Chapter 2

An Early Railroad Train in England

Stephenson's son, Robert, assisted him in the construction of the "Rocket" and later attained considerable reputation as an engineer.

It is claimed that George Stephenson was the inventor of the safety lamp for use in mines, an invention usually accredited to Sir Humphry Davy. He was often consulted in the building of subsequent railroads, but he spent the last years of his life in farming and gardening at his home at Chesterfield, England, where he died August 12, 1848.

Before the days of railroads in America, freight was hauled on canals and passengers rode in stage coaches or on horseback. A coach made the trip from Boston to New York twice a week and the journey required six days. A trip from New York to Philadelphia took two days. From Philadelphia to Baltimore the roads were good, but south of Baltimore they were bad and even dangerous. South of the James River the traveler was compelled to make his journey on horseback. A coach from Charleston to Savannah was the only public conveyance south of the Potomac River.

In the days of the old colonial stagecoach, if a traveler wished to go from Boston to New York, he would have to be ready to begin the journey at three o'clock in the morning. The stage had no glass windows, no door or step, and passengers were obliged to climb in at the front. One pair of horses pulled the stage eighteen miles, and then they were relieved by another pair. At about ten o'clock in the evening, after a day's journey of forty miles, the stage drew up at an inn for the night. At three o'clock the next morning, after dressing by the light of a horn lantern, the traveler must resume his journey. If the roads were bad, he might have to alight from the stage and help the driver pull the wheels out of the mud. Rivers were crossed on clumsy flat-boats. When the streams were swollen with rains or filled with floating ice, the passage across was often dangerous. The trip from Boston to Philadelphia, which would have taken eight days of Washington's time, can easily be made now by train in as many hours. In these days of the modern railroad, San Francisco is nearer in time to New York than Washington was scarcely a hundred years ago.

The first railway in America was built in 1826. It connected a granite quarry at Quincy, Massachusetts, with the town of Milton in the same state. It was only two or three miles long, and was operated with horses. In May, 1829, three English locomotives—the first ever seen in America—were unloaded at New York City. On August 9 of the same year, one of these engines was tried at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. This was the first time that a locomotive ever turned a wheel on a railway in America.

A canal which the business men of Philadelphia proposed to construct from their city to Pittsburg, in order to give them access to the trade centers of the West, threatened the commercial prosperity of Baltimore. To offset the advantages which this canal would give Philadelphia, at a great public meeting in Baltimore it was decided to build a railway from Baltimore to some point on the Ohio River. The road was named the Baltimore and Ohio. In 1830 it was finished from Baltimore as far as Ellicott's Mills, a distance of fifteen miles. The Baltimore and Ohio was the first railroad in the United States built for the express purpose of carrying passengers and freight. The original intention was to pull cars over this road with horses. But Peter Cooper persuaded the railroad officials to try his engine "Tom Thumb," which he had built in 1829. The trial was successful, for "Tom Thumb" drew a car-load of passengers at the rate of fifteen to eighteen miles per hour. This engine was the first locomotive built in America, and its trial was the first trip ever made by an American locomotive.

The first railroad in the United States constructed with the original purpose of using steam as motive power was the South Carolina railroad, a line one hundred thirty-six miles long between Charleston and Hamburg. A locomotive built in New York City, called the "Best Friend," made its first trip over this road in November, 1830. It was the first locomotive to run regularly on a railroad in the United States.

Railroad building spread rapidly in America, as it had in England. By 1835 there were twenty-two railroads in the United States, two of them being west of the Alleghenies, though no road was more than one hundred forty miles in length. There was no railroad west of the Mississippi River prior to 1853, and in that year a line only thirty-eight miles long was built. During 1906 alone, 5516 miles of railroad were constructed in the United States. At the end of that year, there was a total in the United States of 222,635 miles, or nearly enough to reach nine times around the entire globe. The United States now has thirty per cent. more miles of railway main track than all of Europe, and contains two fifths of the railroad mileage of the world. The railroads of the United States represent a value of about fifteen billion dollars, and give employment to a million and a half persons.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was originally owned by the state. Any one could use it by paying certain charges, and each person operating the road furnished his own cars, horses, and drivers. There were frequent blockades; when two cars going in opposite directions met, one had to turn back. If rival shippers came together and neither was willing to yield to the other, a fight probably settled the rights of precedence. After a time steam became the sole motive power, and the locomotives were owned by the state.

