Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/568

550 to either of them the separate authorship of any distinct portions.

A few years afterward, at Göttingen, Weber was engaged in another investigation with his brother Eduard Friedrich, who was also a doctor interested in physical studies, of the mechanism of walking, the results of which were published in the book Mechanik der menschlichen Gehwerkzeuge. The salient feature of this work, in which many novel facts were brought out, was the enunciation of the fact that the pressure of the air is a factor in holding the bones in place in the joints.

For several years Weber was occupied mainly with questions of acoustics, on which, as well as upon electricity, heat, and light, he published many important papers.

His title to be regarded as one of the masters in science rests chiefly on his researches in electricity and magnetism. His position as professor at Göttingen brought him into close association with Gauss, who was as devoted to mathematics as Weber was to physics. The two assisted and complemented one another: Weber needed calculations to bring out the bearings of his experimental results, and Gauss was ready to take up any serious problem that needed solution.

Gauss, according to M. Mascart, besides his work in analysis and celestial mechanics, had given his attention to the mathematical theory of electricity and magnetism, in which he found many analogies with that of universal attraction. He had published a memoir describing an experimental method superior to that of Coulomb for verifying the law of magnetic actions, and a general theory of the magnetism of the globe and the relations between the results obtained at different stations. He established a magnetic observatory, where the methods of calculation he had devised were applied; and with Weber's collaboration an extensive association was formed, including the directors of the principal observatories, chiefly in Germany, for making a systematic study, under a common plan, of the continual variations of terrestrial magnetism. The results of this great enterprise were published by Weber from year to year, and collected in a magnetic atlas of the globe. In memory of this initiative, the Meridian of Göttingen is still preserved as the point of departure in a large number of general studies on the distribution of terrestrial magnetism. This common labor led to the installation, by the two co-workers, in 1834, of the first electric telegraph, by which an important date is marked in the history of telegraphy.

The idea of telegraphing by means of electricity was not entirely novel then. Samuel Thomas von Sömmering, of Munich, had experimented upon it with some success in 1809. Ampère, in 1820, and Fechner, in 1829, had proposed the utilization of the magnetic