Cryptography Schilling's main contribution to cryptography was his
bigram cipher, adopted for government use in 1823. The Schilling ciphers combined features of
substitution ciphers and multiple-choice
polyalphabetic ciphers using
bigrams as source input.
Oriental expedition , 1824 In the 1820s Schilling's scholarly papers on oriental languages brought him degrees and membership in British, French and Russian learned societies. He was a long-time friend to the chief of the Russian Orthodox mission in Peking, and leading Russian orientalist
Nikita Bichurin (father Hyacinth). After Bichurin was disgracefully demoted and exiled, Schilling advocated for his pardon, and in 1826 he secured the transfer of Bichurin from imprisonment at
Valaam Monastery to a desk job at the Foreign Ministry in Saint Petersburg. Schilling assisted
Alexander von Humboldt during the initial stages of the
1829 expedition to Russia. Preparations began immediately after signing of the
Treaty of Adrianople in September 1829. Core staff of the expedition included Schilling himself, Bichurin and
Vladimir Solomirsky, bastard son of
Dmitry Tatishchev.
Alexander Pushkin, well acquainted to all three, wanted to join, but Nicholas I ordered him to stay in Russia. Schilling's main, covert mission was to evaluate the spread of Buddhism among local tribes, to outline the course of action to contain it, and to compile a binding statute that would regulate all aspects of Buddhist religious practice. The imperial government did not tolerate any independent ideologies and settled on subjugating the Buddhist leaders to the state. Outright repressions were ruled out, for fears of mass emigration of nomads, and of potential conflict with China. The government was also concerned with the decline of
border trade at the
Kyakhta checkpoint and the increase in
smuggling; Schilling was tasked with identifying the routes and the markets used by smugglers and to evaluate the volume of illegal trade. Officially, the mission was limited to "studies of population and international trade on the Russo-Chinese frontier"; any research apart from these tasks had to be paid by Schilling personally. To raise money, Schilling sold his scientific library to the Ministry of Education. In May 1830 Schilling began the journey from Saint Petersburg to
Kyakhta, a frontier market town that became his base for the next 18 months. His travels out of Kyakhta to various Buddhist shrines and border stations amounted, in total, to 7208
versts (7690 kilometres). Schilling himself wrote that the purpose of these travels was primarily
ethnographic research. According to Bichurin, Schilling spent most of his time with Tibetan and Mongolian
lamas, studying ancient Buddhist scriptures; he was concerned more with linguistics and history of Far Eastern peoples, rather than ethnography. His main quest was the search for the
Kangyur - a Tibetan
religious text closely guarded by the
lamas and known to Europeans only in fragments. At the beginning, Schilling tried to obtain the complete Kangyur from China. He could not imagine that poor nomadic
Buryats and
Mongols could create, own and safeguard whole libraries of sacred literature. However, he soon found out that the Buryats of the Russian Empire owned three copies of three different editions of the Kangyur; one of the three was preserved in
Chikoy, less than twenty miles east from Kyakhta. Schilling earned the respect of the lamas for being the only Russian who could read Tibetan texts, and easily obtained permission to read and copy them. According to Leonid Chuguevsky, it is likely that the lamas were aware of Schilling's mission and his liberal view towards state control over religion, and in their own way tried to appease the friendly but dangerous visitor. The Chikoy Kangyur could only be copied, but Schilling managed to acquire parts of a different copy from the chief of the Tsongol tribe. Later the
Khambo Lama of the Buryats sent Schilling a collection of medical and
astrological treatises. Schilling became a celebrity among the Buryats: some lamas preached that he was the prophet that would convert the Europeans, others believed that he was the
reincarnated Khubilgan. His house in Kyakhta became the object of mass
pilgrimage that brought more and more manuscripts.
