“Instruments have been recently invented, and are in operation,
either in England or in this country, by which two great hindrances
to the efficiency of the telegraph are remedied. Mr. Stearns,
president of the Franklin Telegraph Company, has invented an
instrument by which messages are transmitted both ways at the same
time, on the same wire, thus doubling its capacity without any
increase of expense. Sir Charles Wheatstone, in England, has
invented an instrument by which double the number of words can be
transmitted and received on the same wire, at an increased expense
in the preparation of the message for transmission. Instruments are
also in operation in Great Britain, worked by boys, after
instruction of one or two days.”
In regard to Mr. Stearns’s apparatus for working both ways over one wire
at the same time, we are compelled to say there is nothing new in the
idea. Doctor Gintl, of Germany, invented it many years ago, and it was
published in an Italian work,[20] with steel-plate illustration, issued
in 1861, translated into English by George B. Prescott, of Albany, and
published in the Telegraphic Journal, London, May, 1864. Moses G.
Farmer, Esq., of Boston, invented another apparatus for doing the same
thing, and worked it between Boston and Portland, in 1849. If there is
any practical value in this apparatus it is open—like the Morse
Telegraph—to the use of all. Sir Charles Wheatstone’s apparatus, by
which double the number of words can be received on the same wire, will
probably prove of the same practical value as many similar inventions,
which in theory can transmit intelligence with the greatest accuracy at
the astonishing rate of five or ten thousand words an hour, but in
practice have never proved of the slightest value.
Footnote 20:
Manuale di Telegrafia Elettrica, di Carlo Matteucci, Torino, 1861.
It is suggestive, that, of more than a hundred inventions designed to
supersede the Morse telegraph, the latter instrument is used to-day on
more than 490,000 miles of wire out of the total of 500,000 in operation
in all parts of the world. Mr. Hubbard’s assertion, “that instruments
are in operation in Great Britain, worked by boys, after instruction of
one or two days,” may be true. From all accounts, the use of boys—and
charity boys at that—has been the great curse of telegraphy in England,
until the saying has become common there, when describing a remarkably
poor specimen of chirography, that “it is written as badly as a
telegraph despatch.” We hope the day is far distant when our messages
shall be transmitted by boys with one or two days’ instruction.
We hardly need say that it is for our interest to adopt every
improvement whereby the despatch of business within a given time can be
materially increased. It is certainly cheaper for us to provide new
instruments, at almost any cost which will ever be charged therefor,
than to put up, keep in repair, and operate additional wires to produce
the same results.