof. Wheatstone of England, Chester and Hamblet of America, and others. They have been used extensively upon private and municipal lines both in Europe and the United States.

The type-printing telegraph was coeval with the dial, and originated with Morse and Vail as early as 1837. The printing of the characters is effected in various ways; sometimes by clockwork mechanism and sometimes by the direct action of an electromagnet. Wheatstone exhibited one in 1841. House of Vermont invented in 1845-1846 the first printing telegraph that was brought into any extensive use in the United States. Then followed that of David E. Hughes of Kentucky in 1855, aided by his co-inventor George M. Phelps of Troy, New York, and which was subsequently adopted by the French government, by the United Kingdom Telegraph Co. of Great Britain, and by the American Telegraph Co in the United States. The system was subsequently greatly improved by Hughes and others. Alexander Bain of Edinburgh in 1845-46 originated the modern automatic chemical telegraph. In this system a kind of punch was used to perforate two rows of holes grouped to represent letters on a strip of paper conducted over a metal cylinder and arranged so as to permit spring levers to drop through the perforations and touch the cylinder, thus forming an electrical contact; and a recording apparatus consisting of a strip of paper carried through a chemical solution of an acid and potash and over a metal roller, and underneath one or two styles, or pens, which pens were connected by live wires with the poles of two batteries at the sending station. The operation is such that colored marks upon the paper were made by the pens corresponding precisely to the perforations in the strip at the sending station. Siemens, Wheatstone and others also improved this system; but none of these systems have as yet replaced or equalled in extensive use the Morse key and sounder system, and its great acoustic advantage of reading the messages by the click of the instrument. The type-printing system, however, has been recently greatly improved by the inventions of Howe, C. L. Buckingham, Fiske and others in the United States. Special contrivances and adaptations of the telegraph for printing stock reports and for transmitting fire alarm, police, and emergency calls, have been invented.

The erection of tall office and other buildings, some to the height of more than twenty stories, made practicable by the invention of the elevator system, has in turn brought out most ingenious devices for operating and controlling the elevators to insure safety and at the same time produce economy in the motive power.

The utility of the telephone has been greatly increased by the inventions of Hughes and Edison of the microphone. This consists, in one form, of pieces of carbon in loose contact placed in the circuit of a telephone. The very slightest vibrations communicated to the wood are heard distinctly in the telephone. By these inventions and certain improvements not only every sound and note of an opera or concert has been carried to distant places, but the slightest whispers, the minute movements of a watch, even the tread of a fly, and the pressure of a finger, have been rendered audible.

By the aid of the electric current certain rays of light directed upon the mineral selenium, and some other substances, have been discovered to emit musical sounds.

So wonderful and mysterious appear these communications along the electric wire that each and every force in the universe seems to have a voice awaiting utterance to man. The hope is indulged that by some such means we may indeed yet receive the “touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.”

In 1879 that eminent English scientist, Prof. Wm. Crookes, published his extensive researches in electrical discharges as manifested in glass tubes from which the air had been exhausted. These same tubes have already been referred to as Geissler tubes, from the name of a young artist of Bonn who invented them. In these tubes are inclosed various gases through which the sparks from an induction coil can be passed by means of platinum electrodes fused into the glass, and on the passage of the current a soft and delicately-tinted light is produced which streams through the tube from pole to pole.

In 1895, Wm. Konrad Roentgen, professor of Physics in the Royal University of Würzburg, while experimenting with these Crookes and Geissler tubes, discovered with one of them, which he had covered with a sort of black cardboard, that the rays emanating from the same and impinging on certain objects would render them self-luminous, or fluorescent; and on further investigation that such rays, unlike the rays of sunlight, were not deflected, refracted or condensed; but that they proceeded in straight lines from the point at which they were produced, and penetrated various articles, such as flesh, blood, and muscle, and thicknesses of paper, cloth and leather, and other substances which are opaque to ordinary light; and that thus while penetrating such objects and rendering them luminous, if a portion of the same were of a character too dense to admit of the penetration, the dark shadow of such obstacle would appear in the otherwise luminous mass.

Unable to explain the nature or cause of this wonderful revelation, Roentgen gave to the light an algebraic name for the unknown—the X rays.

This wonderful discovery, at first regarded as a figment of scientific magic, soon attracted profound attention. At first the experiments were confined to the gratification of curiosity—the interior of the hand was explored, and on one occasion the little mummified hand of an Egyptian princess folded in death three or four thousand years ago, was held up to this light, and the bones, dried blood, and muscle of the ancient Pharaohs exhibited to the startled eyes of the present generation. But soon surgery and medicine took advantage of the unknown rays for practical purposes. The location of previously unreachable bullets, and the condition of internal injuries, were determined; the cause of concealed disease was traced, the living brain explored, and the pulsations of the living heart were witnessed.