Gamble, John
NAME: Gamble, John
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Developed semaphore and canning.
ALIAS/NICKNAME:
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 27 July 1811, in Knightsbridge, London. Aged ?
DISCIPLINE: Writer
FIELD: Telegraphy
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: Unknown
SIBLINGS: Unknown
SPOUSE: None
CHILDREN: None
EDUCATION: Pembroke College, Cambridge to 1787
MAJOR WORK: 'Observations on Telegraphic Experiments', 1795
LIFE AND TIMES: Gamble studied theology and science at Pembroke College, Cambridge during the 1780’s and graduated in 1787, becoming a Fellow of his
college. In 1790 he was made chaplain to the Duke of York, and later chaplain-general of the armed forces.
Always interested in technological developments, during the early 1790’s Gamble became interested in the problems of signalling. During the 18th century various people had studied the problem of long distance communication, and the Napoleonic Wars made the problem acute.
The French led the way in 1794 with a semaphore system radiating from Paris, developed by Chappe*, which used levered arms on the ends of a pivoted beam fixed to a mast on towers nine or ten miles apart. The beam and the arm were manoeuvred by ropes, giving enough positions to encode the alphabet and ten numbers, but it was often difficult both to achieve accurate angles with the three moveable parts, and to interpret the received signals.
On one occasion in 1794, a British Army officer at Menin observed the French moving troops "in tune" with the movements of the sails of a windmill. He mentioned this to Gamble, then chaplain to the Duke of York and known to interested in mechanical inventions, and when drawings of the Chappe system and alphabet were captured in August 1794, they were handed over to Gamble, who set about trying to develop something better, his ideas reaching the Admiralty in 1795.
At this time the Royal Navy had built 48 signal towers along the south coast of England from Sheerness in the East to Land's End in the extreme West. But these could only make a series of fixed signals, with a combination of balls and flags, and as these signals had specific meanings relating to an enemy, their general use was limited.
Working on Chappe's semaphore system, Gamble worked out an improved alphabetical
System. Gamble's proposed semaphore*, which he called his “radiated telegraph,” was composed of a vertical frame holding five "shutters" in one column, mounted about a pivot. The shutters could be opened or closed separately, allowing for 31 different signs. At first the Admiralty funded an experimental model of the machine and trials on Portsdown Hill, which proved that the signals could easily be read with the naked eye from the dockyard at nearby Portsmouth.
Arriving back at the Admiralty, however, Gamble was dismayed to find that Lord George Murray (4th son of Duke of Atholl) had simultaneously hit on the same idea and had designed an even better shutter-system, with six shutters in two columns, giving 63 possible signs.
Murray's system was accepted, and won £2,000 for its inventor In September 1795 successful trials of Murray's system on Wimbledon Common, near London, led the Admiralty to order the construction of 15 stations between London the south coast ( Deal, and Chatham and Sheerness), completed by the end of January 1796. The system was a great success (messages from Dover via Deal were said to have reached London in 7 minutes ) and led to proposals for further lines.
By 1805 the line extended to Plymouth, and by 1808 a complete line was set up and working all along the south coast.
In 1797, in order to present his ideas more effectively, he published: 'Essay on the different Modes of Communication by Signals', which contained a number of elaborate illustrative plates and gave a history of communication from the first beacon light to late 18th-century semaphore, with many valuable suggestions.
But the Admiralty remained unimpressed, and Gamble, now with two church livings (the rectories of Alphamstone and Bradwell-juxta-mare in Essex) had enough money to invest in other technological projects he found interesting.
In 1801 Gamble was in Paris, engaged at the office of Captain James Coates of the Royal Navy, then the British Commissioner for the Exchange of Prisoners of War. That year, Gamble became involved with the continuous paper-making machine invented in 1798 by Robert*, when Gamble's brother-in-law, the publisher and papermaker Leger Didot, asked him to obtain a British patent for Robert's machine in his own name.
In June 1801 Gamble obtained a patent and entered into an agreement for its development with the papermaker Fourdrinier*, and towards the end of the year he returned to France to obtain exact copies of the Louis Robert drawings, and to arrange for the original working model of the paper machine to be sent to England.
The model was sent to John Hall's* factory at Dartford, where the machine was built by the engineer Donkin*, while Didot (who was now in England) and Gamble spent much time in suggesting and superintending alterations. Gamble supervised the installation of the machines by Donkin in 1804-05, and in 1807 moved to the paper mill at St. Neots to manage the installation of another machine there.
In 1809, unable to invest further in an expensive operation, the partnership between Gamble and the Fourdrinier’s was dissolved, ending Gamble's association with papermaking.
Towards the end of his life he again became involved in a project of Donkin's, this time a canning factory dedicated to producing supplies of preserved food for the Royal Navy and based on methods of French inventor Appert*. Gamble left funds to be invested in the factory in 1818, after his death.
ASSESSMENT: John Gamble was a talented civil and military technologist of the late 18th century, who developed a method of signalling on land, and afterwards invested in a series of important technological projects, including the Fourdrinier paper machine and the first canning factory in England.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: John Gamble, semaphore and canning promoter
BIBLIOGRAPHY: DNB
Kent, Captain Barrie, Signal! A History of S'ignalling in the Royal Navy, Hyden House: Clanfield, Hampshire, 1993.