André-Marie Ampère built on the work of Orsted and later developed the field of electrodynamics. One of his experiments revealed that a coiled wire with an electrical current passing through it would produce a magnet.

He realized that the effect of the earth's magnetic field was actually combined with that of the current itself, and that he needed to neutralize the earth's effect in order to truly study the current alone. He devised a means of neutralizing the effect of the earth's magnetic field and thus was able to further his studies. One such study involved the impact of two parallel currents on each other. If the two currents are run in the same direction, they are attracted to each other but are repellent if run in opposite directions. For Ampère's work, the modern unit of electrical current is known as the ampere, or "amp."

In 1851, Anderson joined the Cunard Company and commanded some of their best ships. His ambition was to command a ship on the Atlantic mail service. He was perhaps the most respected and experienced commander within Cunard. The company released him to command the Great Eastern in 1866 for the Atlantic cable-laying voyage. They thought he was their best captain. For the part he played in laying the Atlantic telegraph cable he was knighted and was known as Sir James Anderson.

Scottish inventor Alexander Bain (1810-77) develops an 'electro-chemical recording telegraph,' an ancestor of the fax machine, for which he is granted a patent the following year.

It was in pursuing his studies on behalf of the deaf that Bell constructed his first rough telephone in Boston in 1875. The instrument that was to revolutionize communications throughout the world was introduced at Philadelphia in 1876 and into Britain and France in the following year.

Charles Bellamy was a superintendent of Commercial Cable Company, Hazel Hill, Nova Scotia from 1926 to 1932.

The German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun, shared the 1909 Nobel Prize for physics with Guglielmo Marconi for his work in developing the radio. Braun, who spent his career as a professor of physics at German universities, increased the range of Marconi's transmitter, invented the crystal rectifier, a device that allows current to flow in only one direction, and improves radio transmission, and later invented the oscilloscope, a cathode-ray-tube laboratory device that was the forerunner of today's television and radar tubes.

In 1890, French physicist and inventor Edouard Eugène Désiré Branly (1844-1940) demonstrates his invention - the 'coherer' - enabling radio waves from a distant transmitter to be detected. Once he had established the principle of this device, he developed it no further. The principles were later taken up by Marchese Marconi.

French engineer and cleric who converted an old idea into a reality by inventing the semaphore visual telegraph.

The first development of a useful optical telegraph was in the time of the French Revolution, the epoch of rising capitalism. Revolutionary France was threatened by inner and outer opponents. This situation made a new communication system necessary. The civilian Claude Chappe, a former priest, invented a mechanical-optical telegraph.

It consisted of a column with a movable crosswise beam. This beam also had two movable arms. With ropes it was possible to show many different signal pictures, all together 196, including upper and lower case letters, punctuation marks and numbers. The equipment stood on rooftops or towers and was visible from afar. The first telegraph line of this sort was put into operation in 1794.

At the time, corps of voluntary soldiers were defending France against Austria and other Feudal Powers. The telegraph line consisted of 22 stations and linked Lille with the capital Paris, a distance of over 240 kilometres. It only took 2 to 6 minutes to transfer a message that would have taken riding couriers 30 hours to deliver. In 1894, when the revolutionary army conquered back the city of Le Quesnoy, the message of this event was already in Paris one hour later, but only because there was no fog!

In 1837, Wheatstone and Cooke formed a partnership of convenience. Cooke was an entrepreneur in search of a fortune, whereas Wheatstone was an academic who understood the science of electricity. In June 1837, they were granted a patent on an instrument using six wires connected to five galvanometer needles arranged in a row across the face of a grid which displayed 20 letters of the alphabet. Each letter was sent in the form of currents flowing down two wires, causing the appropriate needles to swing against stops and point to the right letter. Complex to describe, the system was simple to use: children could, and did, operate it successfully.

In 1838, Cooke and Wheatstone patented their two-needle telegraph. This system was cheaper to use, because it needed fewer wires. Another improvement was the one-needle telegraph of 1845.

Cooper was a manufacturer, inventor, and philanthropist born in New York. After success as a glue manufacturer, he and partners, in 1828, started the Canton Iron Works in Baltimore, MD, where the first American-built locomotive was built. He made numerous inventions and flourished as a manufacturer. He founded the Cooper Union in New York City, which provided free adult education courses in science, technology and art. This was the site of one of Lincoln's speechs, in 1860, that greatly enhanced his chances of being nominated for president. He also promoted and backed the laying of the transatlantic cable.

