Ampere was the first and is the most famous
investigator in electrodynamics. He also invented a telegraphic
arrangement in which he used the magnetic needle and coil and the
galvanic battery. Others, in the latter part of the eighteenth century
and the earlier years of the nineteenth, devised similar arrangements.
But no strictly electromagnetic apparatus for telegraphic signalling was
put to successful use until 1836, when, in England, Charles Wheatstone,
who is commonly regarded as the first inventor of practical electric
telegraphy, constructed an apparatus whereby thirty signals were
transmitted through nearly four miles of wire. From 1837 to 1843 he had
as an associate William Fothergill Cooke, and the two worked together to
develop the electric telegraph. They afterward quarrelled over their
respective claims to credit, but in 1838-1841 telegraph lines secured by
their patents were set up on the Great Western and two other English
railways.
Meanwhile other inventors were still working for the same results, in
many parts of the world, and it has been significantly said that "the
electric telegraph had, properly speaking, no inventor; it grew up
little by little.
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