Then a young fellow named Robert Fulton thought he could make a boat go by putting Watt’s engine on board and making it turn paddle-wheels. People laughed at him and called the boat he was building “Fulton’s Folly,” which means “foolishness.” But the boat worked, and Fulton had the laugh on those who had laughed at him. He called his boat the Clermont, and it made regular trips up and down the river.

No one had ever before been able to talk to another far off until the telegraph was invented. The telegraph makes a clicking sound. Electricity flows through a wire from one place to another place which may be a long distance off. If you press a button at one end of the wire you stop the electricity flowing through the wire, and the instrument at the other end makes a click. A short click is called a dot, and a long click is called a dash. These dots and dashes stand for letters of the alphabet, so you can spell out a message by dots and dashes.

A is· —dot-dash
B is — ···dash-dot-dot-dot
E is·dot
H is····dot-dot-dot-dot
T is —dash

An American painter named Morse invented this wonderful little instrument. He built the first telegraph line in America between Baltimore and Washington, and this was the first message he clicked across it: “What hath God wrought!”

A school-teacher named Bell was trying to find some way of making deaf children hear, and in doing so he invented the telephone. The telephone carries words as the telegraph carries clicks. You do not have to know a special alphabet or spell out words by dots and dashes as you do on the telegraph. With the telephone any one can talk from one side of America to the other.

Many inventions now in every-day use have been partly invented by several people, so that it is hard to say just which one thought of the invention first. Several people thought of a way to run a machine by feeding it electricity. This was the electric motor. Then others thought of a way to run a machine by exploding gas. This was the motor used in automobiles.

Electric lights, such as we use indoors, were invented by Thomas Alva Edison. Edison is called a wizard, because in the Middle Ages wizards were supposed to be able to do and to make all sorts of wonderful and impossible things, to turn lead into gold, to make people invisible, and that sort of thing. But Edison has done things that no wizard of a fairy-tale had ever even thought of. Edison was a poor boy who sold newspapers and magazines on a train. He was interested in all sorts of experiments and fitted up a place in the baggage-car where he could make experiments. But he made so much of a mess in the car that at last the baggage-man kicked Edison’s whole outfit off the train. Edison invented many things connected with the phonograph and the movies, and he has probably made more useful and important inventions than any other man who has ever lived, so that he is much greater than those mere kings who have done nothing but quarrel and destroy—without whom the world would have been much better off if they had never lived!

Thousands of people who have lived in the past ages have tried to fly and failed. Millions of people have said it was impossible to fly and foolish to try. Some have even said it was wicked to try, that God meant that only birds and angels should fly. At last, after long years of work and thousands of trials, two American brothers named Wright did the impossible. They invented the airplane and flew.

An Italian named Marconi invented the radio, and others every day are still making wonderful inventions, but you will have to read about these yourself, for we are near the end of our history.

Here is a good subject for an argument or debate: Are we any happier with all these inventions than people were a thousand years ago without them?