Page:Hamel Telegraph history 1859.djvu/25



In one of Soemmerring’s later letters to Baron Schilling, he, alluding to his subaqueous conductor, says that the means found out by him (Schilling) to ignite, by the galvanic current, gunpowder at a distance (das Fernzünden) were more difficult to discover than his, Soemmerring’s, signalising at a distance (das Fernzeichengeben).

After Baron Schilling’s departure from Munich, in 1812, Soemmerring occupied himself less with the telegraph. His attention was directed to the dry voltaic pile, called after the Abbé Zamboni, who had made the first at Verona, where it was placed in the cabinet of the Vice-Roy of Italy, Eugène Beauharnais, afterwards Duke of Leuchtenberg.

From this pile, the action of which was considered, so to speak, perpetual, at that time great things were expected. Dr. Assalini, the surgeon of His Highness, who, like Larrey, had been with Napoleon I. in Egypt, and in 1812, with Prince Eugène, in Russia (where he got his feet frozen), was in June and July 1814 a good deal with Soemmerring at Munich. He printed there a description of “the perpetual (immerwährender) electromotor.” On the 14th of June he exhibited to the Academy of Sciences a pair of piles, belonging to His Highness the Vice-Roy.