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Chap. Lxxiii

CURIOSITIES RESPECTING THE ARTS. - (Continued.) Telegraph-Spectacle of a Sea Fight at Rome-Wooden Eagle; and Iron Fly-Whitehead's Ship-Scaliot's Lock, &c.-Praxiteles' Venus-Weaving Engine-Hydraulic Birds-Herschell's Grand Telescope-Boverick's Curiosities-Bunzlau Curiosities -Artificial Flying.

TELEGRAPH. - This is a word derived from the Greek, and which is very properly given to an instrument, by means of which information may be almost instantaneously conveyed to a considerable distance. The telegraph, though it has been generally known and used by the moderns only for a few years, is by no means a modern invention. There is reason to believe, that amongst the Greeks there was some sort of telegraph in use. The burning of Troy was certainly known in Greece very soon after it happened, and before any person had returned from thence. Now that was altogether so tedious a piece of business, that conjecture never could have supplied the place of information. A Greek play begins with a scene, in which a watchman descends from the top of a tower in Greece, and gives the information that Troy was taken. "I have been looking cut these ten years (says he) to see TELEGRAPH. when that would happen, and this night it is done." Of the antiquity of a mode of conveying intelligence quickly to a great distance, this is certainly a proof. The Chinese, when they send couriers on the great canal, or when any great man travels there, make signals by fire, from one day's journey to another, to have every thing prepared; and most of the barbarous nations used formerly to give the alarm of war by fires lighted on the hills, or rising grounds.

It does not appear that the moderns had thought or suen a machine as a telegraph, till the year 1663, when the Marquis of Worcester, in his "Century of Inventions," affirmed, that he had discovered " a method by which, at a window, as far as eye can discover black from white, a man may hold discourse with his correspondent, without noise made, or notice taken, being, according to occasion given, or means afforded, ex re nata, and no need of provision beforehand, though much better if foreseen, and course taken by mutual consent of parties." This could be done only by means of a telegraph, which, in the next sentence, is declared to have been rendered so perfect, that by means of it the correspondence could be carried on by night as well as by day, though as dark as pitch is black." " About forty years afterwards, M. Amontons proposed a new telegraph. His method was this :- Let there be people placed in several stations, at such a distance from one another, that, by the help of a telescope, a man in one station may see a signal made in the next before him; he must immediately make the same signal, that it may be seen by persons in the station next after him, who are to communicate it to those in the following station, and so on. These signals may be as letters of the alphabet, or as a cipher, understood only by the two persons who are in the distant places, and not by those who make the signals. The person in the second station making the signal to the person in the third, the very moment he sees it in the first; the news may be carried to the greatest distance in as little time as is necessary to make the signals in the first station. The distance of the several stations, which must be as few as possible, is measured by the reach of a telescope. Amontons tried this method in a small tract of land, before several persons of the highest rank at the court of France. It was not, however, till the French revolution, that the telegraph was applied to useful purposes.