OUR IRON NERVE.

Colonist, Issue 26, 19 January 1858, Page 3

OUR IRON NERVE.

(From the London Examiner.) Over the grave of the Abbe Claude Choppe, inventor of what used to be called the modern system of telegraphing, there was erected a bronze telegraph. It was thought, indeed, that he had perfected a monument are prennius ; but the metal stands, while of the Abbe's cunning the last traces disappear. There remains little or no interest in the story of the young priest who, as a schoolboy, with few holidays, invented means of talking with his brothers at another school half a league distant, although still in sight, and afterwards, by help of his cousin Delauney, perfected the invention into a manner of telegraphing which was received with transports of joy by the French Convention four and sixty years ago; Its first words spoken in public were of victory—news of a victory of Conde over the Austrians—and back in a few minutes, post-haste in a new fashion, it carried the reply— " the army of the North has deserved well of its country." Marches and battles are the events connected with the telegraph throughout its early history. It was the soldier's friend before it was the minister of peace. The first telegraph mentioned anywhere, perhaps, was the fire kindled by the Israelites when marching in the. desert. The Gauls talked to each other by the aid of beacon fires, and spread from tribe to tribe intelligence of Caesar's movements by the help of light. The Roman soldier spoke to distant eyes by appearances and disappearances of torch-light at a window. On Trajan's column there is a figure of this kind of lighthouse signalling. When light was given up for wooden posts the poetry of telegraphs had to be quoted at a discount. We improved greatly in England on the method of the Abbe Chappe, making good use of some ideas to be found in a book written nine years before Chappe's invention was adopted, Professor Bergstrasser s Synthemato-! graphy.-r.--. Professor Bergstrasser's Synthematography ! Was that to come upon us in the days when the great hills should speak no more with tongues of fire? There is an end now of Professor Bergstrasser. We have superseded the light only with the lightning, and our telegraphs bring lis back into sympathy with old heroic days. Again, we feel—acutely at this hour we feel—what _Eschylus meant when he caused one of his plays to open with a watchman looking for the fire upon the mountains that should telegraph the fall of Troy to Clytemnestra. She hears of it before a night has covered the event, and replies, when the chorus asks—

. " What messenger so swift? . Vulcan who sends The flashing fi;e from Ida." For such a flash, akin to that of light when we besieged another Troy in the Crimea, we know with what a mighty expectation we in Enghind waited. Could such a flash but come from Delhi ? The Atlantic Telegraph Company has determined—we think most discreetly—not to repeat until next year its effort to bind with an electric cord the old world to the new. There is an Association of some standing, which has spent the last few years in obtaining, and has obtained, all necessary firmans and authorities for the establishment of an electric telegraph between Europe and India. It is in a position to begin work at once, if it can find at once the requisite material. The Atlantic cable, hundreds of miles long, is not to be C 2 l | e - d Up for mmy montn s and pass into a state of hibernation. It can be immediately turned to account. It is wanted at once for the establishment of a submarine telegraph across the Red Sea, wdiich, with some other lines of communica tion traced already, will before another autumn has come, reduce to a week the time needed for verbal communication between England and India. _here is, indeed, for the accomplishment of this end, one other material required, and that is money. Ihe Indian telegraph will cost three quarters of a million—say a million—and unless supported by a guarantee, may be a bad investment for the capitalist, although to the nation, under circumstances like the present, it might save a million in a week.

That,.the line will be laid, down we do not doubt. That a day is come when lines of electric . will be laid down between all countries ol the globe we do not doubt. There are sdm_ philosophers who say that life is electricity; certainly, in one sense, electricity is life. The telegraph wire is the world's iron nerve, and it is destined to be true to the world's life as it is true of the life of animals, that general development rises with every advance towards completeness in the nervous system. When the great nervous centres are connected by their telegraphic lines with every outpost; when the head instantly is cognizant with a pinch in the toe, aud, when the will prompts—by a flash down any line it may select—the immediate accomplishment either of delicate or complex movements, or of acts of force, can set the hands to rend an oak or play upon a fiddle, then the living body is a type of what the living world may yet become. The Atlantic scheme—in the ultimate success of which we have no doubt whatever, though we shall not he surprised if it encounter a few more mishaps at starting—the Atlantic scheme has been a godsend in the mere conception. About nineteen years ago a man well read in the latest curiosities of science would have had to say that there was electric telegraph at work somewhere in America which was found to work even across a distance of two or three miles. Eleven years have not elapsed since these telegraphs were first passed under water, in a modest way. One was sunk in Portsmouth Harbour in November, 1846, to connect the landing-stairs by Royal Clarence Yard with one of the dockyards, that was the first submarine telegraph laid down by Englishmen. There was one also in America under the Hudson. Then came, in September 1851, the link between England and France ; a wider stretch was then adventured upon, and in June 1852 Holyhead was joined to Dublin. In the May following sixty-five miles of iron nerve joined Belgium to England. Then courage was taken by success, and larger schemes were found good in the eyes of the people; the more it was dwelt upon the more it appeared practicable. But when the civilised world had become used to talking of a submarine cable to which we should give an extra five hundred or thousand of miles length as margin, the greater was felt to include the less, and now no little scheme looks terrible. During the last few days ships have gone out on a fresh attempt to put an electric cable to bed in the Mediterranean, ships have gone out also to join Sicily to Malta, and sundry other projects of the kind, all of great magnitude and all in a forward state, have been before the public. There is none among them all so interesting to this country as the plan of making now a way for mind to pass between the waves of the Red Sea.