two frames 18 meters apart. Each of these frames carried thirty-seven
hooks, to which the wire was attached through the intermedium of silk
cords. He laid, besides, a subterranean line of 525 feet at a depth of 4
feet. The wire was inclosed within thick glass tubes which were placed
in a trough of dry wood, of 2 inch section, coated internally and
externally with pitch. This trough was, moreover, filled full of pitch
and closed with a cover of wood. Ronalds preferred these subterranean
conductors to air lines. A portion of one of them that was laid by him
at Hammersmith figured at the Exhibition of 1881, and is shown in Fig.
4.

Nearly at the epoch at which Ronalds was experimenting in England,
a certain Harrisson Gray Dyar was also occupying himself with
electrostatic telegraphy in America. According to letters published only
in 1872 by American journals, Dyar constructed the first telegraph in
America. This line, which was put up on Long Island, was of iron wire
strung on poles carrying glass insulators, and, upon it, Dyar operated
with static electricity. Causing the spark to act upon a movable disk
covered with litmus paper, he produced by the discoloration of the
latter dots and dashes that formed an alphabet.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

These experiments, it seems, were so successful that Dyar and his
relatives resolved to construct a line from New York to Philadelphia;
but quarrels with his copartners, lawsuits, and other causes obliged him
to leave for Rhode Island, and finally for France in 1831. He did not
return to America till 1858.

Dyar, then, would seem to have been the first who combined an alphabet