It is the separate signal with the time consumed in its transmission which is the real unit of cost. The codes now in use employ words whose letters, as signaled, demand more than twice the time required by the Burke system. Thus 4221332, as transmitted by Mr. Burke, means “Advise creditor to prove claim and accept dividend,” for which but ten signals suffice. In the codes now in the hands of the public, an average word of seven letters would contain twenty-three signals. How wide is the variety of sentences possible in the new method? If the numerals are employed in permutations of seven figures, as 1342423, a Burke code will contain 16384 sentences; in permutations of eight figures, four-fold, and in permutations of nine figures, sixteen-fold as many, or 262,144 sentences, a variety much more ample than that of any other system. Mr. Burke finds that an average code message has 8 letters to a word, each word requiring about 25 electrical impulses in transmission; an average permutation on his system does not demand more than 10 impulses.
Mr. Burke has also devised a capital mode of simplifying telegraphic signals of all kinds. A message in the usual Morse code has dots, dashes and spaces, each produced by depressing a key for a short, a long, or a longer period. Mr. Burke interrupts a current with a key solely with dot-intervals; the periods during which the current is unbroken are, according to their length, dot-signals, dash-signals, or spaces:--
Educated guessing . . . Weaving power . . . Imagination indispensable . . . The proving process . . . Theory gainfully directs both observation and experiment . . . Professor Tyndall’s views . . . Discursiveness illustrated in Thomas Young.
As far back as the first man with brains in his head, there was an ache to know why the sun shone, the stars twinkled, the winds blew, why harvests here were plentiful and there scant. The whole burden of witchcraft, of fetichism, of beliefs in voodoo, is a pathetic proof of this human longing to explain. What, after all, are superstitions but premature explanations that overstay their time? When men of thought get a glimpse of an interpretation really true, they are eager to prolong that glimpse until it becomes a survey whose due tests confirm and buttress a well grounded anticipation. This exploring process reminds us of what took place long ago when an architect of unexampled boldness first imagined a dome for a temple, and brought his dream to fulfilment. He began by rearing a single arch, fairly strong, yet hardly strong enough; a second arch arose to meet the first at their common crest; now, in mutual support both had a stability neither could display alone; at last when the wall had gone full circle it had a strength vastly greater than that of any part by itself. The long-admired arch had indeed become no more than an element to be joined with other arches to create a unit of an order distinctly higher.