Page:Hamel Telegraph history 1859.djvu/69

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67

after the death of our Baron Schilling, who, as we know now, had twenty seven years before that time (1810), at Dr. Soemmerring's, at Munich, got acquainted with the first galvanic telegraph in the world, who, above a dozen, years previous had made at St. Petersburg the first electromagnetic telegraph, which he had himself two years before exhibited to the meeting of the Naturalists at Bonn, where it had so pleased that it was taken immediately to Heidelberg, and half-a-year afterwards from thence to England. Here a telegraph on the principle first used by Baron Schilling, had, forty-one days before the 4th September, been at work over a mile and a quarter of line in the open air, and through many miles of wire suspended in a building at the terminus of the railroad, near Euston-square, in London, and Schilling had not long before his decease, at a rope manufactory at St. Petersburg, ordered a submarine cable to be made to unite Cronstadt with the capital through the Gulf of Finland for telegraphic correspondence.

It is to be regretted that Morse, when, in 1838, he with, and at the expense of, a commercially interested member of Congress, Francis 0. J. Smith, came to Europe, wishing to get his apparatus patented in England