be gathered
from the fact that in 1855, the death of the Emperor Nicholas at St.
Petersburg, about one o'clock in the afternoon, was announced in the
House of Lords a few hours later; and as a striking proof of its further
progress, it may be mentioned that the result of the Oaks of 1890
was received in New York fifteen seconds after the horses passed the
winning-post.

Wheatstone's next great invention was the automatic transmitter, in
which the signals of the message are first punched out on a strip of
paper, which is then passed through the sending-key, and controls the
signal currents. By substituting a mechanism for the hand in sending
the message, he was able to telegraph about 100 words a minute, or five
times the ordinary rate. In the Postal Telegraph service this apparatus
is employed for sending Press telegrams, and it has recently been so
much improved, that messages are now sent from London to Bristol at
a speed of 600 words a minute, and even of 400 words a minute between
London and Aberdeen. On the night of April 8, 1886, when Mr. Gladstone
introduced his Bill for Home Rule in Ireland, no fewer than 1,500,000
words were despatched from the central station at St. Martin's-le-Grand
by 100 Wheatstone transmitters. Were Mr. Gladstone himself to speak
for a whole week, night and day, and with his usual facility, he could
hardly surpass this achievement. The plan of sending messages by a
running strip of paper which actuates the key was originally patented
by Bain in 1846; but Wheatstone, aided by Mr. Augustus Stroh, an
accomplished mechanician, and an able experimenter, was the first to
bring the idea into successful operation.

In 1859 Wheatstone was appointed by the Board of Trade to report on the
subject of the Atlantic cables, and in 1864 he was one of the experts
who advised the Atlantic Telegraph Company on the construction of the
successful lines of 1865 and 1866. On February 4, 1867, he published the
principle of reaction in the dynamo-electric machine by a paper to the
Royal Society; but Mr. C. W. Siemens had communicated the identical
discovery ten days earlier, and both papers were read on the same day.
It afterwards appeared that Herr Werner Siemens, Mr. Samuel Alfred
Varley, and Professor Wheatstone had independently arrived at the
principle within a few months of each other. Varley patented it on
December 24, 1866; Siemens called attention to it on January 17, 1867;
and Wheatstone exhibited it i