The latest great step forward in telegraphy was made by Marconi, an Italian scientist, who invented a system of telegraphing without the use of wires.
The telephone has one advantage over the telegraph; it enables a person not only to send messages but to carry on a conversation with persons at a distance. The electric telephone was invented in 1875 by Alexander Graham Bell. His father was a Scotch educator and scientist who invented a method called “Bell’s visible speech” to teach deaf-mutes to speak. Telephones now connect places hundreds of miles apart.
As great advances have been made within the last century in methods of lighting houses as in modes of travel and of communication. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, people still used candles and crude lamps, similar to those which had been in use for hundreds of years. The principle of the candle and the lamp is the same; oil or grease, liquid or solid, is burned by means of a wick. During our great-grandfather’s days, well-to-do people used chiefly wax candles and poor people used candles made of tallow. In many families the only light was furnished by pine knots, called lightwood because the pitch burned making a bright light. It was by such a light that Abraham Lincoln studied.
About the beginning of the nineteenth century an Englishman invented practical gas-light and carried gas made from coal through his house in pipes. In 1821 illuminating gas was made and used in Baltimore for the first time in this country. About a half-century later, another stride forward was made in the lighting of houses. Edison invented the electric light, the brightest, cleanest, and safest light, and the one requiring least care of any yet devised. There are two kinds of the electric light, both widely used. The incandescent, or “glow lamp” as it is called in England, is most common. The arc light is used for lighting large buildings and city streets.
Thomas Edison is an American scientist who has made it his life-work to make practical use of the great force of electricity. He was born in 1847 and is still living and still working. He was the son of a hard-working laborer. His mother had been a school teacher and she gave her son as good an education as she could. When only twelve years old, he started out to earn his own living as a news-boy on the Grand Trunk Railroad.
He was a business-like, enterprising youngster. When there was exciting news in his papers, he telegraphed the fact to stations in advance and bought extra supplies of papers which he disposed of at a good price. He decided that he would like to print a paper of his own, so he got some old type and fitted up part of a freight-car as an office. Here he published a weekly paper, “The Grand Trunk Herald,” which became popular with railroad people. He undertook a second paper called the “Paul Pry” but for some personal remarks in it he was severely punished and he soon after gave up journalism.
He now became interested in chemistry. He bought cheap apparatus and some chemicals and in his freight-car office devoted himself to experiments. Unfortunately, an over-turned bottle of phosphorus set the floor on fire; the conductor put the young editor and scientist, with his printing press and chemical outfit, off the car.
When Edison was about fifteen, he saved the life of a two-year-old child, dragging it from in front of the engine at risk of his own life. The grateful father was a station agent and he offered to teach Edison telegraphy. The boy became a rapid operator, but was too fond of experimenting to devote himself to work and he drifted from one place to another. Finally he went to New York City. For his inventions of stock-printing and other telegraph appliances, he received forty thousand dollars and this enabled him to establish a laboratory to work out his ideas.
For many years Edison was laughed at because he believed that a telegraph wire can be made to carry two messages at once; by his duplex system he made it do so, and later by his quadruplex system he made it carry four messages.
He added some improvements to the telephone invented by Bell, invented a phonograph to record and repeat the sound of the human voice, and a megaphone to carry the sound to a distance, and the kinetoscope.