Francis Ronalds was born in London, in the year 1788. From a very early period in life he devoted himself to the advancement of electrical science, a course he has consistently pursued during a large portion of his life, which has not yet we are glad to be able to state drawn to its close. He is the inventor of an electric telegraph, electrical machine, electrometer, a new mode of electrical insulation, a pendulum doubler, an electric clock, several meteorological and magnetical instruments and other mechanical contrivances. The year 1816, however, marked Mr. Ronald's great achievement in the advancement of electric telegraphs. During that year he was the first to demonstrate that they could be practically and unerringly applied to the passage of messages through a long distance. Well aware of the difficulties arising from imperfect insulation, which had baffled his predecessors, Mr. Ronalds secured the success of his apparatus both by employing better means of insulation than had hitherto been adopted, and also by making use of a form of apparatus which should of itself be capable of supplying any loss of electricity which might arise from defects in the insulation.[32] Mr. Ronalds placed his telegraph wire in glass tubes surrounded by wooden troughs lined with pitch, which were placed in a trench dug in his garden at Hammersmith. He also suspended eight miles of wire by silken cords from a wooden frame erected on his lawn, through which he was enabled to successfully pass messages except in wet weather, the cords not being protected from the wet.

Mr. Ronald's peculiar form of apparatus may be thus briefly described:—At two stations were placed two clocks, with a dial with 20 letters placed on the arbour of the second-hand; in front of each of these dials was placed a screen with a small orifice cut in it so that, as the dial revolved, only one letter could be seen at a time. The clocks were made to go isochronously, and were started at the same instant with the same letter appearing on the dial through the orifices of each of the screens, both dials, therefore, as they revolved, would of course continue to show similar letters. This formed the readable index of his telegraph; means of communication between the two stations were produced in the following manner:—connected with each end of the telegraph wire, and placed in front of the clocks, were two pith ball electrometers, upon which a constant stream of electricity, produced from an ordinary frictional machine, operated and consequently kept in a state of divergence, except when a letter on the dial was to be denoted; the electricity was then partially discharged by breaking the connection, the pith balls in a measure collapsed, and the distant observer was thereby informed to note down the letter then visible through the orifice on the screen. In this way letter after letter might be denoted and intelligence of any kind conveyed. All that was absolutely required for the success of Mr. Ronald's telegraph was, that the clocks should go isochronously during the time intelligence was being transmitted, for, by a preconcerted arrangement, both clocks might be easily started at the same letter upon a given signal. The attention of the distant observer was called by the explosion of gas by means of an electric spark. In 1823, Mr. Ronalds published a full description of his telegraph, in a work entitled, 'Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph, and of some other Electrical Apparatus.'

In 1825, Mr. Ronalds invented a perspective tracing instrument, to facilitate drawing from nature or from plans and elevations, an account of which he published in 1828 in a work entitled, 'Mechanical Perspective.' With this machine he was enabled some years afterwards (in 1835), assisted by Dr. Blair, to procure exact perspective projections taken from given noted stations, of the Celtic remains at Carnac in Brittany. The result of these researches was published by Mr. Ronalds and Dr. Blair in 1836, and was entitled, 'Sketches at Carnac; or, Notes concerning the present state of the Celtic Antiquities in that and some of the adjoining Communes.' In connection with this tracing apparatus, he likewise contrived a hexipod staff used for a support, and which has been much employed for the support of instruments requiring great steadiness, such as telescopes, theodolites, cameras, &c. In the year 1843 he became the first and honorary director of the Kew Observatory, and while occupying this office he supplied the observatory with various new contrivances, for which he received a government reward from the special service fund, and a small pension from the civil list. The most considerable of these contrivances were his atmospheric electrical conductor and its appendages, adopted at the Greenwich, the Madrid, and the Bombay magnetic observatories; his photo-barograph, and two photo-thermographs, adopted at the Radcliff observatory, Oxford; his photo-electrograph, and three photo-magneto-graphs. Besides the writings above-mentioned, Mr. Ronalds is the author of an article in the Philosophical Magazine of 1814, entitled, 'On Electro-galvanic Agency, employed as a moving power, with descriptions of a Galvanic Clock;' and other articles in the same journal, detailing his original experiments to illustrate the relations of quantity and intensity in the electric pile. He also wrote four Reports on the Kew observatory, which were fully illustrated and printed in the reports of the British Association for the years 1845-50-51 and 52; and one paper in the Philosophical Transactions on 'Photographic Self-registering Meteorological and Magnetical Instruments,' written in 1846 and printed in the year following. In 1856 Mr. Ronalds published in French, at Paris, a summary of these reports, with some additions, entitled, 'Descriptions de quelques Instruments Meteorologiques et Magnetiques,' intended to explain his instruments at the French exhibition.

Mr. Ronalds is now (April 1864) residing at Battle in Sussex, and during the latter years of life has spent much time and part of his small pension, in collecting and collating an electric library, which might be conveniently available for the advancement of his favourite science, and prove worthy of presentation or bequest to some British public institution, so as to form the nucleus of one which might approximate possibly to a complete electrical library.—From particulars derived from authentic sources.