perched upon the
line to see what on earth it could mean, and sometimes after a
thunder-storm, when the wires were wet, were found dead by dozens, the
victims of their curiosity, Monkeys climbed the posts and ran along the
lines, chattering, and dropping an interfering tail from one wire to
another, which tended to confound the conversations of Calcutta.
Parrots, with the same contempt for electrical insulation, fastened upon
one string by the beak and another by the leg; and in one village, the
complacent natives hung their fishing-lines to dry upon them.

In 1856 there were four thousand miles of telegraph-wire stretched over
India: some upon bamboo posts, which bent to the storms and thus defied
them; some, as in the Madras Presidency, upon monoliths of
granite,--these, during the Mutiny, proving worth ten times their cost.

* * * * *

Whilst the telegraph has been thus rapidly encircling the globe with its
iron threads, great improvement has been made in the apparatus for
transmitting the electrical signals over them. Instruments called
translators, or repeaters, have been devised, by which aerial lines may
be operated, without repetition, over distances of many thousands of
miles. Through the use of this valuable invention upon the California
line, operators in New York and San Francisco are able to converse as
readily and rapidly as those situated at the extremities of a line only
a hundred miles in length.

The enormous increase in the amount of matter to be transmitted over the
wires has stimulated the inventive genius of our own country and Europe
to produce an apparatus by which the capacity of a wire may be greatly
increased. Mr. M. G. Farmer of Boston, Mr. J. G. Smith of Portland,
Maine, Dr. Gintl of Germany, and one or two other persons, have solved
the problem of the simultaneous transmission of messages over a single
wire in opposite directions. But while their apparatus, with the proper
arrangement of batteries, will unquestionably permit the accomplishment
of this apparent paradox, the natural disturbances upon a wire of any
considerable length, together with the inequalities of the current
caused by escape in wet weather, have precluded its practical use.

In this country, General Lefferts of New York, and in Europe, Professor
Bonelli, have devoted much time and expense to the perfection of
apparatus for securing greater rapidity of transmission over the aerial
lines