Page:Hamel Telegraph history 1859.djvu/37

 and Baron Schilling continued unchanged to the time of his decease, which took place on the 2nd of March, 1830.

When one studies the life and the labours of Soemmerring, it is impossible not to feel the highest esteem for him, as a man and as a philosopher. Not vanity, not eagerness of gain, but pure love of science and the wish to be useful were the motives of his incessant activity. Nor was Soemmerring too sanguine in his expectation with regard to the application of his invention. He expressed, however, the hope that it might serve to telegraph from Munich to Augsburg, nay from one end of the kingdom to the other without intermediate stations.

I had expected that, on the occasion of the centenary Jubilee, which the Royal Academy of Sciences at Munich celebrated in the month of March this year, it would have been pointed out, with some detail, that Soemmerring had invented the first galvanic telegraph, instead of which I found that, in an oration made to recall to memory the labours of defunct members of the Academy, it was said merely: “Soemmerring was one of the first who contrived a galvanic telegraph.” (Sömmerring war einer der Ersten die einen galvanischen Telegraphen erdachten.) These words are very few, and they even are not correct, for