Samuel F. B. Morse (b. April 27, 1791; d. April 2, 1872) contributed to the century’s triumphs and world’s civilization by that brilliant and persistent series of investigations, which resulted in the first practical telegraph. He brought his invention before the world in 1844, and with the aid of the government set up a line of forty miles between Washington and Baltimore, over which dispatches successfully passed, May 24, 1844. From this moment his triumph was complete, and he became the recipient of many flattering distinctions at home and abroad.
John Ericsson (b. July 31, 1803; d. March 8, 1899) either invented, or first made practical, the steam fire-engine, the artificial draught for locomotives, the reversible locomotive, the “link-motion,” the caloric engine, and the screw propeller. Discouraged in England, he came to the United States in 1839, where he revolutionized naval warfare by applying the screw propeller to the U. S. S. Princeton, and employing a range finder. In 1854 he invented the Monitor iron-clad on principles first applied in the Monitor which defeated the Merrimac in Hampton Roads, Virginia, March 9, 1862. His career was signalized by many other valuable inventions.
Alexander Graham Bell, born March 3, 1846, besides exploiting in America his father’s valuable system of instruction to deaf mutes, typifies the inventive spirit of his age by his contribution to public progress through the material side, as exemplified in that indispensable aid to modern life, the telephone, with the invention of which he is generally, but by no means undisputedly, credited.
Thomas Alva Edison (b. February 11, 1847) is a splendid example of the tireless, acute, and practical scientific inventor, and is well named the electrical “wizard.” Among the triumphs of his skill and genius are the automatic telegraphic repeater; the duplex telegraph, afterwards developed into the quadruplex and sextuplex transmitter; the printing telegraph for stock quotations; the carbon telephone transmitter; the aerophone; the megaphone and microphone; the phonograph and photometer; the incandescent lamp; and many other devices for electric lighting.
Nicola Tesla (born 1858), a former pupil and assistant of Edison, shares with his master the honor of representing the world’s greatest and most practical of scientific inventors and discoverers. His most noted investigations and discoveries have been along the line of arousing luminous vibrations in matter, without, at the same time, setting in action heat-vibrations. He has made the remarkable discovery that 200,000 volts may pass harmlessly through that body which 2000 would kill, and is experimenting to produce 3,000,000 vibrations a minute in matter. He has also shown that both motors and lights can be operated on one wire without a circuit. His rotary motor is used in conveying power from the great plant at Niagara Falls.
Novelists.—Sir Walter Scott, of Scotland (b. August 15, 1771; d. September 21, 1832), exerted a powerful influence on the literature of the century through the medium of his stirring poetry and delightful fiction, in both of which he was most ready and prolific. His numerous works, teeming with striking situations, strong and noble in style, are models of literary excellence, and are as captivating to readers of to-day as they were half a century ago.
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
Charles Dickens, of England (b. February 7, 1812; d. June 9, 1870), ably exemplified that school of novelists who paint homely social life with all its innocent, clumsy efforts at humor; its sorrows, vanities, and weaknesses; its selfishness, malice, and vice; its wrongs, sufferings, and goodnesses. Though faulty in plot and style and ridiculous in their exaggerations, his novels marked a new era in literature, and no books ever so appealed to the sympathies and good impulses of readers.
James Fenimore Cooper (b. September 15, 1789; d. September 14, 1851) typifies a large and apparently enduring class of fiction writers of which he was a remarkable forerunner; that school of novelists who deal with stirring, bold, and healthful adventure, in which the Anglo-Saxon mind particularly seems to find unfailing delight. Both at home and abroad, his novels attained a wide, sudden, and well-deserved popularity. And to this day no library of fiction is complete without them.