Before Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison, there was Charles Wheatstone. He was born February 6, 1802 in Gloucestershire, England, and if there was anything to be invented during the Victorian era, he was the guy.
He was something of a child prodigy, and read widely even as a young boy. He saved his pennies for weeks to buy a book on electrical experiments by Volta. When he discovered it was in French, he bought a French dictionary and taught himself the language well enough to become a part-time translator.
Once he had Volta’s book, he and his brother started replicating the experiments in a shed behind their house. He contributed a number of advancements to telegraphy, which was brand new, and also came up with a wide range of inventions, from the stereoscope to the English Concertina to the Playfair cipher, which was an advanced encryption system at the time. He invented it in order to send secret information via telegram. It’s pretty secure, but also quick and easy to use. It was used as recently as WWII.
The Wheatstone family owned a musical instrument shop, and while Charles didn’t care much about the business aspect, he invented several new instruments, including a concertina, the kaleidophone, and the harmonium. He also came up with a device for augmenting quiet sounds. He called the thing a “microphone.” He was responsible for a well-known practical joke (at least it was well-known back in the day): the enchanted lyre. It was an ordinary lyre hung from the ceiling of the music shop, and it could somehow play music that sounded like a piano, a harp, or a dulcimer. The trick was that the metal rod suspending the lyre was carrying the vibrations of music played in a back room, and the lyre itself was just a sounding box. Wheatstone called this a “telephone,” but it was purely mechanical.
He moved on to optics, which led to his invention of the stereoscope, then got interested in measuring time. He began that study because he wanted to measure the speed of electricity — which he managed. Although his results weren’t as accurate as today’s measures, he arrived at a fairly close approximation of 288,000 miles per second. Along the way he invented the “chronoscope,” an electrical device that could measure down to the microsecond. He also came up with a system for keeping a series of electric clocks at exactly the same time. He didn’t bother to patent it because he didn’t think it had any applications, but his acquaintance Alexander Bain stole his idea and did apply for a patent. That was only one of the patent disputes Wheatstone was involved with throughout his career. He wasn’t always the victim; he sometimes appeared to claim more credit than he deserved for some projects.
Wheatstone was knighted in 1868 for his contributions to science as well as his inventions (there are a lot more than I’ve had room to mention), and particularly his automatic telegraph. He won dozens of medals, awards, and diplomas, not only in England. But on a trip to Paris when he was 73, he caught a bad cold. It turned into a lung inflammation, and he never recovered. His name lives on, though, in the Wheatstone bridge, the Wheatstone-Playfair cipher, the Wheatstone System (his automatic telegraph), and several other varieties of telegraphs.