The railroad journeys of our grandfathers were very different from our own. In their day the rails were wooden beams or stringers laid on horizontal blocks of stone. Strips of iron were fastened with spikes to the tops of the wooden rails. The cars were small, each seating only a few passengers. The locomotive was crude. Its greatest speed was about fifteen miles an hour. It could not climb a hill, and when a grade was reached, the cars had to be pulled up or let down with ropes managed by a stationary engine. No cab sheltered the engineer; no brake checked the speed. Sometimes the spikes fastening the iron strips to the tops of the wooden rails worked loose, and these strips curled up and penetrated the bottoms of the cars, greatly to the annoyance and fright of the traveler. The bridges in those days were roofed. The smokestack of the locomotive, being too tall to pass under the roof, was made in two joints or sections fastened together with hinges. When the train approached a bridge, the top section of the stack was lowered. As wood only was used for fuel, the stack emitted a shower of sparks, smoke, and hot cinders. The passengers coughed and sputtered, and covered their eyes, mouths, and noses with handkerchiefs.

The trip from Chicago to New York is about a thousand miles, over prairie, river, and mountain. Should you make the journey between these cities over the Pennsylvania Railroad of to-day, there would be little danger of conflict because two rival trains might want the track at the same time. Nor would you have to wait while ropes pulled the train up a grade, for the locomotive can climb the hills. Instead of the old wooden rails with their strips of iron, there is a double track of solid steel rails all the way. The landscape would fly past you at the rate of a mile a minute, instead of fifteen miles an hour.

Let us suppose that you leave Chicago at 2.45 o'clock P.M., central time. Before the train starts you could telephone to a friend without leaving the car. You might sit down, in an elegant dining-car, to a dinner of all the delicacies the market could afford. You might occupy your own exclusive compartment in a luxuriously equipped Pullman car, lit by electric bulbs, or you could spend the evening reading the magazines, newspapers, and books provided in the train library. You might write at a comfortable desk with train stationery, or dictate letters and telegrams to the train stenographer. You are provided with hot and cold water, bathing facilities, and a barber shop. A maid could be summoned to the service of women and children; and a valet would be in attendance to sponge and press clothing over night. You would arrive in New York the next morning at 9.45 o'clock, having traveled the thousand miles in eighteen hours.

Simple as the idea of the sleeping-car is in reality, it was not introduced until 1858, when the Lake Shore Railroad ran the first crude and uncomfortable night-cars. George M. Pullman in 1859 set for himself the task of producing a palace car which should be used for continuous and comfortable travel through long distances by day and night. He remodelled into sleeping-cars two passenger coaches belonging to the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Though these cars fell far below the inventor's ideal, they were far in advance of the first make-shifts and in consequence created a demand for more and better cars of the same kind. In 1863, at his factory in Chicago, Pullman began the construction of the "Pioneer," the first of the Pullman palace cars. This car was built at a cost of $18,000. It was first used in the funeral train which conveyed the body of President Lincoln to his burial place in Springfield, Illinois.

Few inventions have been financially so remunerative to the inventors as the Pullman palace car. It brought Mr. Pullman an immense fortune. The Pullman Palace Car Company, founded by Pullman in 1867, is one of the largest and most successful manufacturing concerns in America. It employs a capital of $40,000,000, gives work to fourteen thousand persons, furnishes sleeping-car service for 120,000 miles of railway, and operates over 2,000 cars. Mr. Pullman adopted plans for the vestibule car in 1887. He died at his home in Chicago, October 19, 1897.

The idea of the steamboat did not originate in the brain of Robert Fulton. It is claimed that, as early as 1543, Blasco de Garay propelled a boat by steam, and that in 1707, just a hundred years before the time of Fulton'sClermont, Papin ran a boat with steam on a river in Germany. In 1763 William Henry experimented with a steamboat on the Conistoga River in Pennsylvania.

James Rumsey, a Scotchman living in Maryland, is said to have been the first American to discover a method for running a vessel with steam against wind and tide. He conceived the idea in August, 1783. During 1785 he made his boat, and in 1786 he navigated it on the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, Virginia, in the presence of hundreds of spectators. He wrote to General Washington of his invention, and Washington wrote concerning it to Governor Johnson of Maryland. In 1839 Congress voted a gold medal to James Rumsey, Jr., son and only surviving child of the inventor, in recognition of the elder Rumsey's achievement.

In 1787 John Fitch exhibited on the Delaware River a vessel to be propelled by steam, and in 1790, from June to September, he ran a steamboat on that river between Philadelphia and Trenton. But he could not induce the public to patronize his boat, and for lack of business it had to be withdrawn.

