association of its kind, was started, and
Mr. Cooke became a director. Wheatstone and he obtained a considerable
sum for the use of their apparatus. In 1866, Her Majesty conferred the
honour of knighthood on the co-inventors; and in 1871, Cooke was granted
a Civil List pension of L100 a year. His latter years were spent
in seclusion, and he died at Farnham on June 25th, 1879. Outside of
telegraphic circles his name had become well-nigh forgotten.

IV. ALEXANDER BAIN.

Alexander Bain was born of humble parents in the little town of Thurso,
at the extreme north of Scotland, in the year 1811. At the age of twelve
he went to hear a penny lecture on science which, according to his own
account, set him thinking and influenced his whole future. Learning the
art of clockmaking, he went to Edinburgh, and subsequently removed to
London, where he obtained work in Clerkenwell, then famed for its clocks
and watches. His first patent is dated January 11th, 1841, and is in the
name of John Barwise, chronometer maker, and Alexander Bain, mechanist,
Wigmore Street. It describes his electric clock in which there is an
electro-magnetic pendulum, and the electric current is employed to keep
it going instead of springs or weights. He improved on this idea in
following patents, and also proposed to derive the motive electricity
from an 'earth battery,' by burying plates of zinc and copper in the
ground. Gauss and Steinheil had priority in this device which, owing
to 'polarisation' of the plates and to drought, is not reliable. Long
afterwards Mr. Jones of Chester succeeded in regulating timepieces from
a standard astronomical clock by an improvement on the method of Bain.
On December 21, 1841, Bain, in conjunction with Lieut. Thomas Wright,
R.N., of Percival Street, Clerkenwell, patented means of applying
electricity to control railway engines by turning off the steam, marking
time, giving signals, and printing intelligence at different places. He
also proposed to utilise 'natural bodies of water' for a return wire,
but the earlier experimenters had done so, particularly Steinheil in
1838. The most important idea in the patent is, perhaps, his plan for
inverting the needle telegraph of Ampere, Wheatstone and others, and
instead of making the signals by the movements of a pivoted magnetic
needle under the influence of an electrified coil, obtaining them by
suspending a movable coil traversed by the current, between the poles of
a fixe