Frederick Creed was seven years old when he moved to Canso, Nova Scotia, with his family, where his father worked for A. N. Whitman & Son Ltd. At the age of fourteen he began working for Western Union Cable Company in Canso.

In 1889, at the age of twenty-seven, Creed invented what he called the "High Speed Automatic Printing Telegraph System." Immediately after Creed had demonstrated that his system was indeed a major breakthrough in communications, he established a company in London, England, where he began manufacturing the Creed Printer. In 1898, he demonstrated that he could transmit the Glasgow Herald newspaper to London via telegraphy at a rate of sixty words per minute. By 1913, his system was being used routinely to transmit London newspapers to other major centres in Great Britain and Europe. Creed Teleprinters were sold to Denmark, Sweden, India, Australia and South Africa, and provided almost instant printed communications between heads of state. In 1923, he demonstrated that his system was also applicable to ship-to-shore communications, and it therefore became a valuable life-saving system for ships in distress. Creed continued to be involved in the technology he had invented by serving on the Board of Directors of ITT (International Telegraph & Telephone Company).

The idea leading to invention of the Creed Printer (the teletype) was conceived in Canso, Nova Scotia, but realized in Glasgow, Scotland. Frederick Creed had moved from Mill Village to Canso with his family in 1878 and by 1885 was employed by the Western Union Telegraph Company in that town. He learned Morse Code and telegraph and soon formulated the idea that one should be able to interface a typewriter to a telegraphy system to send code, and then receive the code using the telegraph system and a typewriter in reverse order.

The first superintendent of the Hazel Hill Commercial Cable Company was Samuel Dickenson. He was born in Plymouth, England, in 1852. In 1875, he joined the Direct United States Cable Company at Torbay, Guysborough County, and married Sophia Grant, daughter of Duncan Grant of Antigonish -- they had three sons.

In 1884, he joined the Commercial Cable Company as superintendent (referred to as the mastermind who planned and layed out the station from its beginning) and remained at this post until 1904 when he was transferred to New York as Executive Vice-President of the Commercial Cable Company and also of the Commercial Pacific Cable Company; the Commercial Company of Cuba, and Vice-President of Postal Telegraph Company. He was born a leader and in Hazel Hill established an Esprit de Corps in the service. He died in New York on December 24, 1910, and was buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Antigonish. The monument marking his grave bears the following inscription:

Athough best known for his invention of the pressure-ignited heat engine that bears his name, the French-born Rudolf Diesel was also an eminent thermal engineer, a connoisseur of the arts, a linguist, and a social theorist. Diesel's inventions have three points in common: They relate to heat transference by natural physical processes or laws; they involve markedly creative mechanical design; and they were initially motivated by the inventor's concept of sociological needs.

Diesel originally conceived the diesel engine as a facility, readily adaptable in size and costs and utilizing locally available fuels, to enable independent craftsmen and artisans better to endure the powered competition of large industries that then virtually monopolized the predominant power source-the oversized, expensive, fuel-wasting steam engine. During 1885 Diesel set up his first shop-laboratory in Paris and began his 13-year ordeal of creating his distinctive engine. At Augsburg, on August 10, 1893, Diesel's prime model, a single 10-foot iron cylinder with a flywheel at its base, ran on its own power for the first time. Diesel spent two more years at improvements and on the last day of 1896 demonstrated another model with the spectacular, if theoretical, mechanical efficiency of 75.6 percent, in contrast to the then-prevailing efficiency of the steam engine of 10 percent or less. Although commercial manufacture was delayed another year and even then begun at a snail's pace, by 1898 Diesel was a millionaire from franchise fees in great part international. His engines were used to power pipelines, electric and water plants, automobiles and trucks, and marine craft, and soon after were used in applications, including mines, oil fields, factories, and transoceanic shipping.

C. B. Dunham of St. John, New Brunswick, was the first superintendent of the Western Cable Company, Canso, from 1881 to 1910.

Few have contributed in such original and varied ways to our knowledge of Nature as Michael Faraday. He was born in Newington, England in 1791. His family was poor. He was mostly self-educated. Faraday's Law of Induction Father of Electrochemistry - electrolysis anode, cathode, electrode, ion, lines of force; Faraday effect of polarization Best known for his Systematic studies of electrical and magnetic phenomena. First electric motor using currents as the driving source.