Some British authorities claim that the first practical steamboat in the world was the tug "Charlotte Dundas," built by William Symmington, and tried in 1802 on the Clyde and Forth Canal in Scotland. The trial was successful, but steam towing was abandoned for fear of injuring the banks of the canal. Symmington had built a small steamboat that traveled five miles an hour in 1788.

Robert Fulton

To Robert Fulton, an American, belongs the credit for placing the steamboat on a successful commercial basis. Fulton was born at Little Britain, Pennsylvania, in 1765. At the age of seventeen he adopted the profession of portrait and landscape painter. At twenty-two he went to England to study art. There he met James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, and soon he began to give attention to mechanics. In 1793 he started to work on the idea of propelling boats by steam. He made an unsuccessful experiment with a steamboat on the Seine River in France. The vessel sank because its construction was faulty. Fulton returned to America and in New York harbor began to build another boat which he named theKatherine of Clermont, shortened to theClermont. Her engine was procured from Boulton and Watt in England. The boat was one hundred feet long and twenty feet wide, weighed one hundred sixty tons, and was equipped with side paddle wheels and a sheet-iron boiler. As the inventor worked patiently at his task, the newspapers gave him but little notice and the public ridiculed him. The New York legislature had passed a bill granting to Fulton and to Chancellor Livingston the exclusive right to navigate with steam boats the waters of New York State. This bill was a standing subject of ridicule among the legislators at Albany.

In August, 1807, theClermontwas ready for her trial trip. A large crowd of spectators lined the banks of the Hudson as the boat slowly steamed out into the river. The crowd jeered and hooted and shouted at the vessel their nick-name of "Fulton's Folly." As theClermontmoved up the river, making slow headway against the current, the crowd changed their jeers to expressions of wonder and finally to cheers. The dry pine wood used for fuel sent out a cloud of thick, black smoke, flames, and sparks, which spread terror among the watermen of the harbor. TheClermontmade the voyage from New York up the Hudson to Chancellor Livingston's country estate near Albany, a distance of a hundred ten miles, in twenty-four hours. The trip was without mishap and it thoroughly established the practicability of steam for purposes of navigation.

Concerning this voyage Fulton wrote to a friend in Paris: "My steamboat voyage to Albany and back has turned out rather more favorably than I had calculated. The voyage was performed wholly by power of the steam engine. I overtook many sloops and schooners beating to windward, and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved. The morning I left New York there were not thirty persons in the city who believed that the boat would ever move a mile an hour, or be of the least utility. While we were putting off from the wharf, I heard a number of sarcastic remarks. This is the way in which ignorant men compliment what they call philosophers and projectors. I feel infinite pleasure in reflecting on the immense advantages my country will derive from the invention."

TheClermontwas soon running as a regular packet between New York and Albany. The owners of sailing craft on the river hated her and tried to sink her. The New York legislature passed a bill declaring that any attempt to destroy or injure theClermontshould be a public offense punishable by fine and imprisonment. Then the enemies of the boat applied to the courts for an injunction restraining Fulton from navigating the Hudson with his steamboat. Daniel Webster appeared as Fulton's attorney. He won the case and secured for theClermontthe full rights of the river.

Fulton afterward built other steamboats, including a system of steam ferries for New York City. In 1814 he constructed the first United States war steamer. Before constructing theClermont, Fulton was interested in canals and in the invention of machinery for spinning flax and twisting rope. He also made experiments with sub-marine explosives in England, France, and the United States; but these were considered failures. He died February 24, 1815.

The Clermont on the Hudson

The first steamboat in the West was built at Pittsburg in 1811, and within a few years after the first trip of theClermont, steamboats were being used on all the leading rivers of the country.

From the earliest times men had sailed the seas, but their ships were small and slow and subject to wind, tide, and current. The success of the river steamboat led to the use of steam in ocean navigation. The first steamship to cross the Atlantic was theSavannah, in 1818. The vessel relied almost as much upon wind as upon steam for motive power, but during the voyage of twenty-five days steam was used on eighteen days.

The wood required for fuel left little room in the vessel for freight. With the advent of coal for fuel, and better machinery, steamships grew in importance, and in 1837 two ships, theSiriusand theGreat Western, crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York with the use of steam alone. By 1850 the average time for a trans-Atlantic voyage had been reduced to eleven or twelve days.

