Great Inventions and Discoveries

by Willis Duff Piercy

ELECTRICITY: THE TELEGRAPH AND THE TELEPHONE

The great miracle of the twentieth century is electricity. If the printing press is the brain of civilization and the steam engine is its heart, electric wires are its nervous system. Steam is a giant; electricity is a witch. There is something uncanny about it. Man writes volumes about electricity; calls it positive and negative and measures it in ohms and volts; gives courses to explain it in his schools and universities; kills criminals, cures the sick, and scatters darkness with it; makes it whirl him through space; compels it to bear his whisper through hundreds of miles, and can make it fly around the entire earth with his written word—and yet no man knows what electricity is. Electricity exists, and has always existed, from the back of a cat to the infinite arch of the sky.

A hundred years ago practically nothing was known of electricity. Persons now living were born into a world that had never seen an electric telegraph, a telephone, an electric car, or an electric light. We are living in the morning of electrical knowledge, and what the day may bring no one can imagine. Americans have given the world many of the greatest inventions, and in the field of electricity they have given it nearly everything of value. It is to American ingenuity that civilization is indebted for the electrical telegraph, the sub-marine cable, the telephone, the electric light, and the electric car. The names of Morse, Vail, Field, Bell, Brush, Gray, Edison, and Sprague—all American electrical inventors—will always be prominent in the list of the world's great benefactors.

If you will rub a stick of sealing wax briskly with a woolen cloth, you will find that the stick of wax will attract to itself bits of bran, small shreds of paper, and the like. This is the simplest experiment in electricity. In the same way, by rubbing amber with silk, Thales, a Greek philosopher who lived in the sixth century before Christ, is thought to have discovered electricity. The Greek word for amber is elektron. Because of the supposed discovery of electricity in amber by Thales, the English word electricity was "coined" and used for the first time by William Gilbert, a British physician and scientist, who lived during the reigns of Elizabeth and James.

For nearly twenty-five centuries, reaching from the time of Thales to the opening of the nineteenth century, the world learned practically nothing about electricity. The start in modern electrical knowledge was made by Galvani, an Italian scientist, born in 1737, who just before the last century dawned showed that electricity can be produced by the contact of metals with fluids. The term galvanic, used in connection with electricity, comes from the name of this investigator. Galvani's experiments suggested the electric battery to Volta, another Italian scientist who was born in 1745. The electrical word voltaic is in honor of Volta. In 1752 Benjamin Franklin flew his kite into the thunderstorm and proved that lightning is electricity. A little later Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish investigator, pointed out the relation between electricity and magnetism. In the early part of the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday, an eminent English physicist, discovered the possibility of producing electric currents through the motion of a magnet. Faraday's discovery led to the electric dynamo machine, the source of modern power over electricity.

The oldest and greatest of electrical inventions is the telegraph. Tele is a Greek adverb meaning "afar." Graph comes from the Greek verb "to write." Telegraph therefore means "to write afar."

The idea of telegraphic communication is more than two and a half centuries old. In 1632 Galileo referred to a secret art of communicating at great distances by means of magnetic needles. In 1753 there appeared in the Scots Magazine an article signed "C. M." (since ascertained to have been Charles Morrison, of Greenock in Scotland) setting forth a fairly clear idea of the electric telegraph. Joseph Henry, of Washington, D.C., in 1831 signaled through an electrical circuit a mile in length. The first commercially successful telegraph was devised in 1837 by Samuel F. B. Morse, an American.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, April 27, 1791. He was educated in the common schools of his native town and in Yale University, where he was graduated in 1810. After graduation, like Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, he went to Europe to study art, and became successful as an artist. On his return to America in 1832, one of his fellow passengers on the ship was Charles T. Jackson, who had been studying electricity in Paris. Jackson told Morse of some experiments in electricity which the French had been making, and remarked that it would be a good thing if news could be transmitted through long distances by electricity. Morse replied, "Why can't it be done?" From that hour he gave his time and energy to the invention of the electric telegraph. During the remainder of the voyage he drew plans for apparatus and tried to devise an electric alphabet. In 1837 he put two instruments at the ends of a short line through which he sent and received messages. About this time he met a man who was destined to be of great service to him in promoting his invention, and one who deserves almost as much credit for it as Morse himself. This was Alfred Vail.

Vail was born at Morristown, New Jersey, September 25, 1807. He was a son of Stephen Vail, the wealthy owner of the Speedwell iron works.

One day in September, 1837, after Morse had completed his apparatus, he was invited to exhibit it at the University of the City of New York. Alfred Vail was a student in the university at the time and was one of the spectators to whom the apparatus was exhibited. He was much impressed with it. Morse needed money, and Alfred Vail's father had it. Morse was invited to the home of the Vails in Speedwell, where the matter of the invention was talked over. The sum of two thousand dollars was necessary to get the invention started. Stephen Vail agreed to furnish the money. Alfred Vail was to construct apparatus and exhibit it to Congress. For this he was to have one-fourth of the proceeds arising from the patent.