Charles wheatstone biography

Charles Wheatstone from Anne E Keeling's Great Britain and Her Queen, 2nd ed.1897, available on Project Gutenberg. Click on thumbnail for larger image.

Charles Wheatstone was born in Barnwood, Gloucester as the son of a shoemaker with connections to the music business (see Rycroft 127, 125).

In 1806 the family moved to London, where Wheatstone's father both made and taught musical instruments — one of his pupils was Princess Charlotte, the only child of the Prince of Wales. Wheatstone's uncle had a similar concern in the Strand, and in due course the boy was apprenticed to him.

Sir Charles Wheatstone was born on 2 February in the village of Barnwood in the United Kingdom.

He quickly became fascinated by the wonders of sound and its transmission, and returned to his father to pursue his own interests in these, publishing his first paper on his experiments as early as 1823. Before long, Wheatstone began to make his name with various inventions.

One, which he later perfected, was the bellows-blown English concertina still in use today, and still made by the firm of Wheatstone