English bookbinder who became interested in Electricity. He obtained an assistant ship in Davy's lab, then began to conduct his own experiments. He wrote a review article on current views about Electricity and Magnetism in 1821, for which he reproduced Orsted's experiment. He was one of the greatest experimenters ever. Because he was self trained, however, he had no grasp of mathematics and could therefore not understand a word of Ampère's papers. In the course of his experiments, Faraday discovered that a suspended magnet would revolve around a current bearing wire, leading him to propose that magnetism was a circular force. He also discovered magnetic optical rotation, invented the Dynamo (a device capable of converting electricity to motion) in 1821, discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831, and devised the laws of chemical electro-deposition of metals from solutions in 1857.

He formulated the second law of electrolysis: ``the amounts of bodies which are equivalent to each other in their ordinary chemical action have equal quantities of electricity naturally associated with them.'' He published many of his results in the three-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839-1855). One of his most important contributions to physics was his development of the concept of a field to describe magnetic and electric forces in 1845. He first suggested that current produces a electric ``tension'' which produced an ``electronic state,'' or polarization of matter molecules, and was responsible for transmitting the electric force. He experimented with dielectrics in a capacitor. After further experimentation, he abandoned the concept of electronic forces in favour of "lines of force." He maintained that these lines could be made visible in a magnet using iron filings. Faraday was an advocate of the law of energy conservation, believing that possibility of ``the production of any one (power) from another, or the conversion of into another.''

In 1854, he gave his attention to the subject of ocean telegraphs, and was instrumental in procuring a charter from the legislature of Newfoundland to establish a telegraph from the continent of America to that colony, and from there to Europe. The same year, he became one of the founding shareholders of the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, which completed the first electric telegraph line between St. John's, Newfoundland, and New York. The route of this line passed across eastern Nova Scotia, from Amherst through New Glasgow, Antigonish, across the Strait of Canso by a wire stretched from Cape Porcupine to a mast at MacKean's Point, thence through Baddeck and Ingonish, across the Cabot Strait by submarine cable to Cape Ray, at the western tip of Newfoundland, and by overhead line across Newfoundland.

For the next thirteen years he devoted himself exclusively to the execution of this undertaking. He was actively engaged in the construction of the land line of telegraph in Newfoundland, and in the two attempts to lay the submarine cable between Cape Ray and Cape Breton. He crossed the ocean more than fifty times with the expeditions for laying the cable under the Atlantic.

In 1904, John Ambrose Fleming (1849-1945), the English physicist and electrical engineer, invents the first 'thermionic' valve. The term comes from the Greek thermos, meaning 'warm.' Fleming calls the device a 'valve' because it allows electrical currents to pass only in one direction. It becomes known as a 'vacuum tube' in America.

Fleming discovers that, in a vacuum tube, electrons will evaporate from a heated filament (the cathode) and travel across the vacuum to the anode - in one direction only.

Fleming realizes that this 'diode' valve, thus named because it has two electrodes, can be used in a radio receiver as a more reliable and efficient 'detector' than a crystal.

Fleming's original 'thermionic' valve was also known as a 'vacuum tube.' For the next fifty years, thermionic valves of various kinds form a vital part of radio, television and computer circuitry, until they were superseded by the transistor in the 1950s.

Pioneering automotive engineer Henry Ford held many patents on automotive mechanisms but is best remembered for helping devise the factory assembly approach to production that revolutionized the auto industry by greatly reducing the time required to assemble a car.

Born in Wayne County, Michigan, Ford showed an early interest in mechanics, constructing his first steam engine at the age of 15. In 1893, he built his first internal combustion engine, a small one-cylinder gasoline model, and, in 1896, he built his first automobile.

In June 1903, Ford helped establish Ford Motor Company. He served as president of the company from 1906 to 1919 and from 1943 to 1945.

In addition to earning numerous patents on auto mechanisms, Ford served as a vice-president of the Society of Automotive Engineers when it was founded in 1905 to standardize U.S. automotive parts.

After studying at the University of Göttingen, Gauss published, at the age of 24, his "Investigation on Higher Mathematics" that became the basis of modern number theory. In 1801, Gauss calculated the star position of the unallocated planetoid Ceres. In 1809, he published "Theory of the Motion of Heavenly Bodies." In 1816, he dedicated himself in Hanover to tasks concerning land survey (improved thereby the geotactic processes). In 1833, Gauss and his friend, the physicist Wilhelm Weber, installed one of the first electromagnetic telegraphs in Göttingen.