Józef Kowalewski, who witnessed the process, wrote that "the Baron", although an amateur, "influenced the Buriats immensely ... There appeared experts in the Tibetan and even in Sanskrit languages, painters, engravers; the monks began to inquire more deeply into the foundations of their faith and to read books; there were discovered many books which had been before claimed as being non-extant". Finally, in March 1831 Schilling obtained the Kangyur and the 224-volume
Tengyur at a remote
datsan on the
Onon River. Local lamas struggled to print 100 million copies of
Om mani padme hum that they once vowed to contribute to a new shrine, and Schilling came to the rescue promising to print the whole lot, in tiny lithographed
Tibetan script, in Saint Petersburg. He fulfilled the promise, and was rewarded with the precious books. Once the collection was complete, Schilling began cataloguing and indexing; his
Index of the Narthang Kangyur, printed posthumously and anonymously in 1845, contains 3800 pages in four volumes. and one month later He recommended keeping the
status quo on both issues, while keeping an eye on similar problems of the
British administrators in Canton. The government decided not to press the issue of religion; a statute regulating the Buddhists was enacted only in 1853. Having fulfilled the mission, Schilling concentrated on telegraphy and cryptography. 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. 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.
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. 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. Unlike the dot-dash bits of the
Morse code, the bits of Schilling telegraph were encoded by current
direction, and marked as either "left" or "right" in the codetable. 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.
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 copy made for use in his lectures. In 1835, Schilling demonstrated a five-needle telegraph to the
German Physical Society in Frankfurt. By the time Schilling returned to Russia, his telegraph was well known throughout Europe and was frequently discussed in the scientific literature. In September 1836, the British government offered to buy the rights to the telegraph but Schilling declined, wishing to use it to pursue telegraphy in Russia.
Planned installation In 1836, Nicholas I created a commission of inquiry to advise on installation of Schilling's telegraph between
Kronstadt, an important naval base, and
Peterhof Palace. An experimental line was set up in the
Admiralty building, connecting Menshikov's study with his subordinates' offices. The five-kilometre line was partly overground and partly submerged in the canals, with three intermediate
Schweigger multipliers. Menshikov submitted a favourable report and secured the tsar's approval to connect
Peterhof with the naval base at
Kronstadt, across the
Gulf of Finland. It consisted of
voltaic piles, wires, multipliers coupled to
repeater switches, and
alarm bells. Thin copper wires were insulated with silk-reinforced
latex and suspended to load-bearing
hemp cables. Each multiplier contained several hundred turns of silver of copper wire on a
brass spool. Schilling knew that all means of insulating submerged cables were inferior to bare overhead wires, and intended to keep the length of submerged cable as short as possible. but he died on 6 August (N.S.), and the project was subsequently cancelled. It may be that Schilling used a single-needle-only setup on demonstrations around Europe merely for ease of transport, or it may have been a later design inspired by the
Gauss and Weber telegraph, in which case he would not have been the first. The code alleged to have been used with this telegraph can be traced to
Alfred Vail, but the variable-length code (like
Morse code) given by Vail is merely shown as an example of how it could be used. In any case, two-element signalling alphabets predate any form of electrical telegraphy by some time.
Automatic recording Schilling looked into the possibility of automatic recording of telegraph signals, but could not make it work due to the complexity of the device. His electrical engineering successor, Jacobi, succeeded in doing this in 1841 on a telegraph line from the
Winter Palace to the
General Staff Headquarters. Schilling discussed the idea with Sommering, and realised the military prospects for the invention. He devised a water resistant conducting wire that could be laid in wet earth or through rivers. It consisted of a copper wire insulated with a mixture of India-rubber and varnish. Schilling had in mind the military use of telegraphy in the field as well, and was excited about the prospects. Sömmerring wrote in his diary "Schilling is quite childish about his electro-conducting cord." In September 1812 Schilling demonstrated his first remote-controlled naval
fuse to
Alexander I on the
Neva River in Saint Petersburg. In 1822 Schilling demonstrated the land version of his fuse to Alexander I at
Krasnoye Selo; in 1827 another Schilling mine was shown to Nicholas I. This time the test was supervised by
military engineer Karl Schilder, an influential
Imperial Guard officer and an inventor in his own right. The main problem that Schilling faced was the lack of
batteries fit for field service, an issue not resolved until after the end of hostilities. According to Russian biographers of both Schilling and Schilder, reports of electrically-fired mines being used during the
siege of Silistra are almost certainly incorrect. Schilling continued improving land mines until the end of his life. These demolition sets were produced and issued to military engineers' units from 1836 onwards. On the other hand, the
Russian Navy resisted the novelty until the invention of a reliable
contact fuse by
Moritz von Jacobi in 1840. == Legacy ==