Wheatstone, Charles

Bowers B. Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS, 1802-1875. London, England Science Museum 1975, p. 204. 

The Physical Society of London, The Scientific Papers of Sir Charles Wheatstone (London Taylor and Francis, 1879). 

In the year 1843, Charles Wheatstone, the first Professor of Physics at Ring s College, London, invented one of the most accurate and commonly used methods of measuring resistance. It is known as Wheatstone bridge method. By this method the ratio of two resistances is determined and if the value of one of them is known, the value of the other is obtained (Fig 1.3) shows the circuit diagram of Wheatstone bridge. 

Wheatstone, Sir Charles (1802-75) British physicist, who set up as a musical instrument-maker in London. He studied acoustics and optics, inventing a stereoscope in 1838. His most important work, done with William Cooke (1806-79), was the development of an electric telegraph, which they... 

Wheatstone s bridge hwet- Ston, wet-, chiefly British -stsn- [Sir Charles Wheatstone] (1872) n. If the resistances, ri, t2, r, and T4 form the arms of a Wheatstone s bridge in order as the circuit (omitting cell and galvanometer connections) is traced, when the bridge is balanced... 

Electric telegraph (William FothergUl Cooke and Charles Wheatstone) Wheatstone and Cooke devise a system that uses five pointing needles to indicate alphabetic letters. 

Shortly after Poggendorff s publication. Professor Charles Wheatstone, whose contributions to the development of instrumentation for the study of problems associated with telecommunications are classics, developed a bridge circuit. 

It had become clearer that the Hght from a glowing soHd body shows a conHnuous spectrum while a metal that is vaporized emits a characterisHc line spectrum. The yeUow doublet in the sodium spectrum was an example. Charles Wheatstone, well known from the science of electricity, in 1835 invesHgated electrical arcs generated between metal electrodes. The metals he used were mercury, zinc, cadmium, Hn, bismuth and lead. He used a prism for studying the radiaHon from the arcs and observed the disHnct Hnes that consHtuted the spectrum. Further he noted that each metal had its special group of Hnes, which could possibly be used for element idenH-ficaHon. 

Probably the circuit most widely used for many years for the measmement of resistance is that attributed to Sir Charles Wheatstone. Whereas he was an accomplished scientist, making many contribntions to science and engineering, he only evaluated the application of the bridge circuit that bears his name. The circuit, shown in its basic form in Fig. 5, was originally devised by S. H. Christy in 1833. This circuit has been nsed in various forms in a proliferation of applications from the Kelvin double bridge used for low-resistance measmement (Fig. 31) to the nn-balanced arrangement used in many transducers. 

---