Gisborne worked as one of the first operators for the Montreal Telegraph Company, becoming its chief operator. Then, in 1847, was appointed general manager of the British North American Electric Telegraph Association, which was formed for the purpose of connecting the Maritime Provinces with Upper and Lower Canada. From 1849-51 he held the position of Superintendent of Telegraphs in Nova Scotia.

During the early 1850s, Gisborne began to study the possibility of a submerged transatlantic cable, and interested Joseph Howe and other members of the Canadian government in the subject. Having received their permission to conduct a preliminary survey, he travelled to the United States to find investors willing to sponsor the development and installation of a submarine line. He enlisted the support of several businessmen and was appointed engineer of the private company that emerged as a result. After overseeing the establishment of an overland link from Nova Scotia through New Brunswick to the United States, he successfully laid a small insulated cable from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island in 1852, establishing the world's first submarine telegraph system.

Another step in Gisborne's original transatlantic plan had been to lay an overland line from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, where it could be connected to the existing continental network. With a small steamer and a crew of six native Indians, he had conducted a preliminary survey across Newfoundland in 1851, hiking through dense forests and surviving much hardship. By 1853 labourers had been hired to clear a path for a cable.

Natural or India rubber, as it was then known, was of limited usefulness to industry. Rubber products melted in hot weather, froze and cracked in cold, and adhered to virtually everything until the day in the mid-nineteenth century when inventor Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped some rubber mixed with sulphur on a hot stove.

Goodyear's discovery of what came to be known as vulcanization strengthened rubber so it could be applied to a vast variety of industrial uses, including, eventually, automobile tires.

Goodyear was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He entered the hardware business with his father but the venture failed in 1830. Thereafter, he turned his talents to the commercial improvement of India rubber, which, until his time, was not used much in industry because of the adhesiveness of the surface and because of its inability to withstand temperature extremes. After numerous experiments, in 1836 Goodyear developed a nitric acid treatment that partially remedied these defects. The famous vulcanizing process, patented in 1844, was to revolutionize the rubber industry, but Goodyear was unable to profit financially from his discovery. His numerous patents were constantly infringed upon, and although he was able to establish his rights legally, he died a poor man.

Joseph Henry was one of the first great American scientists after Benjamin Franklin. He aided Samuel F. B. Morse in the development of the telegraph and discovered several important principles of electricity, including self-induction, a phenomenon of primary importance in electronic circuitry.

While working with electromagnets at the Albany Academy (New York) in 1829, he made important design improvements to the telegraph. By insulating the wire instead of the iron core, he was able to wrap a large number of turns of wire around the core and thus greatly increase the power of the magnet. He made an electromagnet for Yale College that could support 2,086 pounds, a world record at the time. In 1832, three years later, he noticed the principle of self-induction, and was albe to devise and construct the first electric motor.

In 1831, Henry built and successfully operated over a distance of one mile (1.6 kilometers) a telegraph of his own design. He became professor of natural philosophy at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1832. Continuing his research, he discovered the laws upon which the transformer is based. He also found that currents could be induced at a distance and in one case magnetized a needle by utilizing a lightning flash eight miles away. This experiment was apparently the first use of radio waves across a distance. By using a thermogalvanometer, a heat-detection device, he showed that sunspots radiate less heat than the general solar surface.

It happened this way: in 1888, Hertz described in an electrical journal how he was able to trigger his electromagnetic waves with his oscillator. A young man in his teens happened to read the article while he was vacationing in the Alps. For him, Hertz's discovery gave him an idea: Why not use the waves set off by Hertz's spark oscillator for signalling? Guglielmo Marconi was that young man. He rushed back home to Italy to give the idea a try.

When Hertz died in Bonn, Germany, in 1894, Sir Oliver Lodge gave Hertz credit for accomplishing what the great English physicists of the time were unable to do. It was not hard to give Hertz credit. Not only had he established the validity of Maxwell's theorems, he had done so with a winning modesty. "He was a noble man," said one eulogist in 1894, "who had the singular good fortune to find many admirers, but none to hate or envy him; those who came into personal contact with him were struck by his modesty and charmed by his amiability. He was a true friend to his friends, a respected teacher to his students, who had begun to gather around him in large numbers, some of them coming from great distances; and to his family a loving husband and father."

