He noticed that when he accidentally placed a wire carrying an electric current next to a magnetic needle, the needle moved! After the lecture he repeated this experiment, published the results (in Latin!) on 21st July 1820 and so began the modern age.

Following hard behind Ersted's discovery, Michael Faraday found, in 1831, that he could cause an electric current in a wire by passing it through a magnetic field, and conversely, cause a magnetic field by passing a current along a wire. He was the first person to continuously generate an electric current by rotating a disk between two magnets.

The ability of an electric current to cause the movement of magnetic needles gave Charles Wheatstone a good idea. Working with Fothergill Cooke, he connected five magnetic needles to an electrical circuit in such a way that when a dial some distance away was turned to a series of letters, the needles moved in a characteristic pattern, which could be read and interpreted.

Using this new fangled "electric telegraph", messages could be sent very quickly over relatively long distances. It was immediately put into use by the London and Blackwall Railway, and Wheatstone took out a patent. From then on it was a matter of perfecting and polishing the idea. Wheatstone and Cooke, a year later, reduced the number of needles to two, eventually one, and the number of wires to only one pair.

In 1845 this device was used to catch a suspected murderer. John Tawell was thought to have killed a woman named Hart at a place in England called Salthill. He got on a train at Slough and was heading for London, where he might vanish into the large city. A description of Tawell was sent by Wheatstone's telegraph to the London police who were waiting at the station. They followed and arrested the suspect who was later tried and found guilty of the murder.

Wheatstone was not the only person working in this field. Another inventor had already devised a way of making the electric telegraph easier to use. This was Samuel Morse, who, after a lot of trouble with a law-suit, developed a rival system that automatically recorded incoming messages. This "morse code" is now very familiar, but Morse got his first commercial success in the USA when Congress gave him $30,000 to connect Baltimore and Washington.

The original Morse recording system took two types of incoming signal, a short pulse and a long pulse (which we now call "dots" and "dashes"), and moved a hinged lever against a continuously moving length of paper. A long pulse cause the lever to leave a long mark on the moving paper - a "dash" - whereas a short pulse would only leave a short mark - the "dot".

After some training, an operator could send dots and dashes from a transmitting key, to a recorder a long way away. There another operator recovered the recorded paper, and translated the dot-dash combinations into letters and numbers. Such a system worked only when both ends had trained operators. Wheatstone tried to get around this limitation by developing a system whereby an unskilled operator at one end simply turned a dial to the appropriate letter, and at the other end a needle swung until it pointed at the same letter.

Anyone could send or receive messages this way, but Morse eventually won out, and even Wheatstone had to accept the Morse system when the Post Office in Great Britain too over all public telegraph operations. Characteristically, he made a lot of improvements, which he patented in 1862, and almost a century later his system was still being used on submarine cables because of its superior speed.

Mendel's messages in Europe at this time would probably have used some form of the Morse system (with improvements) and would have been carried along iron wires one-sixth of an inch in diameter. These wires, if they had followed the English system, would have been covered in zinc and either tarred or varnished to prevent corrosion.

The amazing Victorians even connected the USA with the UK using an undersea cable across the Atlantic ocean, and the first successful contact was made on August 5th 1858 along a cable 2600 miles long and containing some 25,000 miles of copper wire. Instantaneous connection between the two continents was the wonder of its day - possibly with an even greater impact than the modern internet.