Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/317

Rh contrived to introduce a remarkable fact relative to the electric telegraph, I soon perceived that it had taken hold of the King's imagination, and the next question confirmed my view. "For what purposes," said the King, "will the electric telegraph become useful?"

I must here request the reader to go back in his memory to the state of our knowledge in 1840, when electricity and other subjects, now of every-day application, were just commencing their then eccentric but now regulated course.

The King put the very question I had wished. Carefully observing his countenance, I felt that I was advancing in a tract in which he was interested. At each pause the proper question was suggested, and at last I pointed out the probability that, by means of the electric telegraphs, his Majesty's fleet might receive warning of coming storms. This led to the new theory of storms, about which the king was very curious. By degrees I endeavoured to make it clear. I cited, as an illustration, a storm which had occurred but a short time before I left England. The damage done by it at Liverpool was very great, and at Glasgow immense. On one large property in the west coast of Scotland thirty thousand timber-trees had been thrown down.

I then explained that by subsequent inquiries it had been found that this storm arose from the overlapping of two circular whirlwinds, one of them coming up from the Atlantic bodily at the rate of twenty miles an hour, the other passing at the rate of twelve miles an hour, in a north-westerly direction, to Glasgow, where they coalesced, and destroyed property to the value of above half a million sterling. I added that if there had been electric communication between Genoa and a few other places the people of Glasgow might have had information of one of those storms twenty-four hours previously to its