The Lusitania of the Cunard Line

If the oldSavannahcould be placed beside theLusitania, the giantess of the Cunard line of ocean steamers, a comparison would demonstrate the triumphs of the century in ocean navigation. If you were to cross the ocean on theLusitaniaor her sister-ship theMauretania, you would enter a vast floating mansion seven hundred ninety feet long, eighty-eight feet wide, eighty-one feet high from keel to boat deck, and weighing thirty-two thousand five hundred tons. Her height to the mastheads is two hundred sixteen feet; each of her three anchors weighs ten tons; and her funnels are so large that a trolley car could easily run through them. TheLusitaniahas accommodation for three thousand passengers, officers, and crew, and is driven by mighty turbine engines of sixty-eight thousand horse power. The steamer was built at a cost of $7,500,000. She has traveled the three thousand miles across the Atlantic in about four and a half days—the quickest trans-Atlantic voyage ever made. She moves through the great waves of the ocean with such steadiness that passengers can scarcely tell whether they are on water or land. A telephone system connects all parts of the ship; there are electric elevators, a special nursery in which children may play; a gymnasium for exercise, shower baths, and an acre and a half of upper deck. There are five thousand electric lights, requiring two hundred miles of wire. Wireless telegraphy flashes messages to the moving ship from distant parts of the world, and bears back greetings from her passengers. A daily illustrated newspaper of thirty-two pages is published on board ship.

CHAPTER IV

ELECTRICITY: THE TELEGRAPH AND THE TELEPHONE

The great miracle of the twentieth century is electricity. If the printing press is the brain of civilization and the steam engine is its heart, electric wires are its nervous system. Steam is a giant; electricity is a witch. There is something uncanny about it. Man writes volumes about electricity; calls it positive and negative and measures it in ohms and volts; gives courses to explain it in his schools and universities; kills criminals, cures the sick, and scatters darkness with it; makes it whirl him through space; compels it to bear his whisper through hundreds of miles, and can make it fly around the entire earth with his written word—and yet no man knows what electricity is. Electricity exists, and has always existed, from the back of a cat to the infinite arch of the sky.

A hundred years ago practically nothing was known of electricity. Persons now living were born into a world that had never seen an electric telegraph, a telephone, an electric car, or an electric light. We are living in the morning of electrical knowledge, and what the day may bring no one can imagine. Americans have given the world many of the greatest inventions, and in the field of electricity they have given it nearly everything of value. It is to American ingenuity that civilization is indebted for the electrical telegraph, the sub-marine cable, the telephone, the electric light, and the electric car. The names of Morse, Vail, Field, Bell, Brush, Gray, Edison, and Sprague—all American electrical inventors—will always be prominent in the list of the world's great benefactors.

If you will rub a stick of sealing wax briskly with a woolen cloth, you will find that the stick of wax will attract to itself bits of bran, small shreds of paper, and the like. This is the simplest experiment in electricity. In the same way, by rubbing amber with silk, Thales, a Greek philosopher who lived in the sixth century before Christ, is thought to have discovered electricity. The Greek word foramberiselektron. Because of the supposed discovery of electricity in amber by Thales, the English wordelectricitywas "coined" and used for the first time by William Gilbert, a British physician and scientist, who lived during the reigns of Elizabeth and James.

For nearly twenty-five centuries, reaching from the time of Thales to the opening of the nineteenth century, the world learned practically nothing about electricity. The start in modern electrical knowledge was made by Galvani, an Italian scientist, born in 1737, who just before the last century dawned showed that electricity can be produced by the contact of metals with fluids. The termgalvanic, used in connection with electricity, comes from the name of this investigator. Galvani's experiments suggested the electric battery to Volta, another Italian scientist who was born in 1745. The electrical wordvoltaicis in honor of Volta. In 1752 Benjamin Franklin flew his kite into the thunderstorm and proved that lightning is electricity. A little later Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish investigator, pointed out the relation between electricity and magnetism. In the early part of the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday, an eminent English physicist, discovered the possibility of producing electric currents through the motion of a magnet. Faraday's discovery led to the electric dynamo machine, the source of modern power over electricity.

The oldest and greatest of electrical inventions is the telegraph.Teleis a Greek adverb meaning "afar."Graphcomes from the Greek verb "to write."Telegraphtherefore means "to write afar."

