Is it far beyond reason to believe that signals based in strong static electricity might have been experimented with by acquaintances in several countries of Europe before 1850? Might someone in, say, Bologna not have had an equally interested friend in Genoa with a similar friction machine and might the person in Genoa have had one in Brest and so on to Wheatstone in England? Was it not fictitiously possible? I am off course assuming that they had a primitive code perhaps based on the number of sparks received at intervals. If not,why? I confess that from the little I've read, beginning with friction machines in an early Bologna laboratory and invention elsewhere of means to markedly strengthen the electricity able to be discharged, that it might have been possible, even if not actually done.