CharlesWheatstone.com

It has been 150 years this year (2025) since Sir Charles Wheatstone breathed his last. In this article I will attempt to go over the last weeks of his life on earth and examine what is left to remember this remarkable man after all this time.

Charles Wheatstone spent the last month of his life on the Continent. There is very little evidence of what he actually did but a short piece published in the Wolverhampton Express and Star soon after his death mentioned he had first travelled to Geneva to carry out “some experiments upon a telegraphic wire between Geneva and London, with a view to improvements in the Atlantic cable,” [1] before making his way to Paris.

The seventy-three year old British physicist was apparently accompanied by his two unmarried daughters, Florence Caroline and Angela [2]. While in the French capital Sir Charles and the Misses Wheatstone stayed at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre which, at the time, was not in its current position, Place André Malraux [3], but at 168, Rue de Rivoli, just opposite the Louvre. The hotel had been inaugurated on 16 October 1855, shortly after the first International Exhibition held in Paris had closed its doors, and was consequently a relatively new building with 700 bedrooms, steam lifts to all floors and a staff of 1250. A month or so before the Wheatstones’ arrival the hotel had been sold for seventeen and a half million francs to Messrs. Chauchard and Hériot [4], the owners of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, which occupied most of the ground floor of the building. The new owners, however, had left the running of the hotel in the capable hands of its manager of several years, Martial Montégut.

01 – Stereoscopic card showing the old Grand Hôtel du Louvre, 168, rue de Rivoli, Paris. The hotel occupies the second building on the right. Author’s collection.

It would be nice to know for sure how the Misses Wheatstone kept busy while their father went to meetings of the Academy of Sciences or met with other eminent colleagues and friends, but in the absence of any document of the period we can only make educated guesses. The Hôtel du Louvre published a richly illustrated Guide de l’étranger dans Paris et ses environs, which gave a wealth of information about what to do and see in Paris. A copy of its 1875 issue is in my possession. “A foreigner who arrives at the Hôtel du Louvre,” this publication boasts, “can, in an hour, organize his life there, for a day or for a year, whether his fortune is princely or his means modest; whether he stops there for a brief or much longer stay; whether he is alone or accompanied by a family. A bath awaits him, his apartment is ready, his meal served at any time. He can live there as he pleases, as if he had in his hand the magic wand of an enchanter, and, in the vast factory working day and night, tranquil in the midst of its thousand wheels and cogs, one observes the order and harmony of a hive of bees under its crystal armour.” [5] The Louvre and its treasures were just across the street, the vast Grand Magasins du Louvre in the same building and some of the main theatres and opera houses (le Théatre français, le Théâtre du Palais-Royal, les Italiens, les Bouffes, l’Opéra Comique and les Variétés) were all within walking distance. Gounod’s Faust and Donizetti’s La Favorite were on at the Opéra, and Boieldieu’s La Dame Blanche at the Opéra Comique. Lighter entertainment could be had at La Gaîté with the fairy play La Chatte Blanche, or at Les Variétés, with Eugène Labiche’s comedy Un chapeau de paille d’Italie. There was also an International Exhibition at the Palais de l’Industrie (where Wheatstone had been one of the jurors for the 1855 International Exhibition and been honoured with the Legion of Honour) and an exhibition of paintings showing Paris during the recent siege (1870-71) at the Place du Château d’Eau.

It is not clear when the Wheatstones checked in at the Hôtel du Louvre [6] but we do know for a fact that Charles Wheatstone attended the meeting of the Academy of Sciences which was held at the Institute on October 4^th. His presence was noticed by Charles Terrier, a journalist from Le Bien Public:

On the benches reserved for the foreign scientists we notice the presence of one of the patriarchs of modern science, the illustrious physicist Mr. Wheatstone, one of the most eminent members of the Royal Society of London. He has been a corresponding member of the Academy of sciences for thirty-three years, and was made a Knight of the Legion of honour at the time of the 1855 International Exhibition for his remarkable work, his numerous inventions, his memorable researches on heat, light and electricity.

Everyone interested is physics is familiar with the curious devices of this ingenious experimenter whose name has long since spread outside the somewhat restricted circle of the official or scholarly world. His name has long been made popular by his skillful research on electricity, which made possible and practical the first telegraph transmission on land, and the manufacture and laying of the first submarine electric cable. We are so accustomed to enjoying this marvelous acquisition of modern science that one has to make a real effort to believe and remember that it was only in our own days, very few years ago, that man succeeded in making his thoughts travel around the world with an incredible speed, comparable to that of the velocity of light. The same scientist also succeeded in measuring this speed. These are titles that place him among the most skillful inventors of a century that produced so many, for whilst it gave France Ampère and Foucault, it bestowed upon England Faraday and Wheatstone. [7]

02 – Stereoscopic card showing the Institute in Paris. Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy.

Wheatstone had been a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences for over thirty years and was, since 30 June 1873, one of its eight Foreign Associates, filling the vacancy occasioned by the death of Baron Liebig. He spoke French fluently, had many personal friends among the members of the Academy and felt at home there. There was another meeting on the 11^th but it is not certain whether Wheatstone attended or was already too sick to go. We know he was seriously ill for about a week prior to his death but with no definite date for the beginning of his last illness it is difficult to be sure.

At the time the Wheatstones were at the Hôtel du Louvre another fairly famous person was staying there, recovering from an attempt on his life. Italian guitarist Jacopo Bellini had just given a concert at Prince Picchi’s residence in Venice on 5 August 1875 when he suddenly fell very ill. The physician who looked after him soon identified the symptoms as a case of poisoning. Noticing the guitarist’s fingertips were abnormally swollen it did not take him long to realise this was where the poison had been introduced into Bellini’s bloodstream. The police examined the strings of the instrument the artist had been playing that night and discovered they had been smeared in poison. The enquiry revealed that one of Bellini’s jilted lovers, knowing that he was prone to play so passionately as to make the tips of his fingers bleed, had coated the strings with a deadly substance. The culprit, Lea Marfirio, was arrested and tried and the guitar player, miraculously saved, travelled to Paris to forget about this near-fatal incident and complete his recovery.