The idea of telegraphic communication is more than two and a half centuries old. In 1632 Galileo referred to a secret art of communicating at great distances by means of magnetic needles. In 1753 there appeared in theScots Magazinean article signed "C. M." (since ascertained to have been Charles Morrison, of Greenock in Scotland) setting forth a fairly clear idea of the electric telegraph. Joseph Henry, of Washington, D.C., in 1831 signaled through an electrical circuit a mile in length. The first commercially successful telegraph was devised in 1837 by Samuel F. B. Morse, an American.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, April 27, 1791. He was educated in the common schools of his native town and in Yale University, where he was graduated in 1810. After graduation, like Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, he went to Europe to study art, and became successful as an artist. On his return to America in 1832, one of his fellow passengers on the ship was Charles T. Jackson, who had been studying electricity in Paris. Jackson told Morse of some experiments in electricity which the French had been making, and remarked that it would be a good thing if news could be transmitted through long distances by electricity. Morse replied, "Why can't it be done?" From that hour he gave his time and energy to the invention of the electric telegraph. During the remainder of the voyage he drew plans for apparatus and tried to devise an electric alphabet. In 1837 he put two instruments at the ends of a short line through which he sent and received messages. About this time he met a man who was destined to be of great service to him in promoting his invention, and one who deserves almost as much credit for it as Morse himself. This was Alfred Vail.

Vail was born at Morristown, New Jersey, September 25, 1807. He was a son of Stephen Vail, the wealthy owner of the Speedwell iron works.

One day in September, 1837, after Morse had completed his apparatus, he was invited to exhibit it at the University of the City of New York. Alfred Vail was a student in the university at the time and was one of the spectators to whom the apparatus was exhibited. He was much impressed with it. Morse needed money, and Alfred Vail's father had it. Morse was invited to the home of the Vails in Speedwell, where the matter of the invention was talked over. The sum of two thousand dollars was necessary to get the invention started. Stephen Vail agreed to furnish the money. Alfred Vail was to construct apparatus and exhibit it to Congress. For this he was to have one-fourth of the proceeds arising from the patent.

Alfred Vail set to work to construct the apparatus. A room in his father's factory was set apart for this purpose. William Baxter, a bright mechanic employed in the iron shops, was chosen to assist him. As secrecy was required for the work, the room was kept locked. For several months Vail and Baxter occupied together the locked room, sharing each other's confidence and each other's elation or disappointment as the work went well or ill. On January 6, 1838, Baxter, without hat or coat, rushed to the elder Vail's residence to announce that the apparatus was completed.

Mr. Vail had become discouraged. However, he went to see the trial of the apparatus. He found his son at one end of the three miles of wire that was stretched around the room, and Morse at the other. After a short explanation had been made to him, he wrote on a piece of paper, "A patient waiter is no loser." He then said to his son, "If you can send this, and Mr. Morse can read it at the other end, I shall be convinced." The message was sent and read at the other end of the wire. The apparatus was taken to Washington, where it created not only wonder but excitement.

Samuel F. B. Morse

In September, 1837, Morse filed an application for a patent on his invention. In December of the same year he failed in his effort to secure from Congress an appropriation for an experimental line which he proposed to build between Washington and Baltimore. In May, 1838, he went to Europe seeking aid. The governments there refused him funds or patents. In May, 1839, he returned to the United States and began an heroic struggle for recognition. During this period he often suffered for the barest necessities of life. Sometimes he could afford but a single meal in twenty-four hours.

Finally, after repeated disappointments, when Morse himself had almost given up hope, the House of Representatives of the Twenty-seventh Congress, on the last night of its session, March 3, 1843, by a vote of ninety to eighty-two, appropriated thirty thousand dollars for building a trial line between Washington and Baltimore. After the bill had passed the House, the outlook for its passage in the Senate was not bright. One Senator who was favorable to the bill advised Morse to "give it up, return home, and think no more of it." The bill had been made the object of opposition and ridicule; one prominent official, to show his contempt for the project, proposed that half the amount asked for should be used in mesmeric experiments. Morse, believing that the Senate would defeat the appropriation, went to his lodging place to retire for the night. He found that after paying the amount he owed at the hotel, he would have less than forty cents left. Early the next morning information reached him that a little before midnight the Senate had passed the bill. Apparent failure had turned into victory; the fight was won.

"Work was begun at once.[1]On April 30 the line reached Annapolis Junction, twenty-two miles from Washington, and was operated with satisfactory results.

"May 1, 1844, was the date upon which the Whig convention was to assemble in Baltimore, to nominate the candidates of that party for President and Vice-President. It was arranged between Morse and Vail that the latter should obtain from the passengers upon the afternoon train from Baltimore to Washington, when it stopped at Annapolis Junction, information of the proceedings of the convention and transmit it at once to Morse at the Capitol in Washington.

"The train arrived at half-past three o'clock, and from the passengers, among whom were many of the delegates to the convention, Mr. Vail ascertained that the convention had assembled, nominated the candidates, and adjourned. This information he at once dispatched to Morse, with whom was gathered a number of prominent men who had been invited to be present. Morse sat awaiting the prearranged signal from Vail, when suddenly there came from the instrument the understood clicking, and as the mechanism started, unwinding the ribbon of paper upon which came the embossed dots and dashes, the complete success of the telegraph over twenty-two miles of wire was established.

