3-028-572 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sir Francis Ronalds, inventor of an electric telegraph, 1870. Engraving of a painting by Hugh Carter, nephew of Sir Francis. [He] '...showed the use of the electric telegraph so long ago as 1816...[and] has devoted his life to the advancement of electrical science and its practical applications...he undertook to prove the practicability of telegraphic communication, at great distances, by transmitting a certain number of electric shocks, for an arranged signal, through insulated wires of considerable length...By this contrivance letter after letter could be denoted, and words spelt out, as certainly as by the telegraph apparatus of Messrs. Wheatstone and Cook, invented at a later period, and patented in 1837...Several improvements in the instruments and methods of testing or recording natural phenomena, the atmospheric electric conductor, the photo-barograph, the photothermograph, the photo-electrograph, and the photo-magnetograph, are due to his ingenuity. He has described these in reports to the British Association and the Royal Society...The atmospheric electric conductor has been adopted at the Greenwich, the Bombay, and the Madrid Observatories. The photo-barograph and photo-thermograph were adopted at the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.