Mirror galvanometer

A mirror galvanometer is an electromechanical instrument that indicates that it has sensed an electric current by deflecting a light beam with a mirror. The beam of light projected on a scale acts as a long massless pointer. In 1826, Johann Christian Poggendorff developed the mirror galvanometer for detecting electric currents. The apparatus is also known as a spot galvanometer after the spot of light produced in some models.

Mirror galvanometers were used extensively in scientific instruments before reliable, stable electronic amplifiers were available. The most common uses were as recording equipment for seismometers and submarine cables used for telegraphy.

In modern times, the term mirror galvanometer is also used for devices that move laser beams by rotating a mirror through a galvanometer set-up. The name is often abbreviated as galvo.

The mirror galvanometer was later improved by William Thomson, later to become Lord Kelvin. He would patent the device in 1858.

Thomson reacted to the need for an instrument that could indicate with sensibility all the variations of the current in a long cable. This instrument was far more sensitive than any which preceded it, enabling the detection of the slightest defect in the core of a cable during its manufacture and submersion. Moreover, it proved the best apparatus for receiving messages through a long cable.

The following is adapted from a contemporary account of Thomson's instrument:

The air in the little chamber surrounding the mirror is compressed at will, so as to act like a cushion, and deaden the movements of the mirror. The needle is thus prevented from idly swinging about at each deflection, and the separate signals are rendered abrupt. At a receiving station the current coming in from the cable has simply to be passed through the coil before it is sent into the ground, and the wandering light spot on the screen faithfully represents all its variations to the clerk, who, looking on, interprets these, and cries out the message word by word. The small weight of the mirror and magnets which form the moving part of this instrument, and the range to which the minute motions of the mirror can be magnified on the screen by the reflected beam of light, which acts as a long impalpable hand or pointer, render the mirror galvanometer marvellously sensitive to the current, especially when compared with other forms of receiving instruments. Messages could be sent from the United Kingdom to the United States through one Atlantic cable and back again through another, and there received on the mirror galvanometer, the electric current used being that from a toy battery made out of a lady's silver thimble, a grain of zinc, and a drop of acidulated water.

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