"Slowly came the message. When it had ended, Morse rose and said: 'Gentlemen, the convention has adjourned. The train bearing that information has just left Annapolis Junction for Washington, and Mr. Vail has telegraphed me the ticket nominated, and it is—' he hesitated, holding in his hand the final proof of victory over space, 'it is—it is Clay and Frelinghuysen.'

"'You are quizzing us,' was the quiet remark. 'It's easy enough for you to guess that Clay is at the head of the ticket, but Frelinghuysen—who is Frelinghuysen?'

"'I only know,' was the dignified answer, 'that it is the name Mr. Vail has sent to me from Annapolis Junction, where he had the news five minutes ago from the train bound this way bearing the delegates.'

"At that time the twenty-two miles from the Junction to Washington required an hour and a quarter for the fastest trains, and long before the train reached Washington the newsboys—enterprising even in those days—had their 'extras' upon the streets, their headings 'By Telegraph' telling the story, and being the first time that such a legend had ever appeared upon a printed sheet.

"A great and enthusiastic crowd greeted the delegates as they alighted from the train at the station. They were struck dumb with astonishment when they heard the people hurrahing for 'Clay and Frelinghuysen,' and saw in cold type before their very eyes the information which they supposed was exclusively their own, but which had preceded them 'by telegraph.' They had asked Mr. Vail at the Junction what he was doing when they saw him working the telegraph key, and when he told them, they joked about it most glibly, for no one had any belief in the success of the telegraph."

The first message by telegraph

The First Message by Telegraph

By May 23 the entire line was completed from Washington to Baltimore. On the next day, May 24, 1844, Morse from Washington sent to Vail at Baltimore the first message ever sent over the completed wire, "What hath God wrought?"

This famous message was dictated by Miss Ellsworth, daughter of the commissioner of patents at that time. She had taken a keen interest in the success of the bill appropriating the thirty thousand dollars for the experiment, and was the first to convey to Morse the news that the bill had passed. Morse thereupon gave Miss Ellsworth his promise that the first message to pass over the line should be dictated by her. A bit of the original wire and the receiver that Vail used at Baltimore are now preserved in the National Museum in Washington. The transmitter used by Morse at the Washington end of the line has been lost.

Morse lived to see his system of telegraphy adopted by the United States, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, and Australia. Ninety-five per cent of all telegraphy is by his system. He finally received a large fortune from his invention. Unlike Columbus, Morse was honored in his lifetime for his achievement. Foreign nations bestowed upon him honors and medals, and in August, 1858, a convention of European powers called by Napoleon III at Paris gave Morse four hundred thousand francs (about $80,000) as a testimonial of his services to civilization. In October, 1842, he laid the first sub-marine telegraph line. It was across the harbor of New York. Later he assisted Peter Cooper and Cyrus W. Field in their efforts to lay the first Atlantic cable. Honored by all the civilized world, he died in New York City April 2, 1872. Thirteen years earlier Vail had died at his home in Morristown, New Jersey.

In the Morse system the alphabet is represented by combinations of dots and dashes. The dots denote short currents of electricity flowing through the wire; the dashes, longer ones. Credit for the alphabet really belongs to Vail; Morse had devised a somewhat complicated system, but Vail invented the dots and dashes. He discovered thateandtare the most frequently used letters. He denotedeby one dot, or one short current;the indicated by one dash, or one long current. The other letters are denoted by dots and dashes, asa, one dot and one dash;b, one dash and three dots, etc.

In 1838 Steinheil, a German investigator, contributed an important element to the practical operation of the electric telegraph by discovering that the earth could take the place of the return wire, which up to that time had been deemed necessary to complete the circuit.

At first only one message could be sent over a wire at a time. Now several messages may be transmitted in opposite directions over the same wire at the same time.

Wireless telegraphy is based on the principle discovered and announced by the English scientist Michael Faraday, that heat, light, and electricity are transmitted by ether waves, and that these ether waves permeate all space. The first to demonstrate the practical operation of wireless telegraphy was Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian. In 1890 he undertook experiments to prove his theory that the electric current readily passes through any substance, and when once started in a given direction follows a direct course without the aid of a conductor. Marconi made the first practical demonstration of wireless telegraphy in 1896. In March, 1899, he sent a wireless message across the English channel from France to England. In December, 1901, be began his first experiments in wireless telegraphy across the Atlantic. In December of the following year the first official trans-Atlantic wireless message was sent. Now wireless telegraphic messages are sent regularly to and from moving ships in mid-ocean, and across the three thousand miles of the Atlantic between Europe and America.

