In the early part of the century, whales were so plentiful, especially along the New England coast, that whale, or sperm, oil was used for lighting purposes, and many of the old whale-oil lamps are still in existence. The light they gave was dim and smoky, but it was far better than no light at all. As the years passed, whales became more and more scarce, until sperm oil was selling at over two dollars a gallon. Only the richest people could afford to pay that, and the poor passed their evenings in darkness.
In 1854, a man named James M. Townsend brought to Professor Silliman, of Yale, a bottle of oil, asking him to test it. This was done, and the astonished professor found that here was an oil, whose source he could only guess, which made a splendid illuminant and which also seemed to have some medicinal properties. The oil was from Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, and Townsend, associating with himself a conductor named E. L. Drake, formed the Seneca Oil Company and began gathering the oil by digging trenches. At first it was bottled and sold for medicinal purposes at one dollar a gallon; then Drake suggested that a larger supply might be secured if a well was bored for it. A man familiar with salt well boring was employed, and in 1859 the first well was begun at Titusville.
Most people regarded Drake as a madman, and thought that he was simply throwing money away. The work was costly and slow, and finally, when $50,000 had been spent without result, the stockholders of the company refused to go further—all except Townsend. That enthusiast managed to rake up another $500, which he sent to Drake, with instructions to make it go as far as possible. It did not go very far—and yet far enough—for one day the auger, which was down sixty-eight feet, struck a cavity, and up came a flow of oil to within five feet of the surface. Pumping began at the rate of five hundred barrels a day, and fortune seemed in sight. But three months later, the company's works were destroyed by fire, and before they could be rebuilt, scores of other wells had been sunk, many of which were "gushers," requiring no pumping, and the supply was soon so far in excess of the demand that the price of oil tumbled to one dollar a barrel. Discouraged by all this, the Seneca Company sold out its leases and disbanded, leaving Townsend and Drake poorer than they had been before their great discovery.
Years ago, in 1790, to be exact, an Italian scientist named Galvani, experimenting with the legs of a frog, happened to touch the exposed nerves with a piece of metal, while the legs were lying across another piece. He was astonished to see the legs contract violently. Further experiments followed, and the galvanic battery resulted. Years later, our own Professor Henry discovered that if an insulated wire carrying a current of electricity was wrapped around a piece of soft iron, the latter became a magnet. Out of these simple discoveries, came the electric telegraph, and, still more wonderful, the telephone, by which the human voice may be instantly projected hundreds of miles, not only intelligibly, but with every tone and inflection reproduced. In an age of wonders, this is surely one of the greatest.
On February 14, 1876, two applications were made at the patent office at Washington for patents upon the conveyance of sound by electricity. One was filed by Elisha Gray, the other by Alexander Graham Bell. They were practically identical, but it was Bell's good fortune to be the first to make his device practically effective, and so he may fairly be considered the inventor of the telephone.
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, the son of the famous Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of the system by which deaf people are enabled to read speech more or less correctly by observing the motion of the lips. The family moved to Canada in 1872, and Alexander Bell came to Boston, where he soon became widely known as an authority in the teaching of the deaf and dumb. The reproduction of the human voice by mechanical means interested him deeply, and his study of the construction of the human ear, with its drum vibrating in response to sound vibrations, gave him the idea of a vibrating piece of iron in front of an electric magnet. He was, however, very poor and had no money to expend in experiments—so poor, indeed, that when attacked by illness, his hospital expenses were paid by his employer, and so friendless that during his illness no one visited him except two or three pupils from his school.
He persevered with his experiments, with such rude apparatus as he could make himself, and the first Bell telephone was brought into existence with an old cigar-box, two hundred feet of wire, and two magnets from a toy fish-pond. In an improved form, it was shown at the Centennial exhibition of 1876, where Sir William Thomson pronounced it "the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph." As is always the case, the public was slow to appreciate the importance of the invention, and as late as 1877, Bell was unable to secure $10,000 for a half interest in the European rights. The rapid growth of the business in this country is almost without a parallel in history, and no invention has added more to the convenience of modern life.
A distinguished scientist one day asked the late Clerk Maxwell what was the greatest scientific discovery of the last half century, and Maxwell answered without an instant's hesitation: "That the Gramme machine is reversible." Probably the whole scientific world will agree with him, for that discovery meant that power will not only produce electricity, but that electricity will produce power. Let us see how that has been applied. Falling water is one of the most powerful agents in the world, and at a great waterfall like Niagara, millions of horsepower go to waste every day. So at the foot of Niagara, great power-houses have been built where the power of the water is converted into electricity. The electricity is conducted along wires for hundreds of miles to the great industrial centres, and there converted back again into power. In other words, the water of Niagara is to-day turning machinery in Buffalo and Albany. The same method of producing power, the cheapest that has ever been discovered, is being installed all over the world, and will, in time, produce a revolution in manufacturing processes.