.

General Lefferts owns several patents covering inventions of great
ingenuity and value, which are now being perfected and will shortly be
brought into operation. The apparatus consists of an instrument,
operated by keys similar to those of a piano-forte, for punching
characters, composed of dots and lines, upon a narrow strip of paper.
The paper, when thus prepared, is passed rapidly through an instrument
attached to a telegraph-wire, at the other end of which is a similar
instrument which runs in unison. The first instrument is provided with a
flexible metallic comb, which presses through the perforations in the
paper and thus closes the circuit at each dot and line, while the second
instrument is provided with a metallic stylus, or pointer, which rests
upon a fillet of paper prepared with chemicals, and produces, whenever
the circuit is closed, dots and lines of a dark blue color upon the
prepared paper. When the paper is prepared by the perforating apparatus,
it can be run through the instrument at any rate of speed that is
desirable, and it is estimated that with this apparatus one wire may
easily perform as much work in a day as ten can under the ordinary
arrangement.

In Professor Bonelli's system the dispatch is set up in printing-type,
and placed on a little carriage, which is made to pass beneath a comb
with five teeth, which are in communication with five aerial wires of
the line, at the extremity of which these same wires are joined to the
five teeth of a second comb, under which passes a chemically prepared
paper, carried along on a little carriage similar to the one at the
other end on which the printing-type is placed. If under this
arrangement the electric circuit of a battery composed of a sufficient
number of elements, and distributed in a certain order, be completed,
then, at the same time that the first comb is passing over the
printing-type at the one end, the second comb at the other end will
trace the dispatch on the prepared paper in beautiful Roman letters, and
with so great a rapidity that it may be expected that five hundred
messages of twenty words each will be transmitted hourly.

On Wednesday, April 19th, the day of Mr. Lincoln's funeral, eighty-five
thousand words of reports were transmitted between Washington and New
York, between the hours of 7, P. M., and 1, A. M., being at the rate of
over fourteen thousand words per hour. Nine wires were employed for the
purpose. Thirteen thousan