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Updated: June 22, 2025
In 1833-5 Professors Gauss and Weber constructed a telegraph between the physical cabinet and the Observatory of the University of Gottingen. At first they used the voltaic pile, but abandoned it in favour of Faraday's recent discovery that electricity could be generated in a wire by the motion of a magnet.
If Newton, Lagrange, Gauss, and Thompson, to say nothing of smaller men, have muddled away their brains in concocting a scheme of dynamics wherein the very definitions are all wrong; if they have arrived at a law of conservation of energy without knowing what the word energy means, or how to define it; if they have to be set right by an amateur who has devoted a few weeks or months to the subject and acquired a rude smattering of some of its terms, 'what intolerable fools they must all be!" Such is the result of asserting one's freedom by escaping the limitations of knowledge!
To the American reader the name of Karl Friedrich Gauss may have an unfamiliar sound. Gauss was already a youth of fourteen when Morse was born, though the latter outlived the German mathematician by seventeen years. Gauss was a professor of Mathematics at Göttingen, where he passed nearly the whole of his life.
They established an experimental line between their laboratories, using at first a battery. Then Faraday discovered that an electric current could be generated in a wire by the motion of a magnet, thus laying the basis for the modern dynamo. Professors Gauss and Weber, who were operating the telegraph line at Göttingen, adapted this new discovery to their needs.
There he began to experiment with the subtle agent which was soon to be placed at the service of mankind. The observatory was constructed without the use of iron, in order that the magnetic phenomena might be studied under favorable conditions. Humboldt and Arago had previously constructed laboratories without using iron for iron is the great disturber and from them Gauss obtained his hint.
Sir William Thomson says he was the first to apply the absolute methods of measurement introduced by Gauss and Weber. He also investigated there the laws of electric signals in submarine cables. As Secretary to the British Association Committee on Electrical Standards he played a leading part in providing electricians with practical standards of measurement.
The economic factor, to take a single point, is at least as much the effect as it is the cause of scientific invention. There would be no world-wide system of telegraphy if there was no need of world-wide intercommunication. But there would be no electric telegraph at all but for the scientific interest which determined the experiments of Gauss and Weber.
Gauss and Steinheil had priority in this device which, owing to 'polarisation' of the plates and to drought, is not reliable. Long afterwards Mr. Jones of Chester succeeded in regulating timepieces from a standard astronomical clock by an improvement on the method of Bain. On December 21, 1841, Bain, in conjunction with Lieut.
The disturbance of their motions by their giant neighbours afforded a more accurate knowledge of the Jovian mass, which Laplace had taken about 1/50 too small; the anomalous character of their orbits presented geometers with highly stimulating problems in the theory of perturbation; while the exigencies of the first discovery had produced the Theoria Motus, and won Gauss over to the ranks of calculating astronomy.
But the actual working out of the scheme, and the arrangements by which the labours of the observers were so directed as to obtain the best results, we owe to the great mathematician Gauss, working along with Weber, the future founder of the science of electro-magnetic measurement, in the magnetic observatory of Gottingen, and aided by the skill of the instrument-maker Leyser.
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