Late Great Engineers: Charles Wheatstone - Britain’s great Victorian inventor

As inventor of the electric telegraph, an early incarnation of communications technology, Charles Wheatstone can lay claim to being one of the creators of the digitally connected world we live in today. A natural and eccentric innovator, he spent his entire academic career at King’s College London without ever retiring, where his “greatest achievement was the development of electric telegraphs, which revolutionised communications. For the first time, people kilometres apart and out of sight of each other could ‘talk’ in a reliable way.” In an era of expanding rail networks and the emergence of international stock-trading financial exchanges, these communications were essential. Wheatstone also attempted to measure the speed of electric pulses, invented the concertina and introduced stereo photography, for which he is regarded as “the father of 3D and virtual reality technology.” It’s hard to imagine a world devoid of the influence of Wheatstone’s wide-ranging genius.

The infant that was to become one of the great inventors of his age was born into a musical dynasty at the dawn of the 19^th century, child of William and Beata Bubb Wheatstone. The Gloucester family had established an instrument manufacturing business in London’s Strand in the 1790s, and by 1806 had relocated to the metropolis. Unburdened by a gentleman’s classical education, Wheatstone excelled at French, maths and physics while at Kensington Proprietary Grammar School, before being apprenticed, aged 14, into the family business under the tutelage of his uncle Charles. A solitary teenager, he often neglected his job at the musical instrument shop, preferring to read, write songs and pursue his interest in electricity and acoustics. According to his friend Leopold Martin, Wheatstone never quite grew out of these traits, describing him as, “small in feature, childlike to a degree, short-sighted and with wonderful rapid utterance, yet seemingly quite unable to keep pace with an overflowing mind.”