Page:Hamel Telegraph history England 1859.pdf/56

52, but where this telegraph came from he did not know. He wrote: "In the month of March, 1836, I was engaged at Heidelberg in the study of anatomy, in connexion with the interesting and by no means unprofitable profession of anatomical modelling, a self-taught pursuit to which I had been devoting myself with incessant and unabated ardour, working frequently fourteen or fifteen hours a day, for about eighteen months previous. About the 6th of March, 1836, a circumstance occurred which gave an entirely new bent to my thoughts. Having witnessed an electro-telegraphic experiment, exhibited about that day by Professor Möncke of Heidelberg, who had, I believe taken his ideas from Gaüss, I was so much struck with the wonderful power of electricity, and so strongly .impressed with its applicability to the practical transmission of telegraphic intelligence, that from that very day I entirely abandoned my former pursuits, and devoted myself thenceforth with equal ardour, as all who know me can testify, to the practical realization of the Electric Telegraph, an object which has occupied my undivided energies ever since. Professor Möncke's experiment was at that time the only one upon the subject that I had seen or heard of."