Page:Hamel Telegraph history England 1859.pdf/53

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49

lize from one room to another. This was Baron Schilling's telegraph, but Mr. Hoppner did not know it.

The Professor was no other than the already mentioned Greheime Hofrath Muncke. He had in the upper story of the former Convent of Dominicans, where he gave his lectures, and where he also lived, suspended wires for telegraphing out of the Cabinet into the Auditory.

I have examined these localities; the rooms are now quite empty. When I was there the floors were used to dry hops, spread out on them. From the year 1850 to 1852, the house had served as a military barrack. As Mr. Cooke was curious to see the telegraphing out of one room into another, Mr. Hoppner took him on the 6th of March, 1836, to Professor Muncke's lecture room.

When Mr. Cooke saw the telegraphing, and was told that the instrument could work through great distances, the idea struck him that such a thing might be useful in England, particularly in tunnels along the railroads, which were at that time spreading more and more, and he determined to give up at once his anatomical occupation at Heidelberg, get such an apparatus as the Professor used made, and go to England, to endeavour to get such telegraphs there brought into use.