Page:Hamel Telegraph history England 1859.pdf/34

 lines in Australia. The first line was opened on the 3rd of March, 1854, from Melbourne to Williamstown; other lines in Victoria soon followed, and since last November (1858), the capitals of New South Wales and of South Australia (Sydney and Adelaide) are telegraphically united with that of Victoria (Melbourne). Ere long these lines will be joined to others in Tasmania, by means of a submarine cable to be laid across Bass’s Strait.

So we know now, that the Honourable Francis James Lamb, third Viscount Melbourne, brother to Lady Palmerston, was the first Englishman that ever saw a telegraph put in action by a galvanic battery, and that it was the Russian Baron Schilling who invited him to take notice of it.

A Mr. John Robert Sharp, residing at Doe Hill, in Derbyshire, having read in the number for February 1816 of the “Repertory of Arts,” a short account of Soemmerring’s invention (taken from the “Denkschriften” of the Academy of Sciences at Munich, which were published in 1811) announced in the number for June of that same journal, that in 1813 he had made before the Lords of the Admiralty an experiment showing that the voltaic current might serve for telegraphic purposes. Mr. Sharpe did not