page_title: Pavel Schilling
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Pavel Schilling / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: A 6 kopek USSR stamp commemorating Pavel Schilling in 1982. The legend along the bottom reads "The 150th anniversary of the invention of electromagnetic telegraph in Russia" ("150-летие изобретения электромагнитного телеграфа в России") The legend along the side reads P.L. Schilling Русский: Марка СССР, П. Л. Шиллинг, 1982, 6 коп.
context_page_description: Baron Pavel Lvovitch Schilling, also known as Paul Schilling, was a Russian military officer and diplomat of Baltic German origin. The majority of his career was spent working for the imperial Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a language officer at the Russian embassy in Munich. As a military officer, he took part in the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon. In his later career, he was transferred to the Asian department of the ministry and undertook a tour of Mongolia to collect ancient manuscripts.
  Schilling is best known for his pioneering work in electrical telegraphy, which he undertook at his own initiative. While he was in Munich, he worked with Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring who was developing an electrochemical telegraph. Schilling developed the first electromagnetic telegraph that was of practical use. Schilling's design was a needle telegraph using magnetised needles suspended by a thread over a current-carrying coil. His design also greatly reduced the number of wires compared to Sömmerring's system by the use of binary coding. Tsar Nicholas I planned to install Schilling's telegraph on a link to Kronstadt, but cancelled the project after Schilling died.
context_section_description: The Schilling needle telegraph, as such, was never used, but it is partly the ancestor of the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, a system widely used in the United Kingdom and British Empire in the nineteenth century, and some instruments remained in use well into the twentieth century.  Schilling's demonstration in Frankfurt was attended by Georg Wilhelm Muncke who subsequently had an exact copy of Schilling's apparatus made.  Muncke used this for demonstrations in lectures.  One of these lectures was attended by William Fothergill Cooke, who was inspired to build a version of Schilling's telegraph of his own, although he did not realise that the instrument he saw was due to Schilling.  He abandoned this method for practical use in favour of electromagnetic clockwork solutions for a while, apparently believing that needle telegraphs always required multiple wires.  That Schilling's method of suspending the needle by a thread horizontally was not very convenient was also an influence.  This changed when he partnered with Charles Wheatstone and the telegraph they then built together was a multiple-needle telegraph, but with a rather more robust mounting based on the galvanometer of Macedonio Melloni.  There is no evidence for the claim sometimes advanced that Wheatstone also lectured with a copy of Schilling's telegraph, although he certainly knew about it and lectured on its implications.
  Schilling's telegraph of 1832 is currently displayed in the telegraph collection of the A.S. Popov Central Museum of Communications.  The instrument was previously on exhibition at the Paris Electrical Exhibition of 1881.  His contributions to electrical telegraphy were named an IEEE Milestone in 2009.  The building housing his apartment in St. Petersburg, then known as Ofrosimova's house, but now 7 Marsovue Pole, has a memorial plaque, placed in 1886 to mark the centennial of his birth.
caption: A six kopek postage stamp from the USSR commemorating the 150th anniversary of Pavel Schilling's invention, 1982[57]
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