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The First Sheet from the Printing Press

GRADED SUPPLEMENTARY READING SERIES

GREAT INVENTIONS
AND DISCOVERIES

BY

WILLIS DUFF PIERCY

NEW YORK
CHARLES E. MERRILL COMPANY

Copyright, 1911
By Charles E. Merrill Co.

CONTENTS

GREAT INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Tens of thousands of years ago, when the world was even then old, primitive man came into existence. The first men lived in the branches of trees or in their hollow trunks, and sometimes in caves. For food they chased horses or caught fish from the streams along whose shores they lived. If they had clothing, it was the skins of wild beasts. Life was simple, slow, and crude. There were no cities, books, railroads, clocks, newspapers, schools, churches, judges, teachers, automobiles, or elections. Man lived with other animals and was little superior to them. These primitive men are called cave-dwellers.

A resident of modern New York sits down to a breakfast gathered from distant parts of the earth. He spreads out before him his daily newspaper, which tells him what has happened during the last twenty-four hours all over the world. Telegraph wires and ocean cables have flashed these events across thousands of miles into the newspaper offices and there great printing presses have recorded them upon paper. After breakfast he gets into an electric street car or automobile and is carried through miles of space in a very short time to a great steel building hundreds of feet high. He steps into an electric elevator and is whirled rapidly up to his office on the twentieth floor. The postman brings a package of letters which fast-flying mail trains have brought him during the night from far-away places. He reads them and then speaks rapidly to a young woman who makes some crooked marks on paper. After running her fingers rapidly over the keyboard of a little machine, she hands him type-written replies to the letters he has received. A boy brings him a little yellow envelope. In it he finds a message from Seattle or London or Hong Kong or Buenos Ayres sent only a few moments ago. He wishes to talk with a business associate in Boston or St. Louis. Still sitting at his desk, he applies a small tube to his ear and speaks to the man as distinctly and as instantaneously as if he were in the next room. He finds it important to be in Chicago. After luncheon, he boards a train equipped with the conveniences of his own home, sleeps there comfortably, and flies through the thousand miles of distance in time to have breakfast in Chicago the next morning.

What is the difference between the life of the cave-dweller and the life of the modern New Yorker? We call it civilization. It is not at one bound or at one thousand that we pass from the primitive cave to New York City. Civilization is the accumulation of centuries of achievement. It is builded, in the language of Isaiah, "line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little."

Different nations have accomplished different things and have scattered the seeds of these accomplishments among other nations. Certain individuals have seen farther in certain directions than their fellows and have contributed to civilization the results of their vision. Whoever has added to the safety, the happiness, the power, or the convenience of society; whoever discovers a star or a microbe; whoever paints a picture or plants a tree, builds a bridge or fights a righteous battle; whoever makes two ears of corn grow where there grew but one before; whoever lets the light shine in upon a darkened street or a darkened spirit is an agent of civilization.

The history of civilization is largely a history of man's struggle against the forces of nature and of his victory over them. Nature is always saying to man, "Thou shalt not"; and man is always replying, "I will." If diseases lurk in air and water, cures are ready in the mind of man. Nature shoves men apart with lofty mountains; but man drives his iron horse over the mountains or through them. Vast oceans roll and mighty winds blow between continents; but steam laughs at stormy seas. The moon's light is not sufficient for man's purposes and he makes a brighter one. When winter blows his icy breath, man warms himself with coal and fire. The South pours down upon him her scorching summer; but he has learned how to freeze water into ice. Time and space conspire together for human isolation; man conjures with electricity and with it destroys both. The stars seek to hide their secrets behind immeasurable distances; but an Italian gives man a glass that brings the heavens closer before his vision. History tries to conceal itself in the rubbish of ages; but with ink man preserves the past. His asylums, hospitals, churches, schools, libraries, and universities are lights along the shore guiding the human race in its voyage down the ever widening stream of growth and possibility.