When he fell ill, Wheatstone was attended by doctors Guéneau de Mussy and Barth. French physician Henri François Marie Guéneau de Mussy [8] had gone into voluntary exile in Britain after the abdication of King Louis Philippe (1848) and early in 1873 had returned to France with the survivors of the Orleans family “whose trusted servant, physician and friend he still remains” [9] There is little doubt de Mussy and Wheatstone were acquainted if not friends. The other physician was Jean Baptiste Philippe Barth (1806 – 1877), vice president then president of the French Academy of Medecine. Both men were experts in their field but tried as they might, they did not manage to save their illustrious patient.

03 – Portrait of Doctor Henri François Marie Guéneau de Mussy published in The Graphic on 15 February 1873. Author’s collection.

After being in a very critical condition for several days Wheatstone started getting slightly better and on 16^th October he wrote his will, witnessed by fellow scientist, astronomer, chemist, and inventor Warren de La Rue [10], who was present in Paris at the time, and by one Thomas McEniry (born in 1845) who is listed as an annuitant in the 1871 census but as an analytical chemist ten years later. 

04 – Portrait of Warren de la Rue from a photograph by Mr. J. Albert of Munich, published in the Illustrated London News on 11 May 1889, shortly after his death. Author’s collection.

Wheatstone left a lump sum of about £12,000 to his children, with the exception of his second son, Arthur William Frederick, who was given a £200 annuity per annum “for his natural life” (see note 27). His surviving sister, Sophia Ann, received an annuity of £100 and the use of a house, rent-free, at 8, Alma Square, for the rest of her life. His niece Emma Georgina, the daughter of his sister Charlotte Georgina who had passed in 1858, was also granted a £50 annuity which completed the £50 per year Wheatstone’s brother William had left her. There were smaller bequests to one of his late wife’s niece, Florence West; to his cousin on his mother’s side, Harriet Ward, née Rider, the daughter of his aunt Sophia Bubb, who had married Cornelius Ward, a musical instrument maker, and was now a widow; to the daughters and sister of said cousin, one Lucy Price; to his wife’s sister Rachel Elisabeth Heaviside; and finally to Dr Henry Pye Lewis Drew (1811 – 1880), surgeon, who does not seem to have been related but who may have been a friend or the family doctor.

The main bequest for non-family members or friends was to King’s College, London, where he had been a Professor of Experimental Philosophy since 1834:

I bequeath to the Corporation of King’s College, London, all my scientific Books and Apparatus or such portions thereof as the Professor of Experimental Philosophy for the time being shall think proper to select, also the Medals and Diplomas awarded to me by scientific Academies and Societies at home and abroad. I also bequeath to the same Corporation the sum of Five hundred pounds to be expended in scientific Apparatus.

Wheatstone gave his collection of framed portraits of scientists to the Royal Society, along with £500 “to be applied to the purposes of the Wollaston Donation Fund”.

Soon after he had signed his will, Wheatstone’s condition got worse and his two doctors “caused a communication to be made to the Academy of Science, to-day [the 18^th], intimating the critical condition of the great English electrician.” [11]. His third daughter, Ada Catherine, and son-in-law Robert Sabine were urged to come over at once.

The news of Wheatstone’s illness reached England by submarine telegraph – an invention Wheatstone had done a lot to implement and promote and one which he was still trying to improve until the week before he died – and was first reported in the British press on Tuesday 19 October, the very day the brilliant British polymath passed away at two o’clock in the afternoon, surrounded by friends and his family:

Professor Wheatstone lies at Paris very ill with congestion of the lungs. The report yesterday afternoon was slightly more favourable. [12]

Intelligence has reached London of the alarming illness of Sir Charles Wheatstone, who while in Paris has been attacked by bronchitis. It is to this distinguished septuagenarian, in conjunction with Mr. Cooke, that we are indebted for the invention, development, and practical application of the electric telegraph. [13]

The news of Wheatstone’s illness and death must have reached at an early stage the manager of the hotel, Martial Montégut [14] who, unfortunately, was familiar with such occurrences. His wife of forty-nine years had died in the apartment they occupied in the hotel on 5 March 1871. Before that the couple had lost a fifteen year old daughter and a twenty-one son who had respectively passed, also at the hotel, on 27 May 1865 and 21 June 1869.

French and British newspapers were still full of the news of Wheatstone’s illness on the 20^th, when his death certificate was drawn out at the mairie of the first arrondissement. It was witnessed by Adolphe Taffart, fifty-six, an employee of the Hôtel du Louvre, and Jean Vidalat, fifty-four, a clerk at the Préfecture de la Seine. The original certificate reads:

Du Vingt Octobre 1875 à dix heures et demie du matin. Acte de décès légalement constaté de Sir Charles Wheatstone, membre de l’Institut de France, âgé de soixante-treize ans, né à Barnwood, Angleterre, décédé à Paris, hier à deux heures du soir, en son domicile, rue de Rivoli, No, 168, veuf de Emma West; fils de défunts (sans renseignements). Sur la déclaration faite à nous, Officier de l’État Civil du premier arrondissement de Paris, par Adolphe Taffart, employé à l’Hôtel du Louvre, âgé de cinquante six ans, demeurant à Paris, rue de Rivoli, 168; et par Jean-Baptiste Vidalat, garçon de bureau, âgé de cinquante quatre ans, rue Jean Lantier, 15. Lecture faite les témoins ont signé avec nous.

Wheatstone’s remains were embalmed by doctor Gannal [15] on the 20^th and were to have been sent back to Britain at once but “the members of the Academy of Sciences, however, being desirous of paying the last honours to the deceased, a special funeral service will be held this afternoon [Thursday 21^st of October] over the body, in the chapel of the British Embassy.” [16]

The funeral service took place, as mentioned, in the English chapel located rue d’Aguesseau, in the 8^th arrondissement, and very close to the British Embassy. Although the chapel still exists today the original building was pulled down and we have to rely on old photographs (postcards actually) to get an idea of what it looked like both inside and outside.

