Ronalds Section A Ronalds, Sir Francis (1788-1873),
inventor of the electric telegraph and meteorologist, son of Francis Ronalds, a
London merchant, and of his wife, Jane, daughter of William Field, was born in
London on 21 Febrary 1788. Ronalds was educated at a private school at Cheshunt
by the Rev. E. Cogan. At an early age he displayed a taste for experiment, and
he acquired great skill later in practical mechanics and draughtsmanship. Under
the influence of Jean Andre de Luc (1727-1817), whose acquaintance he made in
1814, he began to devote himself to practical electricity in Tilloch’s
Philosophical Magazine, one of which records an ingenious use of De Luc’s
’electric column’ as a motive power for a clock. Section B Ronalds’s name is chiefly remembered
as the inventor of an electric telegraph. Since 1753, when the first proposal
for an electric telegraph worked by statical electricity was made by a writer
signing ’CM’ (said to be Charles Morrison) in the Scots Magazine, successive
advances had been made abroad by Volta, Le Sage, Lomond, Cavallo, Salva, and
others; but much was needed to perfect the invention. Section C In 1816, Francis Ronalds, then
living at Upper Mall, Hammersmith, built in his back garden two frames to
accommodate eight miles of wire for his new invention of an electrostatic
telegraph. In used clockwork-driven rotating dials, engraved with letters of the
alphabet and numbers, synchronised with each other, at both ends of the circuit.
For the past three or four years, encouraged by the octogenarian Swiss
meteorologist, Jean Andre De Luc, Ronalds had been enthusiastically
experimenting with electrostatic clockwork devices. When someone desired to send
a message he earthed the wire at his end at the moment when the dial indicated
the desired letter. At he receiving end the pith balls would fall together when
earthed and the recipient noted the letter showing on his dial at that moment.
The system was slow and depended on the two dials staying in step, but Ronalds
successfully transmitted and received letters over 150 metres of wire; later he
succeeded in sending messages through eight miles of iron wire suspended above
his garden in London. After sending messages along his wires on the frame, he
developed another version in which the wires were enclosed in glass tubes buried
in the ground. At each end of the line a clockwork mechanism turned
synchronously revolving discs with letters on them. A frictional-electricity
machine kept the wire continuously charged, while at each end two pith balls
hung from the wire on silk threads, and since they were similarly charged from
the wire they stayed apart. Ronalds’s instrument was of real practical use, and
the brilliant idea of using synchronously rotating discs, now employed in the
Hughes printing apparatus, was entirely his own. The only defect in his
invention was the comparative slowness with which a succession of symbols could
be transmitted. Section D
With communications between London and Portsmouth in mind, he believed his
telegraph would work over distances of 800 km. In the same year, Ronalds wrote
to offer his invention to the Admiralty. In fact, in 1806, Ralph Wedgwood
submitted a telegraph based on frictional electricity to the Admiralty, but was
told that the semaphore was sufficient for the country. In a pamphlet he
suggested the establishment of a telegraph system with public offices in
different centres. Francis Ronalds, in 1816, brought a similar telegraph of his
invention to the notice of the Admiralty, and was politely informed that
’telegraphs of any kind are now wholly unnecessary’. John Barrow, Secretary to
the Admiralty, replied that ’Telegraphs of any kind are now wholly unnecessary;
and no other than the one now in use will be adopted.’ (The one in use was a
semaphore system.) Only a year after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the
Admiralty saw no need for improved communications, even though the semaphore was
usable only in daylight and good weather. Section
E After this disappointment, Ronalds set off for the
continent. He travelled throughout Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, taking
notes, sketching and collecting scientific books between 1816 and 1823. He had
begun collecting his large library of works on electricity and kindred subjects.
The last activity formed the beginnings of the Ronalds Library, left in trust to
the IEE (now the IET) after his death. In a small pamphlet published in 1823,
Ronalds described his invention and listed some of its possible uses, ’Why
should not government govern at Portsmouth almost as promptly as in Downing
Street Why should our defaulters escape by default of our foggy climate Let us
have Electrical Conversazione offices communicating with each other all over the
kingdom if we can.’ In 1825 he invented and patented a perspective tracing
instrument, intended to facilitate drawing from nature, which he improved about
1828, and described in a work called ’Mechanical Perspective’. These instruments
seem to be the only ones for which he took out patents. Section F However, Ronalds never patented his
invention in electric telegraph. Ronalds seems to have made few or no practical
contributions to science. In the meanwhile, one person did benefit from this
work—Charles Wheatstone who saw the telegraph as a boy. When Charles Wheatstone
was quite a child, his father had seen the Ronalds telegraph at work. Later, the
invention of an electric telegraph had been marvellously developed by
Wheatstone, who had seen many of the Hammersmith experiments, in conjunction
with Mr. William Fothergill Cooke, and these two men together devised and
patented in 1837 the first electric telegraph used publicly and commercially in
England. When, in 1855, a controversy arose between Wheatstone and Cooke, though
less fully, acknowledged the priority of Ronalds’s work; until 1855 Ronalds’s
share in the invention had been forgotten by the public. Section G Early in 1843 Ronalds was made
honourary director and superintendent of the Meteorological Observatory, which
was then established at Kew by the British Association for the Advancement of
Science. He began work on a system for registering meteorological data using
photography and this time was awarded a grant to continue his work. A similar
system was developed independently by Charles Brooke, aided like Ronalds by
grants from the Royal Society, had invented independently about this time. But
the British Association confirmed Ronalds’s priority. This was the beginning of
automatic, accurate recording of meteorological data and remained in use for
some years after Ronalds’s death. Section
H Ronalds lived long enough to see his prophecies come
to fruition and to receive belated official recognition: in 1870, three years
before he died, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I, for his ’early and
remarkable labours in telegraphic investigations’. —Ronalds