The centuries do not yield to man equal advancement. Some are very fertile; others are almost, if not quite, barren. The entire period of a thousand years stretching from the fall of Rome to the discovery of America was as sterile as a heath. On the other hand, the nineteenth century was the greatest in history in point of human progress, especially in the field of inventions. It alone gave to man far more of civilization than the whole ten centuries before the discovery of America or indeed any other period of a thousand years. One hundred years ago there was not a mile of railroad, ocean cable, or telegraph wire in the world; not a telephone, automobile, electric light, or typewriter. The people were then deriding the new-born idea of the steamboat, and wireless telegraphy had not been dreamed of.

Even up to the beginning of the Revolutionary War, less than one hundred fifty years ago, no man in America had ever seen an envelope, a match, a stove, a piece of coal, a daily newspaper, a sewing machine, a reaper, a drill, a mowing machine, ether, chloroform, galvanized iron, India-rubber, or steam-driven machinery. We who are alive to-day are fortunate more than any other generation thus far in the world's population.

"We are living, we are dwelling

In a grand and awful time;

In an age on ages telling—

To be living is sublime."

The horse and the dog of to-day are not very different from the horses and the dogs of a thousand years ago. From the beginning they have done about all they can ever do. Not so with man. He is a progressive animal. He is always reaching outward and upward for broader and higher things. Tennyson sings,

"For I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns."

The difference between the lives of the primitive cave-dweller and the modern American is unspeakably vast. But looking far down the vista of future ages, who shall say that the fortieth century may not as far surpass the twentieth as the twentieth does the sleepy dawn of man's existence on the earth? We are packing more of life into a day than our ancestors could put into a month. And the hours of the centuries to come hold a fuller experience than our days.

Thomas Carlyle calls man a "tool-using animal." Throughout all time man has made and used tools. These tools are the best measure of his civilization. According to the material out of which they have been made, man's progress has been divided into epochs or ages.

Primitive man made a few implements of bone, horn, and stone. They were few and crude. This period is called the Stone Age. During it men dwelt in caves or huts, dressed themselves in skins, and lived by catching fish, chasing wild animals, and gathering wild fruits. By and by man learned how to make tools out of bronze, an alloy composed of copper and tin. These bronze implements were more numerous and more efficient than the stone tools and gave man a higher degree of power and workmanship. With them he cut down trees or carved stone for his dwellings and acquired generally a higher order of life. This era is named the Bronze Age. Finally the use of iron was discovered. This metal afforded many tools that could not be made of stone or bronze—tools that were much stronger and more efficient. Man became correspondingly more powerful and his life more complex. The period during which iron was used is called the Iron Age.

Invention is the making of some new thing not previously existing. Discovery is the finding of something already in existence but not known before. There was no electric telegraph until Samuel Morse made or invented it; America has always existed, but was not known until Christopher Columbus found or discovered it.

Among all the builders of civilization, not the least are the inventors and discoverers. High up on the page of those who have made the world great will always stand the names of Gutenberg or Coster, Watt, Stephenson, Morse, Edison, Fulton, Galileo, Newton, Columbus, Morton, Bell, Marconi, and others who have invented new machines and discovered new processes for making life more happy, safe, and powerful.

Regarding the influence of inventions upon civilization, Lord Salisbury says: "The inventors and even the first users of the great discoveries in applied science had never realized what influence their work was to have upon industry, politics, society, and even religion. The discovery of gunpowder simply annihilated feudalism, thus effecting an entire change in the structure of government in Europe. As to the discovery of printing, it not only made religious revolutions possible, but was the basis on which modern democratic forms of government rested. The steam engine not only changed all forms of industry and the conditions under which industries were prosecuted, but it made practically contiguous the most distant parts of the world, reducing its vastness to a relatively contracted area. And now the introduction of electricity as a form of force seems destined, as its development proceeds, to bring about results quite as important in their way, though but yet dimly seen by the most far-sighted."

Secretary Seward pays this tribute to invention: "The exercise of the inventive faculty is the nearest akin to the Creator of any faculty possessed by the human mind; for while it does not create in the sense that the Creator did, yet it is the nearest approach to it of anything known to man."