05 – Exterior of the English chapel, rue d’Aguesseau, Paris. Author’s collection.

06 – Interior of the English chapel, rue d’Aguesseau, Paris. Author’s collection.

The service was performed by the incumbent, Reverend Edward Forbes (1817 – 1882). The Institute was represented by Messrs le Baron Larrey, Jean Baptiste Dumas, Henri Tresca, Jules Maillard de la Gournerie, and Eugène Belgrand [17]. The ambassador for Great Britain in Paris, Lord Lyons, attended [18]. Were also present some influential members of the British community in Paris as well as the main civil servants and directors of the French Telegraph Company. Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Henri Tresca, who were not only colleagues, but dear friends of the deceased gave moving speeches. The former devoted a fairly large portion of his eulogy to the stereoscope:

When we survey through the stereoscope those astonishing views of distant scenes or inaccessible mountains, those reproductions of the grand monuments of Egypt, Greece, and Italy, we cannot but remember that the instrument which presents them thus with their perspective, their surface, their solidity, was invented by Sir C. Wheatstone, not by a happy accident, but by painful struggles, but through a course of dedicated and profound study of the physiology of vision. Thence has sprung the new industry which, brought to perfection by his illustrious fellow-countryman Brewster, affords employment to-day to thousands of artists and workmen, and contributes to the intellectual enjoyments of millions of civilised beings. [19]

Dumas concluded his speech with the following words:

Farewell! Wheatstone, farewell, in the name of the Academy and of science; in the name of the friendship that united us for forty years, farewell! [20]

07 – Cabinet card portrait of Lord Lyons by Russell & Sons. Author’s collection.

08 – Portrait of Jean Baptiste Dumas. Engraving by Lafosse after a photograph by Pierre Petit. Author’s collection

On the evening of that same day, the coffin holding Sir Charles Wheatstone’s remains was loaded onto a wagon at the Gare du Nord and left by the 8.00 pm service to London via Calais and Dover. Wheatstone’s body then lay in state in his lodgings at 19 Park Crescent until the day chosen for the funeral.

09 – Stereoscopic card showing the Gare du Nord in Paris in the 19^th century. Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy.

Meanwhile British and French newspapers published short or long obituaries of the famous dearly departed. Most of them mentioned his works in the fields of acoustics, optics, electricity and magnetism and nearly all reminded the public of his connection with the invention and practical applications of the electric telegraph but also of the quarrel that opposed him at some point with the other inventor, William Fothergill Cooke. I reproduce here verbatim one of the most detailed of those obituaries, published in the Newcastle Daily Chronicle on the day Wheatstone’s body arrived in London:

DEATH OF PROFESSOR WHEATSTONE.

A telegram from Paris, dated Wednesday says that Sir Charles Wheatstone, the scientific inventor of the electric telegraph, died in that city on the previous day. The deceased knight, who held the office of professor of experimental philosophy in King’s College, London, was born at Gloucester in 1802. He began life as a seller of music in London, and was led to investigate the science of sound both theoretically and practically. Uniting great mechanical ingenuity with clear geometrical conceptions of pure dynamics, he produced from time to time several instruments and pieces of apparatus for the illustration of mechanical and acoustic principles. In 1833 he communicated to the Royal Society, through Professor Faraday, a paper on the acoustic figures which had been summarily investigated by Chladui, and in the following year he communicated to the society, through the same medium, his now celebrated “account of some experiments to measure the velocity of electricity and the duration of electric light.” In the same year he was appointed to the chair of experimental philosophy in King’s College, and two years later he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. On the 21^st of June, 1838, he communicated a paper to that society entitled “Contributions to the physiology of vision,” in which he described for the first time that beautiful instrument invented by him, which he named the stereoscope, and which now in its various forms is so very widely known throughout the world. But though the stereoscope has deservedly been an object of popular admiration, Professor Wheatstone is far better known to the world for the application of his scientific genius and attainments to the electric telegraph. As his claim to the invention of this instrument has been denied, this being one of the vexed questions of Science, we give here an official paper on the subjects, drawn up and signed by the late Sir M. J. Brunel, and Professor Daniell: – “In March, 1836, Mr. Cooke, while engaged at Heidelberg in scientific pursuits, witnessed for the first time one of those well-known experiments in electricity considered as a possible means of communicating intelligence which have been tried and exhibited from time to time by various philosophers. Struck with the importance of an instantaneous mode of communicating intelligence, and impressed by a strong conviction that so great an object might be attained by means of electricity, he devoted himself exclusively to the realisation of his object. In February, 1837, he was introduced to Professor Wheatstone, and in May of that year they took out a joint patent on a footing of equality, for their existing inventions, and the undertaking rapidly progressed until it attained a character of simple and practical system, worked out scientifically on the sure basis of practical experience. Whilst Cooke is the man who practically introduced and carried out the electric telegraph, Wheatstone is acknowledged as the scientific man whose profound and successful researches have already prepared the public to receive it as a project capable of practical application.” In 1868 he was knighted by the Queen, and the same year the Royal Society bestowed its Copley medal upon him for his researches in acoustics, optics, electricity and magnetism. [21]

Other articles published at the time also mention how he was created LL.D. [22] by the University of Edinburgh on 12 April 1869, how he had received the great medal of Ampère (a distinction only awarded every six years) from the French Society for the Encouragement of National Industry and also how he had recently “devised an apparatus for conveying instructions to the engineers and steermen on board large steam vessels.” [23] He was described as a physicist, a reputed inventor, a natural philosopher, a distinguished man of science, an eminent electrician or electricist [24] and the Northern Whig even went as far as to call him “one of the most remarkable men of the present century.” [25]

Unfortunately for us we do not have any “off the record” testimonies from members of his family or close friends. Their opinion on what kind of person Wheatstone really was in his private life would have been precious.

