With this much as a preliminary we are prepared to take up the applications of electricity, which to most people will be more interesting than what has gone before.
CHAPTER X.
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.
In the year 1617 Strada, an Italian Jesuit, proposed to telegraph news without wires by means of two sympathetic needles made of loadstone so balanced that when one was turned the other would turn with it. Each needle was to have a dial with the letters on it. This would have been very nice if it had only worked, but it was not based on any known law of nature.
Many attempts at telegraphing with electricity were made by different people during the eighteenth century. About 1748 Franklin succeeded in firing spirits by means of a wire across the Schuylkill River, using, as all the other experimenters had done, frictional electricity. In 1753 an anonymous letter was written to Scott's Magazine describing a method by which it was possible to communicate at a distance by electricity. The writer proposed the use of a wire for each letter of the alphabet, that should terminate in pith balls at the receiving end, and under the balls were to be strips of paper corresponding to the letters of the alphabet. The message was to be sent by discharging static electricity through the wire corresponding to the first letter of a word when the paper would be attracted to the pith ball and read by the observer. Then the wire corresponding to the second letter of the word was to be charged in like manner, and so on till the whole message was spelled out. This was the first practical (i.e., possible) suggestion for a telegraph. The writer also proposed to have the wires strung on insulators, which was a great advance over the other attempts.
The communication was anonymous, as no doubt, like many others, the author feared the ridicule of his neighbors. It requires a vast amount of moral courage to stand up before the world and openly advocate some new theory that has never come within the experience of any one before. It requires much now, but it required more then; for a man in those days would have been roasted for what in these days he would be toasted. The rank and file of humanity have been opposed to innovations in all ages, but no progress could have been made without innovations. There always has to be a first time. Galileo is said to have been forced to retract, on his knees, some theory he advanced about the motion of the earth, and its relation to the sun and other heavenly bodies. Notwithstanding this retraction the seed-thought sown by Galileo took root in other minds, which led to the triumph of scientific truth over religious fanaticism.
The writer in Scott's Magazine did not have the opportunity to put his ideas into practice, so the glory of the invention fell to others. Such men as this unknown writer are made of finer stuff, and they stand alone on the frontier of progress. They do not fear the bullets of an enemy half so much as the gibes of a friend. Much of their work is done quietly and without notice, and when something of real importance is worked out theoretically and experimentally, some one seizes upon it and proclaims it from the housetops and attaches to it his name; but perhaps years after the real inventor (the man who taught the so-called inventor how to do it) is dead, some one writes a book that reveals the truth, and then the hero-loving people erect a monument to his memory.
Such a man was our own Professor Joseph Henry, so long the presiding genius at the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. He worked out all the problems of the present American telegraphic system and demonstrated it practically. Everything that made the so-called Morse telegraph a success had long before been described and demonstrated by Henry. Yet with the modest grace that was ingrained in the man he yielded all to the one who was instrumental in constructing the first telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington. Great credit is due to such men as Morse and Cyrus W. Field—neither of them inventors, but promoters of great systems of communication that are of unspeakable benefit to mankind. Henry pointed out the way, and Morse carried it into effect. Morse has had no more credit than was due him, but has Henry had as much as is due him? No great invention was ever yet the work, wholly, of one man. We Americans are too apt to forget this.