English Inventor and Scientist. He is remembered for the creation of a working electric telegraph in 1816 and a continuously recording camera in 1845. The son of a cheese monger, at age 14 he was apprenticed as a draper. He became interested in electricity and began conducting experiments on atmospheric electricity. In 1814 he published his first papers in the "Philosophical Magazine" on the properties of the dry pile, a form of battery that his mentor Jean-André Deluc helped to develop. Two years later, he established that electrical signals could be transmitted over large distances with eight miles of iron wire strung on insulators on his mother's lawn in Hammersmith and discovered that the signal travelled immeasurably fast from one end to the other, and thereby created a working electric telegraph. His invention was rejected the the British government as being "totally unnecessary" and it would take two decades before commercialization of his invention was established. In March 1825 he patented two drawing instruments for producing perspective sketches. The first instrument produced a perspective view of an object directly from drawings of the plan and elevations and the second machine enabled a scene or person to be traced from life onto paper with considerable precision. Additionally, he also created the ubiquitous portable tripod stand with three pairs of hinged legs. Then in 1845, he created the first successful camera to make continuous recordings of an instrument 24 hours per day. He applied his technique in electrographs to observe atmospheric electricity, barographs, and thermo-hygrographs to monitor the weather, and magnetographs to record the three components of geomagnetic force. Further instruments he created include an improved version of Henri Regnault's aspirated hygrometer that was employed for many years; an early meteorological kite, and the storm clock used to monitor rapid changes in meteorological parameters during extreme events. In 1870 he was knighted for his work in the field of electricity.