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Updated: May 9, 2025
He was the first to utilize the earth for the return circuit, using a single wire for despatching the electric current used in signaling and allowing it to return through the ground. In 1837, the same year in which Wheatstone and Morse were busy perfecting their telegraphs, as we shall see, Edward Davy exhibited a needle telegraph in London.
First exhibitions of the Telegraph. Testimony of Robert G. Rankin and Rev. Henry B. Tappan. Cooke and Wheatstone. Joseph Henry, Leonard D. Gale, and Alfred Vail. Professor Gale's testimony. Professor Henry's discoveries. Regrettable controversy of later years. Professor Charles T. Jackson's claims. Alfred Vail. Contract of September 23, 1837. Work at Morristown. New Jersey. The "Morse Alphabet."
The plan of sending messages by a running strip of paper which actuates the key was originally patented by Bain in 1846; but Wheatstone, aided by Mr. Augustus Stroh, an accomplished mechanician, and an able experimenter, was the first to bring the idea into successful operation.
The year of the telegraph 1837 was an important one for Morse, as it was for Cooke and Wheatstone. In the privacy of his rooms he had constructed, with his own hands, a model of his apparatus, and fortune began to favour him. Thanks to Professor Gale, he improved the electro-magnet, employed a more powerful battery, and was thus able to work through a much longer line.
While the inventor was fighting for his rights in his own country, his invention, by the sheer force of its superiority, was gradually displacing all other systems abroad. Even in England it was superseding the Cooke and Wheatstone needle telegraph, and on the Continent it had been adopted by Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, Hanover, and Turkey.
"Other projects for the establishment of a magnetic telegraph have been broached here, especially from Professor Wheatstone, of London, and Professor Steinheil, of Munich. It is said, however, to be very manifest that our Yankee Professor is ahead of them all in the essential requisitions of such an invention, and that he is in the way to bear off the palm.
Werner Siemens to the Berlin Academy, on the 17th of January, 1867, and by the lecturer to the Royal Society, on the 4th of the following month. This was read on the 14th of February, when the late Sir Charles Wheatstone also brought forward a paper embodying the same principle.
The telegraph of Wheatstone is going ahead in England, even with all its complications; so, I presume, is the one of Steinheil in Bavaria. Whether ours is to be adopted depends on the Government or on a company, and the times are not favorable for the formation of a company.
Though silent and reserved in public, Wheatstone was a clear and voluble talker in private, if taken on his favourite studies, and his small but active person, his plain but intelligent countenance, was full of animation. Sir Henry Taylor tells us that he once observed Wheatstone at an evening party in Oxford earnestly holding forth to Lord Palmerston on the capabilities of his telegraph.
Five wires, with a sixth return wire, were used in the first experimental line erected in London in 1837. So in the year when Morse was constructing his models Wheatstone and Cooke were operating an experimental line, crude and impracticable though it was, and enjoying the sensations of communicating with each other at a distance.
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