One of the obituaries I personally think best describes Charles Wheatstone as a public figure was published in the Daily News and re-printed verbatim in the Manchester Evening News:

The Daily News says: – The celebrity of Sir Charles Wheatstone was not an uproarious fame, nor were the honours he received extravagant. But his name must always have the fitting place in the history of scientific discovery, and, indeed, his work as a practical philosopher in other fields was valuable, and varied enough to have secured him a lasting reputation, even he had never taught the world a new use for that fiery spark which Mirabeau accepted as the impersonation of the scientific genius of Benjamin Franklin. [26]

On Tuesday 26 October 1875, Mr. Frémy, President of the Academy of Sciences, opened the day’s meeting with a few words about Wheatstone and the loss his death was to the scientific world in general and to the members of the Academy in particular who had welcomed the English physicist as one of their own. His opening remarks reminded those present that science knows no borders and that scientists all over the world are brothers in science, whatever the nationality that is written down on their passports.

On Wednesday 27 October, the second funeral of Charles Wheatstone, which had been announced in the press, took place from 11 a.m. onwards. As soon as the clock struck the hour the procession which had formed outside 19, Park Crescent started moving. Led by a hearse drawn by four horses, it proceeded slowly towards its destination, Kensal Green Cemetery, where Wheatstone was to be buried in the family vault, next to his sister Charlotte Georgina, who had passed on 14 July 1858, his brother William Dolman who had died on 30 August 1862, and his wife Emma, née West, who had succumbed to kidney failure on 25 January 1865. Wheatstone’s coffin was followed by fourteen mourning carriages and ten private ones. In the first of the former sat his eldest son Charles Pablo [27] and the Reverend Doctor Henry Stebbing [28] who, three years earlier had celebrated the union of Wheatstone’s daughter Ada Catherine to Robert Henry Sabine.

The list of the persons occupying the other twenty-three carriages reads like a Who’s Who of the period. They appear here in alphabetical order:

• Professor Frederick Augustus Abel, from the Royal Arsenal, (17 July 1827 – 6 September 1902)
• Mr. John Couch Adams (1819 – 1892), from the Observatory, Cambridge
• Professor William Grylls Adams, FRS (18 February 1836 – 10 April 1915), professor of Natural Philosophy at King’s College from 1863 onwards
• Sir George Biddell Airy (27 July 1801 – 2 January 1892), Astronomer Royal from 1835 to 1881
• Professor Robert Bentley (25 March 1821 – 24 December 1893), English botanist, King’s College, London
• Mr. Joseph Bonomi the Younger (9 October 1796 – 3 March 1878), English sculptor, artist, Egyptologist and museum curator
• Reverend William Cadman (1815 –1891), vicar of Trinity Church, Marylebone
• Professor George Carey Foster, FCS, FRS (October 1835 – 9 February 1919) chemist and physicist, known for application and modification of the Wheatstone bridge for precise electrical measurement
• Dr. William Benjamin Carpenter, CB, FRS (29 October 1813 – 19 November 1885), English physician, invertebrate zoologist, and physiologist
• Mr. Josiah Latimer Clark, FRS, FRAS (10 March 1822 – 30 October 1898), British electrical engineer who, in 1853, had suggested a way of taking stereoscopic photographs sequentially on the same plate while transposing the two halves of the negatives at the same time
• Sir William Fothergill Cooke (4 May 1806 – 25 June 1879), the other inventor of the electric telegraph
• George Cruikshank (27 September 1792 – 1 February 1878), British caricaturist and illustrator and a good friend of Wheatstone
• Edward Frankland, KCB, FRS, FRSE (18 January 1825 – 9 August 1899) English chemist who was knighted in 1897.
• Mr. John Peter Gassiott (2 April 1797 – 15 August 1877), English businessman and amateur scientist particularly associated with public demonstrations of electrical phenomena and the development of the Royal Society
• Professor John Hall Gladstone, FRS (7 March 1827 – 6 October 1902) British chemist who served as President of the Physical Society between 1874 and 1876 and was President of the Chemical Society from 1877 to 1879
• Sir William Robert Grove (1811 – 1896) a Welsh judge and physical scientist. He anticipated the general theory of the conservation of energy, and was a pioneer of fuel cell technology. He invented the Grove voltaic cell and was proposed for Fellowship of the Royal Society by Charles Wheatstone and two others. 
• Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (30 June 1817 – 10 December 1911) a British botanist, explorer, and a founder of geographical botany. He was Charles Darwin’s closest friend
• Sir Robert Lush (25 October 1807 – 27 December 1881), an English judge who served on many Commissions and Committees of Judges
• Colonel Charles Manby (1804 – 1884)
• Professor James Clerk Maxwell FRS FRSE (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) a Scottish physicist and mathematician who was responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation and is best remembered for his work on colour photography using black and white negatives taken through coloured filters
• Dr. Thomas Lambert Mears (1839 – 1918) barrister at the Inner Temple and teacher at the University of London
• Professor William Odling, FRS, Oxford (5 September 1829 – 17 February 1921), chemist who contributed to the development of the periodic table
• Lawrence Parsons, 4th Earl of Rosse, KP FRS (17 November 1840 – 29 August 1908) member of the Irish peerage and amateur astronomer.
• Dr. John Percy, F.R.S. (23 March 1817 – 18 June 1889), metallurgist, amateur photographer and friend of Wheatstone who gave him one of his earliest prismatic stereoscopes
• Mr. Alfred Louis Sabine (2 March 1840 – 20 February 1916), brother of Robert Henry Sabine who will become Director of the Electric Telegraph Company
• Robert Henry SABINE (6 November 1837 – 25 October 1884), civil engineer, Wheatstone’s son-in-law and one of the executors of his will
• Dr. Francis Sibson, FRS (21 May 1814 – 7 September 1876), English physician and anatomist.
• Mr. W. Sowerby, from the Royal Botanic Society
• Professor James Joseph Sylvester (3 September 1814 – 15 March 1897), an English mathematician who made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory, and combinatorics
• Sir William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (26 June 1824 – 17 December 1907), British mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer
• Mr. Charles Vincent Walker (20 March 1812 – 24 December 1882), English electrical engineer and publisher, who was the first person to send a submarine telegraph
• Mr. Frederick Oldfield Ward (1818 – 1877), who wrote Outlines of Human Osteology
• and many more

