Steam, Steel and Electricity

by James W. Steele

Science began with static electricity, so called, because its sources were more readily and easily discovered in the course of scientific accidents, as in the original discovery of the property of rubbed amber, etc., and the long course of investigations that were suggested by that antique, accidental discovery. What we know as the dynamic branch of the subject was created by the investigations of Faraday; induction was its mother. It is the practically important branch, but its investigation required the invention of machinery to perform its necessary operations. Between the two branches the sole difference--a difference that may be said not actually to exist--is in quantity and pressure.

To the department of static electricity all those industrial appliances first known belong, as the telegraph, electro-plating, etc. I shall first consider this class of appliances and machines. The most important of the class is

THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.--The word is Greek, meaning, literally, "to write from a distance." But long since, and before Morse's invention, it had come to mean the giving of any information, by any means, from afar. The existence of telegraphs, not electric, is as old as the need of them. The idea of quickness, speedy delivery, is involved. If time is not an object, men may go or send. The means used in telegraphing, in ancient and modern times, have been sound and sight. Anything that can be expressed so as to be read at a distance, and that conveys a meaning, is a telegram. [[21]] Our plains Indians used columns of smoke, or fires, and are the actual inventors of the heliograph, now so called, though formerly meaning the making of a picture by the aid of the sun--photography. The vessels of a squadron at sea have long used telegraphic signals. Some of the celebrated sentences of our history have been written by visual signals, such as "Hold the fort, for I am coming," "Don't give up the ship," etc. Order of showing, positions, and colors are arbitrarily made to mean certain words. The sinking of the "Victoria" in 1893, was brought about by the orders conveyed by marine signals. Bells and guns signal by sound. So does the modern electric telegraph, contrary to original design. It is all telegraphy, but it all required an agreed and very limited code, and comparative nearness. None of the means in ancient use were available for the multifarious uses of modern commerce.

[21.] This word is of American coinage, and first appeared in the Albany Evening Journal, in 1852. It avoids the use of two words, as "Telegraphic Message," or "Telegraphic Dispatch," and the ungrammatical use of "Telegraph," for a message by telegraph. The new word was at once adopted.

As soon as it was known that electricity could be sent long distances over wires, human genius began to contrive a way of using it as a means of conveying definite intelligence. The first idea of the kind was attempted to be put into effect in 1774. This was, however, before the discovery of the electro-magnet (about 1800), or even the Galvanic battery, and it was seriously proposed to have as many wires as there were letters; each wire to have a frictional battery for generating electricity at one end of the circuit, and a pith-ball electroscope at the other. The modern reader may smile at the idea of the hurried sender of a message taking a piece of cat-skin, or his silk handkerchief, and rubbing up the successive letter-balls of glass or sulphur until he had spelled out his telegram. Later a man named Dyer, of New York, invented a system of sending messages by a single wire, and of causing a record to be made at the receiving office by means of a point passing over litmus paper, which the current was to mark by chemical action, the paper passing over a roller or drum during the operation. The battery for this arrangement was also frictional. They knew of no other. Then came the deflected-needle telegraph, first suggested by Ampère, and a few such lines were constructed, and to some extent operated. In one of the original telegraph lines the wires were bound in hemp and laid in pipes on the surface of the ground. The expedient of poles and atmospheric insulation was not thought of until it was adopted as a last resort during the construction of Morse's first line between Washington and Baltimore.

In the year 1832, an American named Samuel F. B. Morse was making a voyage home from Havre to New York in the sailing packet Sully. He was an educated man, a graduate of Yale, and an artist, being the holder of a gold medal awarded him for his first work in sculpture, and no want of success drove him to other fields. But during this tedious voyage of the old times in a sailing vessel he seems to have conceived the idea which thenceforth occupied his life. It was the beginning of the present Electric Telegraph. During this same voyage he embodied his notions in some drawings, and they were the beginnings of vicissitudes among the most long-continued and trying for which life affords any opportunity. He abandoned his studies. He paid attention to no other interest. He passed years in silent and lonesome endeavors that seemed to all others useless. He subjected himself to the reproaches of all his friends, lost the confidence of business men, gained the reputation of being a monomaniac, and was finally given over to the following of devices deemed the most useless and unpromising that up to that time had occupied the mind of any man.

The rank and file of humanity had no definite idea of the plan, or of the results that would follow if it were successful. In reality no one cared. It was Morse's enterprise exclusively--a crank's fad alone. There has been no period in the history of society when the public, as a body, was interested in any great change in the systems to which it was accustomed. There is always enmity against an improver. In reality, the question of how much money Morse should make by inventing the electric telegraph was the question of least importance. Yet it was regarded as the only one. He is dead. His profits have gone into the mass, his honors have become international. The patents have long expired. The public, the entire world, are long since the beneficiaries, and the benefits continue to be inconceivably vast. Nothing in all history exceeds in moral importance the invention of the telegraph except the invention of printing with movable types.

After eight years of waiting, and the repeated instruction of the entire Congress of the United States in the art of telegraphy, that body was finally induced to make an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars to be expended in the construction of an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. And now begins the actual strangeness of the story of the Telegraph. After many years of toil, Morse still had learned nothing of the efficient construction of an electro-magnet. The magnet which he attempted to use unchanged was after the pattern of the first one ever made--a bent U-shaped bar, around which were a few turns of wire not insulated. The bar was varnished for insulation, and the turns of wire were so few that they did not touch each other. The apparatus would not work at a distance of more than a few feet, and not invariably then. Professor Leonard D. Gale suggested the cause of the difficulty as being in the sparseness of the coils of wire on the magnet and the use of a single-cell battery. He furnished an electro-magnet and battery out of his own belongings, with which the efficiency of the contrivance was greatly increased. The only insulated wire then known was bonnet-wire, used by milliners for shaping the immense flaring bonnets worn by our grandmothers, and when it finally came to constructing the instruments of the first telegraphic system the entire stock of New York was exhausted. The immense stocks of electrical supplies now available for all purposes was then, and for many years afterwards, unknown. Previous to the investigations of Professor Henry, in 1830, only the theory of causing a core of soft iron to become a magnet was known, and the actual magnet, as we make it, had not been made. Morse, in his beginnings, had not money enough to employ a competent mechanic, and was himself possessed of but scant mechanical skill or knowledge of mechanical results. Persistency was the quality by which he succeeded.