Charles Holness was the last superintendent of the Commercial Cable Company, Hazel Hill, from 1952 to 1962. Mr. Holness had the unpleasant task of sending out the last message across the wires and then shutting down one of the most important International Communications Centres in North America, the Commercial Cable Station at Hazel Hill, Nova Scotia.

In 1855, the British physicist David Edward Hughes (1831-1900) invented the first telegraph system printing the text at the sending and at the receiving end, thus doing away with a special alphabetic code as required with the Morse telegraph. In 1869, the first six Hughes telegraphs were placed in service in Switzerland. Mr. Hughes was personally present to supervise installation work and to instruct operators. The Hughes type printers were used in large telegraph offices exclusively, where they worked until 1939 alongside more recent systems. Besides the A. C. drive, this apparatus by Siemens & Halske, Berlin, still has the traditional drive by weight, which was only to be used in the event of current failure, however.

Lord Kelvin was a British physicist who began writing papers on the laws of conservation and dissipation of energy. He published 661 papers on scientific subjects and patented 70 inventions. Knighted as Lord Kelvin by Queen Victoria for his work on the electrical engine, he was in charge of laying the first successful transatlantic cable in 1866. He was educated at the University of Glasgow and Cambridge University.

The rapid deployment of telegraphic lines around the world was driven by the need of nineteenth-century European powers to communicate with their colonial possessions. High-risk technology investments were required. After the use of rubber coating was demonstrated on cables deployed across the Rhine River, the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, but it failed within months. A new cable designed by Lord Kelvin was laid in 1866 and operated successfully on a continuous basis.

John Mackay was an entrepreneur who invested one million dollars into the Postal Telegraph stock. Soon after his investment he was made president of the company and became interested in cables. He convinced a New York newspaper baron by the name of James Bennett to form a partnership with him. In two months this partnership became the Commercial Cable Company.

At age 20, he came across an article on the electromagnetic waves discovered eight years earlier by H. R. Hertz, and it occurred to him that these might be used in signalling. He began experimenting with Hertzian waves in the attic of Villa Grifone. By the end of the year he was able to ring a bell at a distance of ten metres with no wire or any metallic connection. Gradually, Marconi improved his instruments, grounding both the transmitter and receiver, and using a wire, insulated from the Earth, which served as an aerial or antenna to facilitate both sending and receiving. As time went on, he sent signals across greater and greater distances. In 1895, he sent one over a distance of two kilometres. In 1896, he went to England and sent a signal fifteen kilometres. He then applied for and obtained the first patent in the history of radio. From 1902 to 1945, Marconi's company was a major employer in Glace Bay and Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

Matthew Maury was a United States naval officer and oceanographer who was the founder of the United States Naval Observatory; confederate head of coast, harbour and river defences; inventor of a torpedo; and a pioneer of wind and current charts. The American Matthew F. Maury, who was born in 1806, joined the U.S. Navy in 1825 where he soon developed an interest for hydrography. As a result of this interest, he wrote a report entitled On the Navigation of Cape Horn which was published in 1834. Maury was appointed superintendent of the U.S. Navy's Hydrographical Office in Washington after having injured a leg in 1839 and two years later of the Naval Observatory. His analysis of thousands of log books and reports enabled him to publish recommendations for the most effective sea route to take advantage of winds and currents.

Maury reported that Lieutenant Commander O. H. Berryman had completed a series of surroundings the previous year from Newfoundland to Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean. He also investigated winds and currents in the area. Anticipating the possibility of a submarine telegraph line, Lieutenant Berryman found that the ocean floor in the 1,600 miles between Newfoundland and Ireland was primarily a plateau deep enough to clear icebergs and ships' anchors, yet shallow enough to make submarine line feasible.

Lieutenant Maury, in an almost poetic conclusion to his report, stated, "I do not, however, pretend to consider the question as to the possibility of finding a time calm enough, the sea smooth enough, wire long enough, or a ship big enough to lay a coil of wire sixteen hundred miles in length."

Samuel F. B. Morse worked as a portrait painter for more than twenty years. Despite his artistic success, in the 1830s he turned to invention. However, he did not entirely abandon his beloved artwork until his mid-forties. Morse hit the jackpot with his model for a magnetic telegraph in 1837.

Samuel Morse began his career as a landscape painter. In 1839, he abandoned painting and announced his first discovery of the Morse code. The electric telegraph that was discovered by his colleague A. Vail and all others that followed used Morse code. Morse spent many years fighting legal disputes by both rivals and former partners. Eventually, the United States Supreme Court awarded him the patent rights.

