of twenty-six wires being used, one for each letter, six or eight wires· only should be employed, each charged by a Leyden jar, and that different letters should be formed by means of various combinations of signals from these. ... Mr. (afterwards Sir Francis) Ronalds ... took up the subject of telegraphy in the year 1816, and published an account of his experiments in 1823," based on the same idea as that of Chappe. ... "Ronalds drew up a sort of telegraphic code by which words, and sometimes even complete sentences, could be transmitted by only three discharges. ... Ronalds completely proved the practicability of his plan, not only on [a] short underground line, .... but also upon an overhead line some eight miles in length, constructed by carrying a telegraph wire backwards and forwards over a wooden frame-work erected in his garden at Hammersmith. ... The first attempt to employ voltaic electricity in telegraphy was made by Don Francisco Salva, whose frictional telegraph has already been referred to. On the 14th of May, 1800, Salva read a paper on 'Galvanism and its application to Telegraphy' before the Academy of Sciences at Barcelona, in which he described a number of experiments which he had made in telegraphing over a line some 310 metres in length. ... A few years later he applied the then recent discovery of the Voltaic pile to the same purpose, the liberation of bubbles of gas by the decomposition of water at the receiving station being the method adopted for indicating the passage of the signals. A telegraph of a very similar character was devised by Sömmering, and described in a paper communicated by the inventor to the Munich Academy of Sciences in 1809. Sömmering used a set of thirty-five wires corresponding to the twenty-five letters of the German alphabet and the ten numerals. ... Oersted's discovery of the action of the electric current upon a suspended magnetic needle provided a new and much more hopeful method of applying the electric current to telegraphy. The great French astronomer Laplace appears to have been the first to suggest this application of Oersted's discovery, and he was followed shortly afterwards by Ampere, who in the year 1820 read a paper before the Paris Academy of Sciences." _G. W. De Tunzelmann, Electricity in Modern Life, chapter 9._ ELECTRICITY: A. D. 1786-1800. Discoveries of Galvani and Volta.