Excerpt from Improvement Era, Vol. 27: June, 1924 Who could have imagined, asks Helmholtz, when Galvani Observed the twitching of the frog muscles as he brought various metals in contact with them, that eighty years later Europe would be overspun with wires which transmit messages from Madrid to St. Petersburg with the rapidity of lightning, by means of the same principle whose first manifestations this anatomist then Observed. The first telegraph line between cities was installed between Baltimore and Washington, in 1844; the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1856 in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the tele phone. Thus the researches Of such men as Volta, Oersted, Ampere. Faraday, Henry, Morse, and Bell have added greatly to the human welfare, for who can deny the value of these almost instantaneous methods of communicating around the world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.