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 21, 1833. He grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia. After studying in the United States, he started a laboratory with his father Immanuel Nobel that was situated in Heleneborg, outside Stockholm. In St. Petersburg, he discoved that nitroglycerin and black-gunpowder together with a fuse would explode. Some years later he realized that this combination did not work as well as he had intended. His new idea was to lay a separate powder charge, that had a fuse, in a box with nitroglycerin. This resulted in a very strong and powerful explosion. But once again Alfred had problems with his new idea because of the difficulty with transporting it. He made a last attempt to correct his problem by taking sand from a river bank and mixing it with the nitroglycerin. Success was founded and the mixture was very stable.

Thus, dynamite was discovered.

The German physicist Georg Simon Ohm, for whom the unit of electrical resistance, the ohm, was named, determined (1826) Ohm's law, the relationship between the flow of current, the voltage, and the resistance in a closed circuit. Ohm's scientific contemporaries were slow to recognize his achievement; failing to realize how closely his conclusions were. His results, derived from careful experimental work, set many standards for existing experimental data. For most of his life, Ohm held only indifferent, poorly paid teaching jobs, but in 1852 he was given the chair of physics at the University of Munich.

The Danish natural philosopher Hans Christian Ørsted discovered electromagnetic induction while giving a lecture demonstration in 1820. In addition to electromagnetism, he worked on the compressibility of gases and liquids and on diamagnetism. Ørsted received his doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in 1799.

His youthful adoption of Immanuel Kant's philosophy endured, although he modified Kant's ideas by belief in a fundamental unity of the forces of nature. The popularity of his public lectures gained him an extraordinary professorship at the University of Copenhagen in 1806, and he became director of the Polytechnic Institute in Copenhagen in 1829.

Elisha Graves Otis did not invent the elevator, he invented something perhaps more important: the elevator brake, which made skyscrapers a practical reality.

Born on a farm near Halifax, Vermont, as the youngest of six children, Otis made several attempts at establishing businesses in his early years. However, chronically poor health led to continual financial woes.

Finally, in 1845, he tried to change his luck with a move to Albany, New York. There he worked as a master mechanic in the bedstead factory of O. Tingley & Company. He remained there for about three years and, during that time, invented and put into use a railway safety brake, which could be controlled by the engineer, and ingenious devices to run rails for four-poster beds and to improve the operation of turbine wheels.

By 1852, he had moved to Yonkers, New York, to organize and install machinery for the bedstead firm of Maize & Burns, which was expanding. Josiah Maize needed a hoist to lift heavy equipment to the upper floor. Although hoists were not new, Otis' inventive nature had been piqued because of the equipment's safety problem. If one could just devise a machine that would not fall. He hit upon the answer, a tough, steel wagon spring meshing with a ratchet. If the rope gave way, the spring would catch and hold.

In 1854, Otis dramatized his safety device on the floor of the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York. With a large audience on hand, the inventor ascended in an elevator cradled in an open-sided shaft. Halfway up, he had the hoisting cable cut with an axe. The platform held fast and the elevator industry was on its way. Otis had no way of knowing that this simple safety device was to alter the face of the globe, that because of it vast cities would spring up toward the sky instead of spreading toward the horizon as in the past.

French chemist Louis Pasteur was the founder of microbiological sciences, which aided in the improvement in Brewing Beer and Ale.

Born in Dole, France, Pasteur received his scientific education at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He served successively as professor of chemistry in Strasbourg and professor of chemistry and dean of the Lille Faculty of Sciences, which he organized in 1854. Three years later he returned to the École Normale as director of scientific studies, a post he retained until 1867, when he became professor of chemistry at the Sorbonne.

John Pender was a Scottish-born, Manchester-based cotton merchant who became one of the directors of the English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company. This was Pender's first step in a lifelong involvement with telecommunications that eventually lead to the creation of the world's largest telecommunications network through cable and wireless.

The following year, the English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company build the London-Dublin telegraph, using a submarine cable across the Irish Sea. Success came at their third attempt to lay the cable.

In 1900, German physicist Max Planck demonstrated that energy exists at the subatomic level in packets which he calls 'quanta.' He calculates that the energy of a quantum of light (a photon) is proportional to the frequency of the light. The formula is E=hv, whereby h is a constant, now named after Planck.

