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Thus Soemmering took up the idea of an electric telegraph, and experimented with the decomposition of water by the galvanic current. Schilling, after contemplating these contrivances for fifteen or twenty years, adopts Romagnosi’s discovery, at Ampère’s suggestion of the practicability of the magnetic needle telegraph; fortifies himself with ScweiggerSchweigger [sic]’s multiplier of force; and invents a simple and striking instrument, which appears under various modifications in lecture-rooms and scientific journals, for six or seven years, at the end of which it dies out. The very sight of this instrument in operation instantaneously excites another mind to devote itself to the realization of the long barren idea.

To continue the foregoing quotation:—“The merit of the invention must, therefore, consist, in a very great degree at least, in the practical realization of that which had before been an idea or an experiment:”—and this practical realization belongs to.

W. F. C.,, 1859.