Sir Francis Ronalds

Born in London in 1788, from his youth betrayed the liveliest interest in electricity. It is as the inventor of a real system of electric telegraphy, years before the world was ready for it, that he remains known to fame.

 

The nearest approach to an electric telegraph in existence when Ronalds began his work was Soemmering's, in which signals were emitted from twenty or thirty wires by means of bubbles of gas arising from the decomposition of water during the discharge of an electric current. As all these telegraph wires were of gold the instrument was as costly as it was impossible.

 

Ronalds made a great advance when, in 1816, he fashioned an apparatus which transmitted every requisite signal with the use of only a single circuit. His current was obtained by means of a frictional electric machine, and was conveyed through eight miles of wire, insulated in glass tubes, and surrounded by a wood trough filled with pitch.

The whole idea was admirable for a first attempt, and Ronalds, though he appreciated the fact that this was but a first step, expressed the belief that he would see the day when the King at Brighton would be able to communicate instantly with his Ministers in London.

He did see his prediction realised, but not to his own profit, for when at last the Admiralty condescended to notice him it was to inform him that, the war with France being at an end, there was no need for telegraphs. So Ronalds, in his cheery way, bade farewell to telegraphy and went on his travels, a wiser, though not necessarily a sadder, man.

 

But his invention was not wasted. The world has need of peace as well as war, and Wheatstone, who had been thinking on the same lines, gave peace the great triumph of quick communication which had come too late for the war, and he afterwards acknowledged that he had been greatly indebted to the cheerful scholar telegraphing with might and main through eight miles of wire in his Hammersmith garden.

Ronalds afterwards won fame as a meteorologist, and devised a system of photographic registration for meteorological instruments. When, after many years of excellent service, he retired from Kew, the Government awarded him a niggardly pension.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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