Plank's discovery helped to reconcile the conflict between the ideas that light was either a wave or a particle, through the concept of quantum. It opened the way to the revolution of modern theoretical physics.

The theorem is also, says Bray, 'at the heart of the technological design of devices such as television camera and display tubes, lasers, and light amplifiers for optical telecommunication systems.' Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918.

Pupin's discovery made long-distance cable telephony possible, at the same time enormously increasing the rate at which telegraph messages could be sent over submarine cables. Even so, when a submarine telephone cable was laid between Tasmania and the mainland of Australia in 1936, it was then the longest in the world, while the first transatlantic telephone cable was not laid until 1956, using specially-developed submersible repeaters. By then, far more sophisticated telecommunications transmission methods had been developed for use on land.

Born in Idvor, Banat, on October 9, 1854, Pupin received his academic education at Columbia College, New York, and his scientific education at the universities of Cambridge, England, and Berlin, Germany. He obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Berlin, and returned to Columbia University in 1889 to take a position as instructor in theoretical electrical engineering.

Reis was the inventor of the magnetic telephone. He was an elementary school teacher in Friedrichsdorf, Germany. Reis began his professional career as an employer in a colour shop. At the age of 19, he started to study in physics and mathematics. He was a self-educated person.

In 1861, Reis succeeded in transmitting speech and music electrically down a wire using a device he called das Telephon - the 'telephone.' They were of various shapes and sizes and resembled a large wooden ear.

In 1816, Francis Ronalds demonstrated a working telegraph in Hammersmith, England. His telegraph was activated by pulses of frictional electricity. Ronalds demonstrated his telegraph over a distance of eight miles across an above-ground iron wire. He also experimented using an underground wire, a copper wire encased in a glass tube and laid in a wooden trough. Ronalds ceased work on the telegraph when the Navy was not interested in his invention.

Siemens went to the army because he did not have enough money for further studies. He was an artillery officer in the Prussian army. During his army services, he had already made many inventions in the electro-techtronics field. He created a printing and needle telegraph and a cable which was insulated with gutta-percha, later used for undersea cable. In 1847, Siemens founded the company "Siemens & Halske" with the mechanic Johann Georg Halske. This international company was later known as "Siemens." He left the army in 1849 and worked solely for his company.

William Sturgeon was an English electrical engineer who devised the first electromagnet capable of supporting more than its own weight. This device led to the invention of the telegraph, the electric motor, and numerous other devices basic to modern technology.

Sturgeon, self-educated in electrical phenomena and natural science, spent much time lecturing and conducting electrical experiments. In 1824, he became lecturer in science at the Royal Military College, Addiscombe, Surrey, and the following year he exhibited his first electromagnet. The 7-ounce (200-gram) magnet was able to support 9 pounds (4 kilograms) of iron using the current from a single cell.

Sturgeon built an electric motor in 1832 and invented the commutator, an integral part of most modern electric motors. In 1836, the year he founded the monthly journal Annals of Electricity, he invented the first suspended coil galvanometer, a device for measuring current.

He also improved the voltaic battery and worked on the theory of thermoelectricity. From more than 500 kite observations he established that in serene weather the atmosphere is invariably charged positively with respect to the Earth, becoming more positive with increasing altitude.

Nikola Tesla invented the induction motor with rotating magnetic field that made unit drives for machines feasible and made AC power transmission an economic necessity.

Born in Smiljan Lika, Croatia, the son of a Serbian Orthodox clergyman, Tesla attended Johanneum, a polytechnic school in Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague for two years. He started work in the engineering department of the Austrian telegraph system, then became an electrical engineer at an electric power company in Budapest and later at another in Strasbourg.

While in technical school, Tesla became convinced that commutators were unnecessary on motors; and while with the power company he built a crude motor which demonstrated the truth of his theory. In 1884, Tesla came to the United States and joined the Edison Machine Works as a dynamo designer.

In 1887 and 1888, Tesla had an experimental shop at 89 Liberty Street, New York, and there he invented the induction motor. He sold the invention to Westinghouse in July 1888 and spent a year in Pittsburgh instructing Westinghouse engineers.

Tesla obtained more than 100 patents in his lifetime. Despite his 700 inventions Tesla was not wealthy. For many years he worked in his room at the Hotel New Yorker, where he died.

In 1896, English physicist J. J. Thomson announced his discovery of the electron in a lecture to the Royal Institution in London. He tells his audience, "The assumption of a state of matter more finely subdivided than the atom of an element is a startling one." His discovery of the electron marks the beginning of the Electronic Age.

