Electric telegraph with dial and keyboard

In 1851 the scientific instrument maker Paul Gustave Froment presented this electric telegraph transmitter and receiver to the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale. Its innovative feature was its keyboard. Each of the message’s consecutive letters and numbers typed on the transmitter keyboard is indicated for a fraction of a second by the hand, powered by an electromagnet, on the dial. In a report submitted to the society, Claude Pouillet wrote: ‘The transmission of a dispatch is executed rather like a piece of music on a keyboard instrument.’ According to Baron Séguier, chairman of the Electric Telegraph Commission, this telegraph was the simplest and most perfect, and Froment was indeed renowned for the quality and precision of his apparatuses.