WHEATSTONE, Sir CHARLES, physicist and electrician, was b. at Gloucester in 1802. From school he went to the making of musical instruments, and afterward entered into business on his own account in London. But he was no ordinary manufacturer; the scientific principles involved in the construction of instruments occupied his thought; he made many improvements, and in 1823 published a paper entitled New Experiments on Sound. Endowed with remarkable ingenuity, he produced numerous models and apparatus to illustrate the phenomena of acoustics and of light, his attention having been drawn to the latter by the analogies between the two subjects. Few men have done so much toward the student to apprehend the principles on which scientific theo ries are based, particularly those of the undulatory theory of light.
In 1833 Mr. Wheatstone communicated his first paper, On Acoustic Figures, to the Royal society; followed in 1834, by Experiments to Measure the Velocity of Electricity, in which, with a mirror revolving 800 times in a second, he demonstrated the velocity at 288,000 in. in a second—greater than that of light. In the same year he was appointed professor of natural philosophy in King's college, London. In 1836 he was elected a fellow of the royal society; and in a course of lectures at the college on the velocity above referred to, he anticipated the electric telegraph by experimenting through 4 m. of copper wire. In May, 1837, a patent was taken out in the joint names of Cooke and Wheat stone, "for improvements in giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by means of electric cuirents transmitted through metallic circuits." From this instrument, which had five needles, has grown that system of electric telegraphs which now ramifies over the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. The first working-telegraph insulated copper wires inclosed in an iron tubewas constructed on the Blackwall rail way in 1838.
To enumerate the titles only of professor Wheatstone's papers on scientific subjects, and describe his various inventions, would fill many pages: a few only can be indicated here. In a paper on binocular vision laid before the royal society in 1838, he explained
the principle of the stereoscope, an instrument of his invention: in 1840 he showed that, by means of electromagnetism, a number of clocks far apart might be kept going with absolute exactitude from one central clock; and in 1843 he brought out his new instru ments and processes for determining the constants of a voltaic series. In 1840, and again in 1843, the royal society awarded him their royal medal—a high acknowledgment oethe merit of his researches. For along time after that date, scarcely a year passed without a paper on some recondite scientific subject, or some new invention, or improvement on former inventions, from the hand.of professor Wheatstone, which heightened his repu tation, and procured him substantial pecuniary reward. Among his inventions are his cryptograph; his automatic telegraph in two forms; his telegraph thermometer and barometer, by which an observer at the foot of a mountain could read the indications as shown by the instruments on the summit; a machine for the conversion of dynamical into electrical force without the use of permanent magnets, by which large quantities of electricity can be produced at a cheap rate; and an apparatus for conveying instructions to engineers and steersmen on board large steam-vessels.
Professor sat many times on the council, and was a vice-president of the royal society. He was also a corresponding member of the leading foreign scientific academies, and in 1873 lie was elected foreign associate of the science department of the institute of France. In 1868 he received from her majesty the honor of knighthood, and in the same year the royal society bestowed on him its Copley medal. He was made LL.D. in 1869 by the university of Edinburgh. He died in 1875.