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35 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." (Soemmerring war einer der Ersten die einen galvanischen Telegraphen erdachten.) These words are very few, and they even are not correct, for Soemmerring's telegraph was not " one of the first," hut the very first galvanic telegraph.

It is well known that in 1820 a new era for the art of telegraphing was dawning. Hans Christian Oersted, at Copenhagen, had directed the attention of the scientific world much more effectually than Romagnosi, in Italy,