Part 10 (1/2)
Considerable progress was made in telegraphy in the after part of the eighteenth century. This progress related to the transmission of visible messages through the air. In the time of the French Revolution such contrivance occupied the attention of military commanders and of governing powers. A certain noted engineer named Chappe invented at this epoch a telegraph that might be properly called successful.
Chappe was the son of the distinguished French astronomer, Jean Chappe d'Auteroche, who died at San Lucar, California, in 1769. This elder Chappe had previously made a journey into Siberia, and had seen from that station the transit of Venus in 1761. Hoping to observe the recurring transit, eight years afterward, he went to the coast of our then almost unknown California, but died there as stated above.
The younger Chappe, being anxious to serve the Revolution, invented his telegraph; but in doing so he subjected himself to the suspicions of the more ignorant, and on one notable occasion was brought into a strait place--both he and his invention. The story of this affair is given by Carlyle in the second volume of his ”French Revolution.” One knows not whether to smile or weep over the graphic account which the crabbed philosopher gives of Chappe and his work in the following extract:
”What, for example,” says he, ”is this that Engineer Chappe is doing in the Park of Vincennes? In the Park of Vincennes; and onward, they say, in the Park of Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau, the a.s.sa.s.sinated deputy; and still onward to the Heights of Ecouen and farther, he has scaffolding set up, has posts driven in; wooden arms with elbow-joints are jerking and fugling in the air, in the most rapid mysterious manner! Citoyens ran up, suspicious. Yes, O Citoyens, we are signaling; it is a device, this, worthy of the Republic; a thing for what we will call far-writing without the aid of postbags; in Greek it shall be named Telegraph. '_Telegraphe sacre_,' answers Citoyenism.
For writing to Traitors, to Austria?--and tears it down, Chappe had to escape and get a new legislative Decree. Nevertheless he has accomplished it, the indefatigable Chappe; this his Far-writer, with its wooden arms and elbow-joints, can intelligibly signal; and lines of them are set up, to the North Frontiers and elsewhither. On an Autumn evening of the Year Two, Far-writer having just written that Conde Town has surrendered to us, we send from the Tuileries Convention-Hall this response in the shape of a Decree: 'The name of Conde is changed to _Nord-Libre_ (North Free). The Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the country.' To the admiration of men!
For lo! in some half-hour, while the Convention yet debates, there arrives this new answer: 'I inform thee (_Je t'annonce_), Citizen President, that the Decree of Convention, ordering change of the name Conde into North Free; and the other, declaring that the Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the country, are transmitted and acknowledged by Telegraph. I have instructed my Officer at Lille to forward them to North Free by express.' Signed, Chappe.”
This successful telegraph of Engineer Chappe was not an electric telegraph, but a sunlight telegraph. Is it in reality any more wonderful to use the electrical wave in the transmission of intelligible symbols than to use a wave of light? Such seems to have been the opinion of mankind; and the coming of the electric telegraph was long postponed. The invention was made by slow approaches. In our country the notion has prevailed that Morse did all--that others did nothing; but this notion is very erroneous.
We are not to suppose that the Chappe method of telegraphing became extinct after its first successful work. Other references to what we _suppose_ to be the same instrument are found in the literature of the age. The wonder is that more was not written and more accomplished by the agency of Chappe's invention. In the fall of the year 1800, General Bonaparte, who had been in Egypt and the East, returned to Europe and landed at Frejus on his way to Paris, with the dream of universal dominion in his head. In the first volume of the _Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte_, his secretary M. de Bourrienne, writing of the return to France says:
”We arrived in Paris on the 24th Vendemiaire (the sixteenth of October). As yet he (Napoleon) knew nothing of what was going on; for he had seen neither his wife nor his brothers, who were looking for him on the Burgundy Road. The news of our landing at Frejus had reached Paris _by a_ _telegraphic despatch_. Madame Bonaparte, who was dining with M. Gohier when that despatch was communicated to him, as President of the Directory, immediately set off to meet her husband,” etc. We should be glad to know in what particular form that ”telegraphic despatch” was delivered! But such are Bourrienne's words!
To the American reader the name of Karl Friedrich Gauss may have an unfamiliar sound. Gauss was already a youth of fourteen when Morse was born, though the latter outlived the German mathematician by seventeen years. Gauss was a professor of Mathematics at Gottingen, where he pa.s.sed nearly the whole of his life. In the early part of the century he distinguished himself in astronomy and in other branches of physical science. He then became interested in magnetic and electrical phenomena, and in 1833, with the a.s.sistance of Wilhelm Eduard Weber, one of his fellow-professors, who died in 1891, he erected at Gottingen a magnetic observatory. There he began to experiment with the subtle agent which was soon to be placed at the service of mankind.