Also present were some of Wheatstone’s servants [29], the Reverend Charles Stuart, Chaplain of Kensal Green Cemetery, who read the first part of the burial service, and Baroness Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts who followed Wheatstone’s coffin in her carriage all the way to the grave. Hers is the only female name which appears in the various lists of mourners published in the press. Florence Nightingale might have come too, though she did not get out much, but she had been taken seriously ill around the time Wheatstone was at death’s door in Paris.

10 – London Stereoscopic Company. Carte-de-visite of Baroness Angela Georgina Coutts. Author’s collection.

The Birmingham Mail reported that “the ceremony was unostentatious” [30], an adjective which seems to apply to Wheatstone’s life as a whole.

Obituaries and eulogies continued to be published in the weeks that followed Wheatstone’s funeral. For example, on 10 November 1875 Joshua Latimer Clark, the President of the Society of Telegraph Engineers, opened their 38^th ordinary meeting with the following words:

[Before] we commence, it is my duty to take some notice of the loss of one of our most distinguished members ; I allude to the death of Sir Charles Wheatstone. A greater name than that we can seldom expect to have in our Society. Sir Charles Wheatstone was distinguished, not only amongst the members of this Society, but throughout the world, as one of the most eminent men of science of this or any past era, and I do not think we can duly appreciate the greatness of his name unless we regard it from a proper distance. You cannot discover the tallest tree in the forest while you are standing under its shadow.

[…]

Our successors will hear in their day of the giants of the Victorian era ; they will hear the name of Watts in connection with the steam-engine, and of Stephenson in connection with the locomotive and railways ; and they will also hear of Wheatstone in connection with the electric telegraph. [31]

In answer to the President’s words, Professor Abel, who, like Latimer Clark, was present at Wheatstone’s funeral, added a short personal touch about Sir Charles, with whom he had been fortunate to work on a project some twenty-five years previously:

With him, to undertake a work was to set about it with remarkable enthusiasm, to which was added an astonishing amount of ingenuity, and we cannot fail to notice how very rapidly he brought his scientific ideas into practical use. [32]

Words to the same effect as the ones uttered by Professor Abel crop up in several of the articles and eulogies about Charles Wheatstone, nearly everyone mentioning at some point what a practical mind he had and how he always made sure his inventions had practical applications.

Reading all the things that were written about him after his death there is no doubt that Charles Wheatstone was very much respected in the scientific world and that he was considered one of the greatest minds of the century. How, then can we explain so little is left of this world-wide renown a century and a half after he passed away ?

When other great men of the time have had statues erected in their honour, none was ever made to celebrate Wheatstone’s achievements. The museum of Gloucester houses a small maquette for a monument to Wheatstone which was designed by William Silver Frith (1850 – 1924) but never completed and that is the closest to a statue of Wheatstone there is. To this can be added a couple of blue plaques [33] and a brass memorial tablet unveiled in 1925 and originally affixed to the north outer wall of St. Michael’s Church in Gloucester before being moved to the technical college and then back to the tower of St. Michael’s Church, but inside this time [34].

11 – Modern stereoscopic card showing the maquette for a statue to Wheatstone, executed in 1886 by William Silver Frith in 1886 and kept at the Gloucester Museum. Photo by Rebecca Sharpe.

12– Modern stereoscopic card showing the blue plaque outside the house in Gloucester where Wheatstone and his family lived before they moved to London. Photo by the author.

13 – Modern stereoscopic card showing the newly refurbished façade of 19, Park Crescent, with the blue plaque restored to the location it had occupied before the whole place was rebuilt. Photo by the author.

14 – Modern stereoscopic card showing a close-up of the blue plaque. Photo by the author.

15 – Modern stereoscopic card showing the 1925 brass memorial tablet on the interior wall of the tower of St. Michael’s Church, Gloucester. Photo by the author.

A marble bust of Wheatstone was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878. It was the work of William Gorton Brooker [35] and bore number 1444 in the catalogue of the exhibition:

1444 – The late Sir C. Wheatstone, F.R.S.— bust, marble W. G. Brooker

Brooker’s bust was for a long time in the storage rooms of the Science Museum at Blythe House before everything was moved to Swindon. When we went to photograph it, we found it in a basement, although in very good company, next to busts of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and optician Andrew Ross. There is at least one plaster cast of this bust, now in Sir Brian May’s collection, and that’s it !

16 – Modern stereoscopic card. Bust of Wheatstone by William Gorton Brooker in the basement of Blythe House, London, before the move of the items in storage to a new place in Swindon. Wheatstone is between optician Andrew Ross (on the left) and Queen Victoria (on the right). Photo by the author.

To these few mementoes of Wheatstone’s life and past glory one must not forget to add photographs, drawings, engravings and paintings. There is at the National Portrait Gallery in London an early chalk portrait of a thirty-five year old Wheatstone by William Brockedon (1787 – 1854) and a later one, also in chalk, drawn in 1868 by Samuel Laurence (1812 – 1884). I am also aware of a few painted portraits of Wheatstone: one by Charles Martin (1820 – 1906), one of the sons of John Martin, the painter of Belshazzar’s Feast, The Plains of Heaven, and The Great Day of His Wrath, in the collections of the Royal Society; a second one in dire need of proper restoration and, to be honest, not a very good artwork, painted in 1870 [36] by Joseph Sydney Willes Hodges (1829 – 1900); and finally a third one by Sir Henry William Llewellyn (1858 – 1941), commissioned by Sir George Sutton and presented in 1928 to the Institution of Electrical Engineers, now the Institution of Engineering and Technology [37].

