Morse code, the bits of Schilling telegraph were encoded by current direction, and marked as either "left" or "right" in the codetable. The economic value of variable-length coding was not obvious yet; relying on operator's memory or scratchpads to record incoming bits was deemed too unreliable. Thus, fellow researchers compelled Schilling to design an alternative multi-wire, parallel-send system. Von Sömmerring used eight bits; Schilling reduced the number of bits to six (again, for a 40-character alphabet). Schilling took a single-needle instrument with him for demonstration purposes on his journey to the Far East. When he returned, Schilling used a binary code on his telegraph with multiple needles, inspired by the hexagrams from I Ching which he had become familiar with in the East. These hexagrams are figures used in divination, each of which consist of a figure of six stacked lines. Each line can be solid or broken, two binary states, leading to a total of 64 figures. The six units of the I Ching fitted in perfectly with the six needles he needed to code the Russian alphabet. This was the first use of binary coding in telecommunications, predating the Baudot code by several decades. 1832 demonstration On 21 October 1832 (O.S.), Schilling set up a demonstration of his six-needle telegraph between two rooms in his apartment building at Marsovo Pole, about 100 metres apart. To get the space to demonstrate a credible distance, he hired the entire floor of the building and ran a mile and a half of wire around the building. The demonstration was so popular that it stayed open until the Christmas break. Notable visitors included Nicholas I (who had already seen an earlier version in April 1830), Moritz von Jacobi, Alexander von Benckendorff, and Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich. A ten-word message in French was dictated by the Tsar and successfully sent over the apparatus. Alexander von Humboldt, after seeing Schilling's telegraph demonstrated in Berlin, recommended to the Tsar that a telegraph should be built in Russia. In May 1835, Schilling began a tour of Europe demonstrating a one-needle instrument. He conducted experiments in Vienna with other scientists, including an investigation into the relative merits of rooftop and buried cables. The buried cable was not successful because his thin India rubber and varnish insulation was inadequate. In September he was at a meeting in Bonn where Georg Wilhelm Muncke saw the instrument. Muncke had a