Talk:William Watson (scientist)

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1747 experiments

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The article in The North British Review (digitized by Google) initially mentions three published works:

The Museum of Science and Art, edited by Dionysius Lardner, D.C.L., On the Electric Telegraph. Vol. III. and IV.
This work has been digitized by Google: Vol. III, Vol. III & IV (both 1854) and has 15 chapters on The Electric Telegraph (vol. III, pp. 113-208, vol. IV, pp. 1-144). However, all of the text focuses on the 19th century and makes no mention of Watson.
Mémoire de [sur] la Telegraphie Electrique. Par M. Werner Siemens, (de Berlin,) Ancien Officer D'Artillerie. Paris, 1850. Pp. 48.
It would be reasonable to expect the original to be in German, and printed in blackletter. On Google Books, one finds Die electrische Telegraphie (1866). This short text (only 40 pages) starts with Volta (1800), Sömmering, Weber (1830s), and doesn't touch the previous century.
Reports by the Juries of the Great Exhibition. Report of Jury X. London, 1850.
There is a volume titled Reports by the Juries: On the Subjects in the Thirty Classes... and sure enough, class X is "philosophical instruments", covering photography, the electric telegraph (p. 245), astronomical, naval and surveying instruments, and calculating machines. The very brief text mentions 1820 and Oerten (should be: Oersted), but not the 18th century.

It seems the information from 1747 is not taken from any of these three sources.

More about Watson is found in the German Wikipedia's article. And in this article "Bishop Watson and the Electric Telegraph, in Journal of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, vol. 9, pp. 790-791. --LA2 (talk) 16:44, 31 August 2013 (UTC)Reply