on telegraphy and cryptography. His work on the Kangyur was completed by an educated lay Buryat man brought from Siberia specifically for this purpose. Telegraphy Schilling first became involved in telegraphy while he was in Munich. He assisted Sömmerring with his experiments with an electrochemical telegraph. This form of telegraph uses electricity to cause a chemical reaction at the far end, such as bubbles forming in a glass tube of acid. After returning to St. Petersburg he conducted his own experiments with this type of telegraph. He demonstrated this to Tsar Alexander I in 1812, but Alexander declined to take it up. His successor Nicholas I (ascended 1825), wary about the spread of "subversive" ideas, was particularly opposed to introducing any mass communications. He agreed with the use of electrical telegraphy for selected military and civil offices, but prohibited public discussion of telegraph technology, including even reports on foreign inventions. Schilling could demonstrate his experiments to the public with no ill consequences, but he never tried to publish his research in print. After the death of Schilling, in 1841, Moritz von Jacobi tried to do it, and the journal containing his review article was confiscated and destroyed by a special order of the tsar. When Schilling learned of Hans Christian Ørsted's discovery in 1820 that electric current could deflect compass needles, he decided to switch investigation into needle telegraphs, that is, telegraphs that used Ørsted's principle. Schilling used from one to six needles in various demonstrations to represent letters of the alphabet or other information. 1828 prototype The first Schilling telegraph was completed in 1828. The demonstration set consisted of a double-wire copper line and two terminals, each having a voltaic pile providing current of around 200 mA, a Schweigger multiplier for indication, a send-receive switch and a bidirectional telegraph key. There were no intermediate repeaters yet, limiting the potential range of the system. The switches and the keys used open vials filled with mercury. Likewise, the shaft of the multiplier pointer was hydraulically dampened by suspending its paddle in a pool of mercury. The coil of each multiplier contained 1760 turns of copper wire insulated with silk. Two magnetized steel pegs ensured that in absence of current the pointer always returned to its off-state, and provided some additional dampening. The 40-character code table used variable-length coding, from one to five bits per character. Unlike the dot-dash bits of the