Charles Wheatstone

Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802 to 1875) was an English physicist and inventor whose work spanned electricity, acoustics, optics and communication. He is remembered above all for the Wheatstone bridge, a circuit for measuring an unknown electrical resistance that he popularised in 1843 although it had been devised earlier by Samuel Hunter Christie, and for his part in building practical telegraphy together with William Fothergill Cooke. Trained in his family's musical instrument business in London, he became professor of experimental physics at King's College London in 1834 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1836. He described stereopsis, built the stereoscope, improved and promoted the English concertina and gave his name to the Playfair cipher. He was knighted in 1868 and died in Paris in 1875.