One of the most striking illustrations of the power of perseverance is the successful struggle of Cyrus West Field in laying the Atlantic cable. Mr. Field was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, November 30, 1819. His schooling, which was slight, was secured in his native town. When he was fifteen years old, he secured a position in a business house in New York City at a salary of fifty dollars a year. He subsequently founded a prosperous business in the manufacture and sale of paper. In 1854 Mr. Field's attention was directed to an attempt to lay an electric cable at Newfoundland, which had failed for want of funds. The idea of laying a cable across the Atlantic occurred to him. He laid his plans before a number of prominent citizens of New York. On four successive evenings they met at his home to study the project, and they finally decided to undertake it. On May 6, 1854, a company was organized to lay the cable, with Peter Cooper as president.

The next twelve years Field devoted exclusively to the cable. He went to England thirty times. The first cable was brought from England and was to be laid across the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Forty miles had been successfully laid, when a storm arose and the cable was cut in order to save the ship. Then came a year's delay. Meantime the bottom of the sea was being explored and a vast tableland was discovered stretching from Newfoundland to Ireland. Field went to England, where he had little difficulty in organizing a company, and work was then begun on the construction of a new cable. Next he laid his enterprise before Congress, and asked for money. An appropriation bill was finally passed in the Senate by a majority of one, and was signed by President Pierce on March 3, 1857, the day before he retired from office. Field returned to England to superintend the construction of the cable and to make preparations for laying it. At last it was ready, tested, and coiled on the ship. On August 11, 1857, the sixth day out, after three hundred and thirty-five miles had been laid, the cable parted.

Lord Clarendon, in an interview with Field, had remarked: "But, suppose you don't succeed? Suppose you make the attempt and fail—your cable is lost in the sea—then what will you do?" The reply came promptly, "Charge it to profit and loss, and go to work to lay another." Lord Clarendon was so well pleased with the reply that he pledged his aid. The loss of three hundred and thirty-five miles of cable was the loss of half a million dollars. Field came back to America and secured from the Secretary of the Navy the vessels needed for another trial. On June 10, 1858, the United States steam frigateNiagara, then the largest in the world, and the British shipAgamemnonset out from opposite shores, bound for mid-ocean. The vessels met, and the two sections of the cable were spliced; then they began laying it toward both shores at the same time. After a little more than a hundred miles had been laid, this cable parted in mid-ocean, and Field hurried to London to meet the discouraged directors.

On July 17, the ships set sail again for mid-ocean. The cable was spliced in fifteen hundred fathoms of water and again the ships started for opposite shores. Field was on theNiagaraheaded toward Newfoundland. Scarcely any one looked for success. Field was the only man who kept up courage through this trying period. On August 5, 1858, he telegraphed the safe arrival of the ship at Newfoundland. The shore ends of the cable were laid and on August 16 a message from Queen Victoria of England to President Buchanan flashed under the sea. There was great excitement everywhere. The two worlds had been tied together with a strange electric nerve.

Cyrus W, Field

Cyrus W. Field

On the evening of the first of September a great ovation was tendered Field in New York. National salutes were fired; processions were formed; there was an address by the mayor, and late at night a great banquet. While the banquet was in progress, the cable parted.

Everyone except Field was disheartened. He went to work again, and during the next five years, the long years of the Civil War, he labored unceasingly. A larger cable with a greater resisting force was made. On the twenty-third of July, 1865, the steamshipGreat Easternbegan another attempt to lay the cable. When it was within six hundred miles of Newfoundland, the cable parted again. For nine days attempts were made, in two and a half miles of water, to grapple the cable, splice it, and continue the work of laying it. Three times the cable was grappled, but the apparatus on the ship was not strong enough to hoist it aboard. Still Field never faltered. Another British company was formed and another cable was constructed. TheGreat Easternwas again loaded and on July 13, a Friday, set sail westward laying the cable. After an uncertain voyage of two weeks theGreat Easternarrived at Newfoundland, and the undertaking had again been successfully accomplished. Field telegraphed his arrival as follows: "Hearts Content, July 27, 1866. We arrived here at nine o'clock this morning. All well. Thank God, the cable is laid, and is in perfect working order.Cyrus W. Field."

