Page:Hamel Telegraph history England 1859.pdf/32



In February, 1816, Dr. Thomas Thomson printed, in the Annals of Philosophy, that Dr. Redman Coxe, Professor of Chemistry at Philadelphia, in the United States, had informed him that he contemplated Galvanism as a probable means of establishing telegraphic communications, and nominally by the evolution of gases from water. Coxe promised to follow up the idea, but he added that it would demand time. The Abbé Moigno, at Paris, states in both editions of his Traité de Télégraphie électrique (1849 and 1852) erroneously the year 1810 instead of 1816 for the announcement of Coxe’s idea. Other authors have likewise given this false date.

Dr. Thomson did not know that Coxe came six years and a half too late with his idea. Soemmerring, at Munich, had, in 1809, executed, what Coxe in