By careful experimentation, he deduces that these corpuscles (electrons) must be 1,000 times smaller than the then lightest-known particle, the hydrogen ion.

At the age of 27, he became a professor of physics at Cambridge University and ran the Cavendish laboratory, one of the greatest scientific research institutions in the world. Seven of his research assistants won the Nobel Prize, an award he himself received in 1906. Like Kelvin, he is buried near Newton in Westminster Abbey.

The Italian physicist Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was the inventor of the voltaic pile, the first electric battery. In 1775, he invented the electrophorus, a device that, once electrically charged by having been rubbed, could transfer charge to other objects. Between 1776 and 1778, Volta discovered and isolated methane gas.

When Luigi Galvani's experiments with "animal electricity" were published (1791), Volta began experiments that led him to theorize that animal tissue was not necessary for conduction of electricity. Proof of this theory was the battery, which Volta invented in 1800. Volta taught at Como Gymnasium (1775-78) and Pavia University (1778-1815). Napoleon made him a count in 1801. The unit of electric potential, the volt, is named in his honour.

William Walsh, was born in Canso, Nova Scotia, in 1834. His father was Thomas Walsh, a native of Kilkenny, Ireland. His mother's maiden name was Mary Cullin and a native of Waterford, Ireland. They emigrated to Newfoundland, and afterwards settled in Nova Scotia. Walsh was educated in Canso and also at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish. He began business life as a fisherman, after which he spent twenty years at Sea, serving in every capacity from cook to captain.

He returned to his former business in 1875, and was appointed Harbor Master in 1876. He was elected councillor in 1892. From 1881 until 1894, he was employed by Seaman Bros. of London, as pilot on the cable ship Faraday, assisting in locating and landing ten telegraph cables, in the vicinity of Canso. He was regarded as a most successful businessman. Walsh was married twice: first to Mary A. Lukeman, and second, to Mary Hayden.

Weber was a professor at universities in Göttingen and Leibzig. After completing his studies, at the age of 21, he published the book "The Wave theory." Weber constructed with Gauss an electromagnetic telegraph and created the basis for a new unit system.

Charles Wheatstone was one of the most influential figures in the development of the electric telegraph. Wheatstone did invent the telegraph (patented in 1837), and the concertina (a small musical instrument like the accordion). Wheatstone's inventions had far-reaching effects on telegraphy; this was recognized in 1866, when he was knighted. He never retired and died while at a conference in Paris, in 1875.

Wheatstone dedicated himself to electrical engineering, which became his most successful working field. He also invented the mirror stereoscope. Wheatstone first measured the propagation speed of electric current in metallic conductors, investigated the spectral lines of sparks and invented the rheostat, a steeples electrical control resistance. Applying the ohm´s law that he confirmed and with this rheostat, Wheatstone developed the Wheatstone bridge, a circuit used in the retroactive measurement of electrical resistance.

Eli Whitney, American inventor, pioneer, mechanical engineer, and manufacturer is best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin. He also affected the industrial development of the United States when, in manufacturing muskets for the government, he translated the concept of interchangeable parts into a manufacturing system, giving birth to the American mass-production concept.

Born in Westboro, Massachusetts, Whitney decided in 1783 to get a college education. His own efforts were supplemented by his father's financial help, and after six years of preparation he was admitted to Yale College, graduating in 1792.

Whitney saw that a machine to clean the seed from cotton could make the South prosperous and make its inventor rich. He set to work at once and within days had drawn a sketch to explain his idea; 10 days later he constructed a crude model that separated fibre from seed.

After perfecting his machine he filed an application for a patent on June 20, 1793; in February 1794 he deposited a model at the Patent Office, and on March 14 he received his patent.

Whitney's gin brought the South prosperity, but the unwillingness of the planters to pay for its use and the ease with which the gin could be pirated put Whitney's company out of business by 1797. When Congress refused to renew the patent, which expired in 1807, Whitney concluded that 'an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.' He never patented his later inventions, one of which was a milling machine. His genius as expressed in tools, machines, and technological ideas made the southern United States dominant in cotton production and the northern states a bastion of industry.

William Windeler worked for the Commercial Cable Company from 1911 to 1961. He was one of the technicians on duty when one of the most important messages came across the wires: the Titanic had struck an iceberg and was in danger of sinking.