Page:Hamel Telegraph history England 1859.pdf/69

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

65

a certain number of A shaped projections. These types he introduced, one after the other, into a port-rule by which they were moved forward. The teeth of the types were to lift a lever, by means of which the electric current was allowed to flow through the coils of an electro-magnet, causing it to attract an armature fixed to a moveable vertical lever having at its lower end a pencil, which marked on a strip of paper, passing slowly over a roller,zig-zags somewhat like the teeth of a saw.

To find out afterwards what the groups of zig-zags meant, one had to convert the digits they represented into numbers, and then look into the vocabulary for that number to learn what word was meant by it.

It was Dr. Leonard D. Gale, Professor of chemistry, living in the same building as Morse, who had instructed him how to make the coils for an electro-magnet; he also procured him the necessary wire, and lent him a proper galvanic battery. Morse made him afterwards his partner, and he, from 1846, held, until lately, a situation in the Patent Office.

When, at the end of August, 1837, amongst other news fromEurope, there came in a German newspaper, the "Neue Würzburger Zeitung," an account of the 30th June, about