The observatory was constructed without the use of iron, in order that the magnetic phenomena might be studied under favorable conditions.
Humboldt and Arago had previously constructed laboratories without using iron--for iron is the great disturber--and from them Gauss obtained his hint. Weber was also expert in the management of magneto-electrical currents. Gauss, with the aid of his co-worker, constructed a line of telegraph, and sent signals by the agency of the magnetic current to a neighboring town. This was nearly ten years before Morse had fully succeeded in like experimentation.
It appears that the German scientists regarded their telegraph as simply the tangible expression or apparatus to ill.u.s.trate scientific facts and principles. It was for this reason, we presume, that no further headway was made at Gottingen in the development of telegraphy. It was also for the additional reason that men rarely or never accept what is really the first demonstration and exemplification of a new departure in scientific knowledge. Such is the timidity of the human mind--such its conservative attachment to the known thing and to the old method as against the new--that it prefers to stay in the tumble-down ruin of bygone opinions and practices, rather than go up and inhabit the splendid but unfamiliar temple of the future.
Gauss and Weber were left with their scientific discovery; and, indeed, Morse in the New World of practicality and quick adaptations, was about to be rejected and cast out. The sorrows through which he pa.s.sed need not here be recounted. They are sufficiently sad and sufficiently humiliating. His unavailing appeals to the American Congress are happily hidden in the rubbish of history, and are somewhat dimmed by the intervention of more than half a century. But his humiliation was extreme. Smart Congressmen, partisans, the ignorant flotsam of conventions and intrigues, heard the philosopher with contempt. A few heard him with sympathy; and the opinion in his favor grew, as if by the pressure of shame, until he was finally supported, and in a midnight hour of an expiring session of Congress, or rather in the early morning of the fourth of March, 1843, the munificent appropriation of $30,000 was placed at his disposal for the construction of an experimental line between Was.h.i.+ngton and Baltimore.
The one thing was done. A new era of instantaneous communication between men and communities at a distance the one from the other was opened--an era which has proved to be an era of light and knowledge.
Nor may we conclude this sketch without noting the fact that, not a few of the members of the House of Representatives who voted the pittance for the construction of the first line of actual working telegraph in the world, went home to their const.i.tuents and were ignominiously beaten for re-election--this this for the slight service which they had rendered to their country and the human race!
When in New York City, turn thou to the west out of Fifth avenue into Twenty-second street, to the distance of, perhaps, ten rods, and there on a little marble slab set in the wall of a house on the north side of the street, read this curious epitaph:
”In this house lived Professor S.F.B, Morse for thirty years and died!”
THE NEW LIGHT OF MEN.
By the law of nature our existence is divided between daylight and darkness. There is evermore the alternate baptism into dawn and night.
The division of life is not perfect between suns.h.i.+ne and shadow; for the suns.h.i.+ne bends around the world on both horizons, and lengthens the hemisphere of day by a considerable rim of twilight. To this reduction of the darkness we must add moons.h.i.+ne and starlight. But we must also subtract the influence of the clouds and other incidental conditions of obscuration. After these corrections are made, there is for mankind a great band of deep night, wherein no man can work.
Whoever goes forth at some noon of night, when the sky is wrapped with clouds, must realize the utter dependence of our kind upon the light.
How great is the blessing of that sublime and beautiful fact which the blind Milton apostrophizes in the beginning of the Third Book of _Paradise Lost_:
”Hail, holy Light! offspring of heaven first-born!
Or of Eternal coeternal beam, May I express thee unblamed? since G.o.d is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate!
Or hear'st thou rather, pure ethereal stream, Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the sun, Before the heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of G.o.d, as with a mantle, didst invest The rising world of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless infinite.”
How then shall man overcome the darkness? It is one of the problems of his existence. He is obliged with each recurring sunset of his life to enter the tunnel of inky darkness and make his way through as best he may to the morning. What kind of lantern shall he carry as he gropes?
The evolution of artificial light and of the means of producing it const.i.tutes one of the most interesting chapters in the history of our race. Primeval man knew fire. He learned in some way how to kindle fire. The lowest barbarian may be defined as a fire-producing animal.
The cave men of ancient Europe kindled fires in their dark caverns.
The lake dwellers had fires, both on sh.o.r.e and in their huts over the water. Wherever there was a fire there was artificial light. The primitive barbarian walked around the embers of his fire and saw his shadow stretching out into the gloom of the surrounding night.