other people of Europe ... You may intercommunicate all that you wish at
a distance of four or five thousands leagues in less than half an hour.
Will that suffice you for glory?'

George Louis Lesage, in 1782, proposed a plan similar to 'C. M.'s,'
using underground wires. An anonymous correspondent of the JOURNAL DE
PARIS for May 30, 1782, suggested an alarm bell to call attention to the
message. Lomond, of Paris, devised a telegraph with only one wire; the
signals to be read by the peculiar movements of an attracted pith-ball,
and Arthur Young witnessed his plan in action, as recorded in his diary.
M. Chappe, the inventor of the semaphore, tried about the year 1790 to
introduce a synchronous electric telegraph, and failed.

Don Francisco Salva y Campillo, of Barcelona, in 1795, proposed to make
a telegraph between Barcelona and Mataro, either overhead or
underground, and he remarks of the wires, 'at the bottom of the sea
their bed would be ready made, and it would be an extraordinary casualty
that should disturb them.' In Salva's telegraph, the signals were to be
made by illuminating letters of tinfoil with the spark. Volta's great
invention of the pile in 1800 furnished a new source of electricity,
better adapted for the telegraph, and Salva was apparently the first to
recognise this, for, in the same year, he proposed to use it and
interpret the signals by the twitching of a frog's limb, or the
decomposition of water.

In 1802, Jean Alexandre, a reputed natural son of Jean Jacques Rousseau,
brought out a TELEGRAPHE INTIME, or secret telegraph, which appears to
have been a step-by-step apparatus. The inventor concealed its mode of
working, but it was believed to be electrical, and there was a needle
which stopped at various points on a dial. Alexandre stated that he had