Nonfiction · 1891
Heroes of the Telegraph
Ten biographical chapters on the people behind the electric telegraph and telephone: Charles Wheatstone and the first working telegraph line; Samuel Morse and his code; Lord Kelvin's work on the transatlantic cable, laid and repeatedly lost before it held; Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison's own rival claims in the early telephone; and lesser-known figures like Fleeming Jenkin and David Edwin Hughes, alongside inventors whose names survive mostly in the units named for them — Siemens, Weber, Gauss. A further eight shorter sketches, appended after the main ten chapters, cover contributors the book's own main narrative touches only in passing.
Published in 1891 by the Religious Tract Society, Heroes of the Telegraph was written for a general readership at a moment when the technology it describes — barely fifty years old — was still being extended and argued over by many of the people this book profiles.
Contents
- Note
- Preface
- Chapter I — The Origin of the Telegraph
- Chapter II — Charles Wheatstone
- Chapter III — Samuel Morse
- Chapter IV — Sir William Thomson
- Chapter V — Charles William Siemens
- Chapter VI — Fleeming Jenkin
- Chapter VII — Johann Philipp Reis
- Chapter VIII — Graham Bell
- Chapter IX — Thomas Alva Edison
- Chapter X — David Edwin Hughes
- Appendix I — Charles Ferdinand Gauss
- Appendix II — William Edward Weber
- Appendix III — Sir William Fothergill Cooke
- Appendix IV — Alexander Bain
- Appendix V — Dr. Werner Siemens
- Appendix VI — Latimer Clark
- Appendix VII — Count du Moncel
- Appendix VIII — Elisha Gray
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1849–1930 · Victorian
John Munro (1849–1930) was born and later died in Bristol, England, where he taught as a professor of mechanical engineering. Alongside technical works such as A Pocket-Book of Electrical Rules and Tables, he wrote popular accounts of contemporary science and its inventors for a general readership, including Heroes of the Telegraph (1891), and tried his hand at early science fiction with A Trip to Venus.
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