Project Gutenberg #54475
Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century
Robert Routledge
1900Routledge's illustrated survey of nineteenth-century engineering and invention, prepared chapter by chapter from Project Gutenberg HTML.
Project Gutenberg #54475 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for MojiMori from public-domain source metadata
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manipulator can readily admit the compressed air to a tube extending to the station where the signals are received, at which the pressure is made to move a piston as often as the sender opens the valve. This movement is made to convey intelligence when a duly regulated succession of impulses is sent into the tube—the receiving apparatus being arranged either to give visible or audible signals, or to print them on slips of paper, according to any of the methods in use with the electric telegraph. Certain advantages over the electric system are claimed for this pneumatic telegraph—as, for example, greater simplicity and less liability to derangement. The tubes, which are merely leaden piping of small bore, are also exempt from the inconvenient interruptions which electric communication sometimes suffers from electrical disturbances in the atmosphere. The pneumatic system is easily arranged, and from its great simplicity any person can in a few hours learn to use the whole apparatus, while it is calculated that the expense of construction and working would not be above half of that incurred for the electric system. For telegraphs in houses, ships, warehouses, and short lines, this invention will doubtless prove very serviceable; but for long lines a much greater force of compression would be required, and the time needed for the production of an impulse at the distant ends of the tubes would be considerably increased. [1875].
349 Fig. 178.—The Sommeiller Boring Machines.