There are fortunately more photographs of Sir Charles but, for some reason, they are very difficult to find, which means they were never produced in large quantities. It is sad and ironic that there are only three known stereoscopic portraits of the inventor of the stereoscope. The earliest one is a stereoscopic daguerreotype made by Antoine Claudet in 1853 or early 1854 [38] showing Charles Wheatstone, his wife Emma and their first three children: Charles Pablo, Arthur William Frederick, and Florence Caroline. It belonged to Wheatstone and was bequeathed to King’s College, London when he died. In 1980 it was given to the National Portrait Gallery by the Governing Body of the College. The image is unique and was never commercially distributed.

The two other known stereoscopic images of Wheatstone were taken by the London Stereoscopic Company around 1866-1867. We know this because one of the halves of one of the images was used as a model for a fine stipple and line engraving by William Henry Mote (1803 – 1871) which was published in the first quarter of 1867 in John Timbs’ Year Book of Facts in Science and Art. The negative of one of these two portraits is currently in the Hulton Getty Archive and it is clearly a stereoscopic one, taken with a binocular camera. However, neither of the two stereoscopic portraits taken by the London Stereoscopic Company was ever issued for the stereoscope, only in the carte-de-visite format, which is why very few people knew them to be in 3-D until I brought the fact to the attention of the then curator of the Hulton Getty Archive some years ago. The second stereoscopic negative might be there too but is yet to be located in one of their many unopened or unsorted boxes.

17 – William Henry Mote. Stipple and line engraving of Charles Wheatstone after a photograph by the London Stereoscopic Company. 1867. Author’s collection.

There are, fortunately, more than three flat photographs of Charles Wheatstone. There is an early circular daguerreotype showing a fairly young Wheatstone in a private collection in France. The photographer is unknown and it could well be a self-portrait. Another quarter plate daguerreotype, attributed to Charles Chevalier and dated 1843-4, shows the photographer himself on the right and Charles Wheatstone sitting next to him on the left, in profile and dressed like an artist with light coloured clothes. This image, which used to be part of the Cromer collection in France, is now housed in the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, U.S.A. William Edward Kilburn (1818 – 1891) photographed Wheatstone for the daguerreotype but the original image seems to have disappeared and is only known through the engraving that was made from it by Conrad Cook and was published by William Mackenzie in the third volume of the 1863 edition of The Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biographty: a series of memoirs of distinguished me, of all ages and all nations.

18 – Conrad Cook. Stipple and line engraving of Charles Wheatstone after a daguerreotype by William Edward Kilburn. Author’s collection.

During the carte-de-visite craze Wheatstone was photographed by London artists Antoine Claudet, John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Henry Lenthall [39] and the London Stereoscopic Company. Henry Joseph Whitlock, from Birmingham, Robert Hills and John Henry Saunders, from Oxford, as well as James Valentine, from Dundee, also issued carte-de-visite portraits of the eminent physicist, probably when he was visiting those locations to attend meetings of one of the many societies he belonged to. To this list must be added the Nadar studio in Paris who took a couple of portraits of the great man. Oddly enough, these are archived under the names “Sir Chartier Wheatston” and “M. Weastowe” ! To my knowledge they were never published as cartes-de-visite.

19 – Left: CDV of Charles Wheatstone by Joseph Whitlock of Birmingham. Right: CDV of Charles Wheatstone by James Valentine of Dundee. Author’s collection.

Most of the photographs of Wheatstone taken in Britain were used to make engravings or woodcuts for books or illustrated magazines. I have already mentioned the ones by Conrad Cook and William Henry Mote. A photograph by Hills and Saunders was used in The Illustrated London News in 1868 when Wheatstone was knighted and one of the portraits taken by Mayall appeared as a woodcut in the same magazine at the time of his death. Also in 1875, The Graphic used the portrait from the London Stereoscopic Company in the obituary they published on the 30^th of October.

20 – Left: Woodcut after a portrait of Wheatstone taken by Mayall and published in the Illustrated London News in 1875. Right: Woodcut after a portrait of Wheatstone taken by Hills and Saunders and published in the Illustrated London News in 1868. Author’s collection.

As far as I know, that’s all there is. One cannot deny that it is not much to remember one of the geniuses of the Victorian era whose only fault was to be shy and “unostentatious”.

Something else needs to be said about how Wheatstone’s memory has come to be neglected over the years. I have already mentioned the lack of any statues or monuments to him but there is worse. His grave at Kensal Green is in need of urgent repair and does not even feature on the list of interesting monuments in the document given to visitors at the Cemetery. There might be a good reason for this omission. Whereas the Brunels’ grave is visible from a distance and stands clean and with sharp inscriptions, Wheatstone’s resting place, even though it is very close to the Brunels’, is hard to find and the names that were once engraved on it can barely be made out so that you have to know what you are looking for to locate it. And it has been getting worse over the past few years. Emma Wheatstone’s, William Dolman’s and Charlotte Georgina’s names have totally disappeared; Sir Charles’s name, depending on the light, is barely legible; so is the name of son-in-law, Robert Henry Sabine. The only way to recognise the tomb is through the inscription “Charles Pablo, eldest son of the late Charles Wheatstone, D.C.L., who died September 7^th 1886 aged 38 years” which is the most recent one and has been partly protected by the grass that surrounds the grave most of the year. Even more worrying is the fact that the graves around Wheatstone’s have started to sink dangerously into the ground. The headstone’s immediately next to the family plot is tilting more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa [40].

21 – Modern stereoscopic card. Wheatstone’s tomb is the one on the left. The grave in the middle is his cousin Harriet Ward and her family’s. Photo by the author.

22 – Modern stereoscopic card. If you look closely you may be able to decipher the first five letters of Wheatstone’s name. Sad, isn’t it ? Photo by the author.