Twelve years of unfaltering perseverance had won. Honors were heaped upon Field. Congress voted him a gold medal and the thanks of the nation. The prime minister of Great Britain declared that only the fact of his being the citizen of another nation prevented his receiving the highest honors in the power of the British government to bestow. The Paris "Exposition Universelle" of 1867 honored him with the Grand Medal, the highest prize it had to give.

Mr. Field was afterward interested in the laying of cables connecting Europe, India, China, Australia, the West Indies, and South America. In 1880-81 he made a trip around the world, full of satisfaction in his own part in making a new era of the world's civilization. He died at his home in New York on July 11, 1892.

The effect of the electric telegraph on government, intelligence, and civilization in general can scarcely be overstated. Sydney Smith, writing to Earl Grey after the admission of California into the United States, said that this marked an end to the great American republic; for how could people with such diversified interests, with such natural barriers, hold together? He did not foresee how strongly a fine copper wire could bind together the two seaboards and the great plains of the interior. Without the electric telegraph, neither the great daily newspaper nor the modern operation of railroads would be possible. It wipes away the natural boundaries of nations and makes neighbors of all men.

In 1819 Sir Charles Wheatsone, an English physicist, invented an instrument popularly known as the "magic lyre," but which he called the telephone. The first part of this word is the same Greek adverbtelethat is found intelegraph. Thephoneis from another Greek word meaning "to sound." Totelephone, therefore, means "to sound afar." The use of the English wordtelephoneby Wheatsone is historically the first appearance of the word in our language. His device did nothing but reproduce music by means of sounding boards. The inventor of the modern telephone is Alexander Graham Bell.

Mr. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847. His father was Alexander Melville Bell, a Scotch educator, inventor of a system of visible speech, and author of some text-books on elocution. His grandfather was Alexander Bell, noted for his efforts to remove impediments of speech. Alexander Graham Bell was therefore well fitted by heredity for the invention of an instrument to transmit speech. He was educated in the Edinburgh high school and in the University of Edinburgh, and in 1867 he entered the University of London. Hard study broke down his health and he moved to Canada. Thence he moved to the United States, becoming first a teacher of deaf mutes, and afterward professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. In 1874, at the suggestion of the Boston Board of Education, he began some experiments to show to the eye the vibrations of sound, for the use of the deaf and dumb. The results of these experiments convinced Bell that articulate speech could be transmitted through space. Early in 1876 he completed the first telephone. The same year he exhibited it at the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, where it was pronounced the "wonder of wonders."

He filed application for a patent on his invention at the Patent Office in Washington, February 14, 1876. It is a singular fact that another application for a patent on the telephone was received at the Patent Office a few hours later on the same day from Elisha Gray, an electrical inventor of Chicago. The patent was issued to Bell, not because his invention was superior in merit to Gray's, but on the ground that his application was received first. This is a case where "the early bird catches the worm," for the profits arising from the patent have made Mr. Bell very wealthy, and high honors have come to him as the inventor of one of the world's greatest and most marvelous inventions.

The Bell Telephone Company was organized in 1877, and in 1878 the first telephone exchanges were constructed. By the following year the telephone was firmly established as a social and commercial necessity. It has grown with great rapidity. It is now found in every city of the world; hotels, large buildings, and ships have their private exchanges, and it has found its way recently into thousands of farmhouses.

Bell had to fight hard in the courts to sustain his patent. Suit after suit was brought by rival claimants, attacking his right to the patent. The litigation was bitter and protracted. One of the most noteworthy of these suits was brought by a Pennsylvania mechanic named Drawbaugh. He claimed that about 1872 he had made a working telephone out of a cigar box, a glass tumbler, a tin can, and some other crude materials; and that with the apparatus thus constructed he had talked over a wire several hundred feet long. Many persons testified that they were acquainted with Drawbaugh's apparatus, some of them having used it. Some instruments, said to be the original ones which Drawbaugh had constructed, were brought into court and exhibited. It was shown that speech could be transmitted with them in a crude way. Drawbaugh claimed that he was too poor at the time of making the apparatus to take out the necessary patent. The Court decided in favor of Bell. Elisha Gray, whose application for a patent had been received the same day that Bell's was, also brought suit against Bell. Before making his application, Gray had filed some preliminary papers looking forward to a patent on the telephone. In his suit against Bell he charged that the patent examiner had fraudulently and secretly conveyed to Bell the contents of those papers. But Bell won this suit, and he finally established over all rivals his legal title as the inventor of the telephone.

Recently a wireless system of telephoning has been in process of development, and it will not be strange if, within a few years, we shall be talking through space without wires, so boundless seem the possibilities of the age.

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