He seems to have well understood that, in certain conditions, the resistance of such a conductor, though supposed to be unlimited, might be independent of the distance apart of the electrodes which carry the current and allow it to go forth.

He likewise thought of using the railway lines to transmit telegraphic signals.
Several scholars who from the first had turned their minds to telegraphy, had analogous ideas.

It was thus that S.F.B.

Morse, superintendent of the Government telegraphs in the United States, whose name is universally known in connection with the very simple apparatus invented by him, made experiments in the autumn of 1842 before a special commission in New York and a numerous public audience, to show how surely and how easily his apparatus worked.

In the very midst of his experiments a very happy idea occurred to him of replacing by the water of a canal, the length of about a mile of wire which had been suddenly and accidentally destroyed.