I went to the offices of the cemetery and asked if there was something we could do to repair the grave and make the names clear once more. I was told that unless I am the owner of the grave or have the permission of said owner there is nothing we can do. Needless to say I have no idea who the current owner of the grave is. It is usually one of the executors of the will. One of Wheatstone’s executors, his son-in-law Robert Henry Sabine, lies next to him and though I know who his executors are the grave may have belonged to Wheatstone’s other executor, Stephen Williams. It means I now have to find the executors of wills of several generations of executors. I may or may not find the rightful owner who may not even be aware they are the owner of the grave. Is it just me or is there something dreadfully wrong there ? All I want to do is renovate the grave of a great British scientist and make sure that it will be looked after for generations to come. Is that really too much to ask ? Apparently so.

NOTES

[1] Wolverhampton Express and Star, Thursday 21 October 1875, p. 4.

[2] Florence Caroline, the third of Charles and Emma Wheatstone’s children – she had two older brothers – was named after Wheatstone’s good friend Florence Nightingale. She was born on 12 May 1850 and was therefore twenty-five at the time of her father’s death. Her sister Angela was five years younger. She was named after another good friend of Wheatstone’s, Baroness Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, and was born on 13 February 1855. Wheatstone’s third daughter, Ada Catherine, named after yet another female friend, Ada Lovelace, and born on 1 January 1853, had married the thirty-five-year old civil engineer Robert Henry Sabine three years previously on 23 July 1872, and was with her husband in London. 

[3] The move to the current location was made in 1887.

[4] Hippolyte Alfred Chauchard (1821 –1909) was just a clerk in the shop “Au Pauvre Diable” when he went into partnership with Charles Eugène Faré (1803 – 1872) and Auguste Hériot (1826 – 1879) to rent the ground floor of the Hotel du Louvre which had just opened its doors. Faré surprisingly stepped out in 1857 but the two remaining partners carried on and successfully expanded until they owned the whole block.

[5] Guide de l’étranger dans Paris et ses environs, published by the Hôtel du Louvre in 1875. “Un étranger qui débarque à l’Hôtel du Louvre peut, en une heure, y organiser sa vie, pour un jour ou pour une année que sa fortune soit princière ou sa bourse modeste; qu’il y stationne au passage ou qu’il y séjourne; qu’il soit seul ou accompagné d’une famille. Un bain l’attend, son appartement est prêt, son repas servi à toute heure. Il peut y vivre à sa guise, comme s’il avait en main la baguette magique d’un enchanteur, et, dans la vaste usine jour et nuit en travail, tranquille au milieu de ses mille rouages, on observe l’ordre et l’harmonie d’une ruche d’abeilles sous son armure de cristal.”

[6] I wrote to the hotel to ask where the registers of the period were likely to be archived but never got an answer. I guess those registers, if they still exist, would make fascinating reading.

[7] Charles Terrier, Le Bien Public, 9 October 1875, p. 3. Report on the October 4^th 1875 meeting of the Academy of Sciences.

[8] Henri François Marie Guénau de Mussy was born in Chalon-sur-Saône, Saône-et-Loire, on 11 March 1814 and died in Saint-Raphael, Var, on 30 September 1892. He married Clémence Cornélie Victoire Janssens 1829 – 1919) in Brussels, Belgium, on 8 September 1852. In 1868 he was appointed physician at the French Hospital in London (founded in 1718 on behalf of poor French huguenots and their descendants).

[9] The Graphic, 15 February 1873, p. 5. Article relating a dinner of about fifty medical men in honour of de Mussy, prior to his return to France.

[10] Warren de la Rue (1815 – 1889) is mostly remembered for his application of photography to astronomical research. He published stereoscopic pictures of the different phases of the moon.

[11] London Evening Standard, Tuesday 19 October 1875, p. 5.

[12] Birmingham Mail, Tuesday 19 October 1875, p. 3.

[13] Freeman’s Journal, Tuesday 19 October 1875, p. 6.

[14] Martial Montégut, the manager of the Hôtel du Louvre at the time of Wheatstone’s death, was born in Rochefort, Charente on 8 October 1818. On 21 June 1847 he married twenty-five year old Marie Gabrielle Jenny Defontaine. Soon after the death of Wheatstone M. Montégut left the Hôtel du Louvre and worked for a short time at Monte Carlo, Monaco. He died in the 9^th arrondissement of Paris on 20 December 1881.

[15] It is not clear which of the Gannals did the embalming. Adolphe Antoine (4 August 1826 – 14 May 1905) and Gaspard Antoine Félix (3 April 1829 – 1905) were both the sons of Jean Nicolas Gannal (1791 – 1852), the inventor of a new embalming method. They both followed in their father’s footsteps and practiced embalming.

[16] Pall Mall Gazette, Thursday 21 October 1875, p. 7.

[17] Félix Hippolyte, Baron Larey (18 September 1808 – 8 October 1895), was a military surgeon and had been one of the physicians of the late Emperor Napoleon III; Jean-Baptiste André Dumas (16 July 1800 – 11 April 1884) was a famous French chemist who had been a member of the Academy of Sciences since 1832 and is best remembered for his work on the determination of atomic weights. He became a Member of Parliament then a Senator during the Second Empire and even acted as minister of agriculture and commerce for a short period. He was a good friend of Wheatstone’s; Henri Edouard Tresca (12 October 1814 – 21 June 1885) was a mechanical engineer and professor at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He studied plasticity and material failure and was instrumental in the design of the prototype metre bar; Jules Maillard de la Gournerie (20 December 1814 – 25 June 1883) was an engineer and a mathematician; Eugène Belgrand (23 April 1810 – 8 April 1878) was an engineer who contributed to the modernisation of the Paris sewer system during the reign of Napoleon III and also constructed a system of aqueducts to provide the French capital with fresh water.

