This website is dedicated to English polymath and inventor Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS (1802-1875), born in Barnwood, Gloucester.
Charles Wheatstone was the son of Mr. W. Wheatstone, a citizen of Gloucester, where he was born in 1802. He was educated at a private school, where he imbibed a taste for mechanics and physical science. His youth and early manhood were devoted to the manufacture of musical instruments, and he entered into business on his own account in London when he was scarcely of age. He soon showed a capacity for higher and more philosophical studies, his mental powers being concentrated, not so much on the actual manufacture of the instruments themselves, as upon the principles which underlay their construction.
In 1823 he first attracted attention by the publication of a work entitled “New Experiments in Sound.” During the eleven years which succeeded the date of this work he studied the close analogy existing between the phenomena of light and sound, illustrating the subject by numerous models and an apparatus of his own contrivance, and publishing various papers on these topics in the scientific journals of the day. In 1834 he was appointed Professor of Experimental Philosophy at King’s College, London, and two years later he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, when he read a paper [in 1838] on certain phenomena of vision, in which he described for the first time that now familiar implement, the stereoscope.
In 1836 Wheatstone exhibited in his lectures at King’s College certain experiments on the velocity of electricity, with a lengthened circuit of nearly four miles of copper wire, which he then and there proposed to convert into an electric telegraph. In February, 1837, he made the acquaintance of Mr. William Fothergill Cooke, who had lately become acquainted abroad with the electric experiments of Baron Schillin and other German philosophers. In May, Wheatstone and Cooke took out their first patent, “for improvements in giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by means of electric currents transmitted through metallic circuits.” We need not describe at length the various improvements which they successively introduced, it is enough to say that the first line of electric telegraph actually laid down for public purposes was constructed on the Blackwall Railway in 1838. The merits of the invention may be impartially divided between Cooke and Wheatstone. Cooke practically introduced and carried it out, while the scientific researches of Wheatstone prepared the public for its application.
Professor Wheatstone was one of the jurors of the Universal Exhibition at Paris in 1855, in the class for “heat, light and electricity.” On this occasion the Emperor made him a Knight of the Legion of Honour. He was also chosen a correspondent of the French Imperial Institute of Sciences, and an honorary member of the principle academies of science in Europe.
[In 1847], he married Emma, daughter of Mr. J. West, by whom he has left several children. In 1868 he was knighted in recognition of his scientific services. He died [on the 19th Oct 1875] at the Hotel du Louvre, Paris. A funeral service was held over the body at the English Church in the Rue d’Aguesseau, at which Lord Lyons and a deputation from the Academy of Sciences was present. The funeral took place at Kensall Green on Wednesday [27th Oct 1875].
[Adapted from The Graphic, Sat. 30th Oct. 1875, p20.]
Sir Charles Wheatstone, by C. Tomlinson, Oct. 30th 1875.
Another of those intellectual benefactors who confer distinction, not only on the land of their birth, but also on humanity, has passed away full of years and of honours. Sir Charles Wheatstone died last week at Paris, at the age of seventy-three. He was born at Gloucester, and received some aid in the way of training at a private school. He displayed a taste for mechanical science and the structure and modification of musical instruments. This led him to study Acoustics, to repeat and extend Chladni’s results, while his own numerous experiments made him rival the celebrated Savart. His papers were first published in the Annals of Philosophy (N.S. 1823), in the Philosophical Magazine, and in the Journal of the Royal Institution, in the theatre of which many of his results were exhibited. He also took up the analogy between sound and light, as expounded by Dr. Thomas Young, and introduced new modes of illustration. During some years he was in business in Conduit Street, where he perfected several instruments of the accordion kind, remarkable for range and sweetness. When the Polytechnic Institution was first established, two large concave mirrors were placed at the two extremes of the gallery facing each other. We remember seeing Wheatstone’s father play a soft tune in the focus of one mirror, which was heard only in the focus of the other mirror. Wheatstone’s invisible music also excited surprise. A piano in a room below became quite audible by means of a conducting-rod, and a resonant surface in the room above.
When the Adelaide Gallery was established, Wheatstone took advantage of the space thus afforded to arrange his wires for the determination of the velocity of electricity, which he accomplished by means of an ingenious revolving mirror. These experiments were repeated at King’s College, and the possibility of an electric telegraph was demonstrated. Early in 1837 he became acquainted with Mr. Cooke, who also had a scheme for an electric telegraph, and the two became partners in a patent “for improvements in giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by means of electric currents transmitted through metallic circuits.” We cannot here detail the history of this great invention, nor do more than allude to the anxiety, disappointments, and trouble that it occasioned Wheatstone during some years. Nor does our space allow us to give even a list of his numerous discoveries ; but we must not forget that the stereoscope, which is in everybody’s hands, was described in a paper contained in the Transactions of the Royal Society for 1838, in a memoir entitled “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision.”
That Wheatstone was a Fellow of the Royal Society as early as 1836, with Royal and Copley medals against his name (1840 and 1843), and also of many foreign academies, follows almost as a matter of course. He was knighted in 1868, and was also a Knight of the French Legion of Honour. Among his numerous distinctions he was Professor of Experimental Philosophy at King’s College ; but we are not aware that he ever had a class, or that, except on rare occasions, he ever lectured. Wheatstone never obtained eminence either as a writer or as a lecturer. This must be attributed rather to a defect of early training than to mental deficiencies. With pen in hand his thoughts seemed to be fettered and constrained, and before a large audience he became nervous and hesitating. The only lecture we ever heard him attempt to deliver was at King’s College about forty years ago. The subject was the discoveries of Melloni on radiant heat, illustrated by his apparatus just received from Paris ; but the lecturer was so much embarrassed that the termination of the lecture was felt to be a relief both to lecturer and audience. But when Wheatstone had two or three people about him in his own house, or after dinner, in the presence of persons with whom he was familiar, no one would have suspected that he could ever have been afflicted with want of fluency. On such occasions his ideas would flow so pleasantly and so lucidly, that one could not help reflecting that if all this had been put into a lecture Wheatstone might have become a successful rival even of Faraday. On such occasions, too, Wheatstone spoke without reserve ; he described his ideas, his experiments, his instruments, his apparatus, as freely as if the description of them had all been previously published. In this way other men often got credit of inventions which originated in conversations with Wheatstone. No man perhaps ever left behind him so much unfinished work of a high character. His pigeonholes are filled with memoranda for papers about which he talked so freely, but seldom wrote. We remember hearing Faraday in one of the Friday evening lectures, pleasantly reprove this habit. “This experiment,” he said, “is by my friend Mr. Wheatstone. He has not published an account of it. I am more careful in that respect ; for I do not talk about my results until I have secured them in print.”
On one occasion, at least, Wheatstone recognised his error, for he showed us a piece of apparatus for which he had just paid ten guineas, for the purpose of stopping the inventor’s mouth, the said inventor having derived the idea of it from a conversation with Wheatstone.
It is not much more than two months ago, on a moonlight night, in the grounds of Baroness Burdett-Coutts, at Highgate, that we met Wheatstone talking as freely as ever about his discoveries, and some extraordinary results he had just obtained in molecular physics. We little thought that bright and intelligence was so soon to change its sphere of activity, and, while leaving us to mourn his loss, yet cheering us with the reflection that, with enlarged powers – and, it may be, in company with such minds as Faraday’s – he is now in a condition to resolve most of the doubts and difficulties which beset the conscientious scientific worker here.
[C. Tomlinson, ‘Sir Charles Wheatstone’, The Academy, Oct. 30 1857, p.458.]
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