HKB
destructive effects when employed by the forces under Tippoo Saib in the Mahratta war, on which he adopted and improved the missile, and brought out the invention as his own.
Coal-gas was regularly used by the Chinese for lighting purposes long before it was known amongst us. Hydropathy was generally practised by the Romans, who established baths wherever they went. Even chloroform is no new thing. The use of ether as an anaesthetic was known to Albertus Magnus, who flourished in the thirteenth century; and in his works he gives a recipe for its preparation. In 1681 Denis Papin published his Traite des Operations sans Douleur, showing that he had discovered methods of deadening pain. But the use of anaesthetics is much older than Albertus Magnus or Papin; for the ancients had their nepenthe and mandragora; the Chinese their mayo, and the Egyptians their hachisch (both preparations of Cannabis Indica), the effects of which in a great measure resemble those of chloroform. What is perhaps still more surprising is the circumstance that one of the most elegant of recent inventions, that of sun-painting by the daguerreotype, was in the fifteenth century known to Leonardo da Vinci,[9] whose skill as an architect and engraver, and whose accomplishments as a chemist and natural philosopher, have been almost entirely overshadowed by his genius as a painter.[10] The idea, thus early born, lay in oblivion until 1760, when the daguerreotype was again clearly indicated in a book published in Paris, written by a certain Tiphanie de la Roche, under the anagrammatic title of Giphantie. Still later, at the beginning of the present century, we find Thomas Wedgwood, Sir Humphry Davy, and James Watt, making experiments on the action of light upon nitrate of silver; and only within the last few months a silvered copper-plate has been found amongst the old household lumber of Matthew Boulton (Watt's partner), having on it a representation of the old premises at Soho, apparently taken by some such process.[11]
In like manner the invention of the electric telegraph, supposed to be exclusively modern, was clearly indicated by Schwenter in his Delasements Physico-Mathematiques, published in 1636; and he there pointed out how two individuals could communicate with each other by means of the magnetic needle. A century later, in 1746, Le Monnier exhibited a series of experiments in the Royal Gardens at Paris, showing how electricity could be transmitted through iron wire 950 fathoms in length; and in 1753 we find one Charles Marshall publishing a remarkable description of the electric telegraph in the Scots Magazine, under the title of 'An expeditions Method of conveying Intelligence.' Again, in 1760, we find George Louis Lesage, professor of mathematics at Geneva, promulgating his invention of an electric telegraph, which he eventually completed and set to work in 1774. This instrument was composed of twenty-four metallic wires, separate from each other and enclosed in a non-conducting substance. Each wire ended in a stalk mounted with a little ball of elder-wood suspended by a silk thread. When a stream of electricity, no matter how slight., was sent through the wire, the elder-ball at the opposite end was repelled, such movement designating some letter of the alphabet. A few years later we find Arthur Young, in his Travels in France, describing a similar machine invented by a M. Lomond of Paris, the action of which he also describes.[12] In these and similar cases, though the idea was born and the model of the invention was actually made, it still waited the advent of the scientific mechanical inventor who should bring it to perfection, and embody it in a practical working form.