Sadly, that ‘History of Inventions’ that looked so promising
is not the thing at all. One looks at the entry for, say, the electric
telegraph, (this is an imaginary example) and it says, let us say, ‘The
invention of the electric telegraph is usually attributed to Wheatstone. Born
in 1793 of a fishmonger father and sempstress mother, he was educated…’
blah-blah-blah for several pages about what a nice chap he was, then ‘However,
some attribute the electric telegraph to Samuel Morse, born 1812…’ and lots more
of the same sort of stuff, and nary a word about how the damn thing works.
Here are pictures of a Wheatstone telegraph and an early
Morse key:
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