Abstract
THE City of Gloucester proposes to commemorate the achievements of Sir Charles Wheatstone, the practical founder of telegraphy, by placing a bronze memorial tablet on one of its public buildings. This will be unveiled by Sir Charles Sherrington, president of the Royal Society, on October 19, which is the fiftieth anniversary of Wheatstone's death. To electricians, Wheatstone will long be remembered as the perfecter of the “Wheatstone bridge” which they use in their everyday work. In 1867 he described the self-exciting, shunt wound dynamo. They remember him also as the pioneer of the electric telegraph. So far back as 1837, in conjunction with Sir William Cooke, he made the electrical transmission of messages an assured success. In 1844 he conducted some of the earliest experiments in submarine telegraphy. To physicists Wheatstone is well known by the use he made of a rotating mirror to detect whether an electric discharge was oscillatory or not. He made valuable researches in sound, particularly in connexion with Chladni's figures and for his experiments on the prismatic decomposition of the electric light. In 1837 he made the important discovery that sparks between metals gave distinctive spectra. Wheatstone had a marvellous gift for interpreting documents printed in cipher. He deciphered with apparently little difficulty an important document sent him by the Trustees of the British Museum. He invented the Wheatstone's cryptograph, which is one of the most successful devices for rapidly coding and decoding secret messages. The ordinary English concertina was invented and patented by him in 1829. He was a professor at King's College, London, for many years and bequeathed to it all his scientific library and apparatus. This bequest was added to by his family and also by the Physical Society of London. An article on his connexion with the growth of telegraphy was published in NATURE, vol. n, p. 510 et seq. It is interesting to remember that Oliver Heaviside, whose death we had recently to deplore, was his nephew.
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Current Topics and Events. Nature 116, 585–588 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116585a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116585a0