[18] Richard Bickerton Pemell LYONS, 1st Earl Lyons (26 April 1817 – 5 December 1887) served as ambassador to the United States from 1858 to 1865 (a period which included the Civil War) then as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1865 to 1867) and finally as British ambassador to France (1867 to 1887). He was offered the office of Foreign Secretary on three different occasions but refused each time despite being encouraged to accept by Queen Victoria herself.

[19] Journal officiel de la République française, 23 October 1875, p. 5. The translation into English appeared in the Bradford Observer, Thursday 4 November 1875, p. 7, and in the Cambridge Independent Press, Saturday 6 November 1875, p. 2.

[20] Idem.

[21] Newcastle Daily Chronicle, Thursday 21 October 1875, p. 3.

[22] LL.D or Legum Doctor is also known as Doctor of Laws.

[23] Bristol Daily Post, Thursday 21 October 1875, p. 3; Irish Times, Thursday 21 October 1875, p. 2; Northern Whig, Thursday 21 October 1875, p. 5.

[24] Freeman’s Journal, Thursday 21 October 1875, p. 6; Dublin Evening Telegraph, Thursday 21 October 1875, p. 4.

[25] Northern Whig, Thursday 21 October 1875, p. 5.

[26] Manchester Evening News, Friday 22 October 1875, p. 4.

[27] Strangely enough the press never mentions Wheatstone’s second son, Arthur William Frederick (2 August 1849 – 30 June 1898) and we are not even sure he attended his father’s funeral. Some papers even call Charles Pablo “Wheatstone’s only son.” We know from accounts published later in the press that Arthur William was “several times summoned for drunk and disorderly conduct” and that on 16 November 1880 he was fined £2. 2s. for “drunkenness and assault on a police constable.” Was Arthur disowned by his father at some earlier point ? This could explain why he was not treated the same way as his brother and sisters in Charles Wheatstone’s will. Wheatstone may not have felt it safe to leave him a lump sum which he could have spent in a few weeks or months, hence the annuity.

[28] The Reverend Doctor Henry Stebbing (26 August 1799 – 22 September 1883) was, among other things, the first editor of The Athenaeum. His daughter Grace (1840 – 1936), an author of some renown, remained in touch with Wheatstone’s daughters and is listed as a Visitor to Ada and Angela in the 1921 census.

[29] In the 1871 census, Wheatstone, who was living at 19 Park Crescent with his daughter Ada Catherine, and his sister Sophia Ann, is shown as having five servants: a butler named Charles Dorvine, married, 39; a nineteen-year old under-butler or footman called James Harper, unmarried; a cook named Emily Walker, unmarried, 32; a housemaid named Sarah Chapman, unmarried, 25, and an eighteen-year old under housemaid called Martha L. Bussell, unmarried. It is unfortunately not known for certain whether the same persons were still with him at the time of his death.

[30] Birmingham Mail, Wednesday 27 October 1875, p. 3.

[31] Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers, Vol IV, No. 12, pp. 319-320.

[32] Ibid., p. 334

[33] It is a very sad fact to report but there is no blue plaque on Wheatstone’s grandparents’ house in Barnwood where he was born, and my colleague tried to make contact with the current occupiers a couple of year ago. There is one, however, in nearby Gloucester on a house where he lived for a few years before the family moved to London, and a second one at 19 Park Crescent, London, where he spent the last fifteen years of his life. There is nothing original, however, in that latter building which was pulled to the ground and rebuilt to look identical. It had been badly damaged during the Second World War so there was already not much left of the place as Wheatstone knew it.

[34] When my colleague Rebecca and I went to see and photograph the memorial tablet it was completely hidden behind a row of roll-up banners and was totally invisible to anyone who did not know it was there.

[35] William Gorton Brooker was born in Mayport, Cumbria, on 2 May 1842, the son of master ship carver James Brooker (c. 1816 – 1860) and his wife Jane Hudson (1819 – 1910). Brooker married Frances Hudson (1839 – 1904) on 1 June 1864 at Bishop Wearmouth, county Durham and died at the age of 43 on 22 November 1885. He is mostly remembered for the Victoria Hall Disaster Memorial on which he worked with Francis John Williamson (1833 – 1920). It is not clear how he came to sculpt Wheatstone’s bust. Was he a friend of the family ? Was it a commission from some of Wheatstone’s friends or colleagues ? We might never know.

[36] I have in my collection an original letter dated Sunday 1 August 1870 and written by Wheatstone to Sydney Hodges, Esquire, in which he confirms he will come to the artist’s studio on Wednesday [4 August] “at the same time”. This seems to imply he sat for the painter on at least two occasions during the year 1870.

[37] I am very grateful to Library and Archives Manager Ann Locker for providing me with an image of this painting (which made me realise that it had been printed in reverse on the cover and on page 221 of the late Brian Bowers’s biography of Charles Wheatstone) and for the information about who commissioned it and who painted it as the information was lacking in Mr. Bowers’s work.

[38] It is mentioned by Charles Gaudin in the photographic journal La Lumière in its 25 March 1854 issue. Charles Gaudin was reviewing a soirée held on the 11^th of March by the editor-in-chief of the journal, Ernest Lacan, to which were invited photographers, literary men, and painters to celebrate the presence in Paris of Antoine Claudet. Claudet had brought with him 24 stereoscopic daguerreotypes, one of which showing “M. Wheatstone et sa famille.”

[39] I have  never seen any copy of the photograph by Lenthall and it is only known to me through the engraving that was made from it and was published in the September 1868 issue of Leisure Hour to accompany an article about Charles Wheatstone, who had recently been knighted by the Queen.

[40] That headstone, by the way, belongs to the family of his cousin Harriet Ward, née, Rider, whom I mentioned when I was going through Wheatstone’s will. Strangely enough, though, Harriet is named Ann on the grave, as is her daughter, also called Harriet. However, since Harriet the elder is mentioned as being the wife of Cornelius Ward and the other Harriet as his daughter there is no doubt they are the same persons.