Background
He was born on 6 February, 1802 at Gloucester in February 1802, his father being a music-seller in that city.
inventor scientist experimental physicist
He was born on 6 February, 1802 at Gloucester in February 1802, his father being a music-seller in that city.
He received a private school education in Gloucester. Wheatstone's education was carried on in several private schools, at which he appears to have displayed no remarkable attainments, being mainly characterized by a morbid shyness and sensitiveness that prevented him from making friends.
About 1816 he was sent to his uncle, a musical instrument maker in the Strand, to learn the trade; but with his father's countenance he spent more time in reading books of all kinds than at work.
Of these the " acoucryptophone " was one of the most elegant- a light box, shaped like an ancient lyre and suspended by a metallic wire from a piano in the room above.
Wheatstone's early training in making musical instruments now bore rich fruit in the continuous designing of new instruments and pieces of mechanism.
In acoustics his principal work was a research on the transmission of sound through solids, the explanation of Chladni's figures of vibrating solids, various investigations of the principles of acoustics and the mechanism of hearing, and the invention of new uusical instruments, e. g. the concertina fo. fl. )
On the death of his uncle in 1823 Wheatstone and his brother succeeded to the business; but he never seems to have taken a very active part in it, and he virtually retired after six years, devoting himself to experimental research, at first chiefly with regard to sound.
In 1827, he devised a kaleidoscope, a thin vertical steel rod of rectangular cross section fixed at its lower end and carrying a silver bead at its top.
The bead describes beautiful curves resulting from the combination of perpendicular simple harmonic motions of unequal frequencies that the rod undergoes when vibrating.
He was professor at King's College, London, from 1834.
In 1835, Wheatstone demonstrated that in flashing an arc across metallic electrodes, the light given off produces a unique series of lines for each metal when refracted by a prism and that the presence of a small quantity of any metal can thus be detected by observing the position and color of its spectral lines.
This device indicated the time of day even when the sky was overcast. Wheatstone began experiments on the velocity of electric current in wires in 1834.
The readings he obtained were much too high, about 250, 000 miles (402, 000 km) per second.
In collaboration with William F. Cooke (1806 - 1879), he devised a telegraph with five recording needles, and then a two-needle telegraph which was widely used.
Among the many honors bestowed on him were degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, the Legion of Honor (1855), knighthood (1868), and appointment as foreign associate to the Academie des sciences (1873).
He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1837; in 1847 he married; and in 1868, after the completion of his masterpiece, the automatic telegraph, he was krtighted.
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Since 1836 he had been a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1859 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and in 1873 a Foreign Associate of the French Academy of Sciences.
In 1875, he was created an honorary member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He was a D. C. L. of Oxford and an LL. D. of Cambridge.
As a boy he was very shy and sensitive, liking well to retire into an attic, without any other company than his own thoughts.
At Christchurch, Marylebone, on 12 February 1847, Wheatstone was married to Emma West. She was the daughter of a Taunton tradesman, and of handsome appearance. She died in 1866, leaving a family of five young children to his care. His domestic life was quiet and uneventful.
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