And Lord Bacon tells us: "The introduction of new inventions seemeth to be the very chief of all human actions. The benefits of new inventions may extend to all mankind universally; while the good of political achievements can respect but some particular cantons of men; these latter do not endure above a few ages, the former forever. Inventions make all men happy, without injury to any one single person. Furthermore, they are, as it were, new creations, and imitations of God's own works."

CHAPTER II

THE PRINTING PRESS

"Blessings be on the head of Cadmus, the Phœnicians, or whoever it is, that first invented books."

Thomas Carlyle.

"Except a living man," says Charles Kingsley, "there is nothing more wonderful than a book—a message to us from the dead—from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, amuse us, vivify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. We ought to reverence books, to look at them as useful and mighty things." Milton calls a good book "the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." Cicero likens a room without books to a body without a soul. Ruskin says, "Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book." And Thomas Carlyle exclaims: "Wondrous, indeed, is the virtue of a true book! O thou who art able to write a book, which once in two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner!"

Is it not wonderful that a record of all the world has thought and said and felt and done can be deposited in a corner of my room, and that there I may sit and commune with the master spirits of all the centuries? Socrates, Plato, Homer, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Paul, David, Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare, Hugo, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlyle, and Emerson, all in one room at the same time!

Great as books are, however, the world has not long had them. For many generations after man's advent, he had no language. He communicated with his fellows by means of gestures or gave vent to his feelings in rude grunts or cries, much as the lower animals do now. But God gave to man something He did not bestow upon the other animals—the power of articulate speech. Certain sounds came to represent certain ideas and a kind of oral language grew up. This became more and more highly developed as time went by. For centuries the traditions, stories, and songs of men were handed down orally from father to son and were preserved only in the memory. The poems of Homer, the great Greek bard, were recited by readers to large audiences, some of them numbering probably twenty thousand.

By and by men felt the need of preserving their thoughts in some more permanent way than by memory, and there grew up a rude system of writing. At first pictures or rude imitations of objects were used; a circle or a disc might represent the sun, and a crescent the moon. The idea of a tree was denoted by the picture of a tree. The early Indians of North America were among the peoples who used a system of picture writing. In process of time, as men grew in knowledge and culture, certain fixed signs began to denote certain sounds, and a phonetic system of writing was developed.

For the first phonetic alphabet it is generally supposed that we are indebted to the Phœnicians, an active, commercial people, who lived along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. They were a maritime nation and scattered their alphabet wherever they sailed, so that some kind of phonetic alphabet finally existed throughout the civilized world.

Books among the ancients were very different from the books of the present. Paper has not been known long, nor, indeed, has the art of printing. When man began to preserve his thoughts and deeds in more permanent form than in the memory, various substances were used to write upon. Josephus, an historian of the Jews, mentions two columns, one of stone and the other of brick, upon which the children of Seth wrote accounts of their inventions and astronomical discoveries. Tablets of lead containing the works of Hesiod, a Greek writer, were deposited in the temple of the Muses in Bœotia. According to the Bible, the ten commandments which the Lord gave to Moses on Mount Sinai for the children of Israel were engraved on two tablets of stone; and the laws of Solon, the great Grecian law-giver, were carved on planks of wood.

Sixty centuries ago on the banks of the Nile in northern Africa flourished the civilization of the Egyptians. There grew abundantly in Egypt a marsh reed called the papyrus. From the name of this plant is derived our word paper. The Egyptians made their books from the papyrus plant. With a sharp instrument they cut lengthwise strips through the stalk, put these strips together edge to edge, and on them at right angles, placed another layer of shorter strips. The two layers were then moistened with Nile water, pressed together, and left to dry. A leaf of writing material was thus produced. Any roughness on the surface of the sheet was polished away with some smooth instrument. A number of leaves were then glued together so as to form a long piece of the material. The Egyptians took reeds, dipped them in gum water colored with charcoal or with a kind of resinous soot, and wrote on the long papyrus strip. Sometimes ink was made of the cuttle fish or from lees of wine. After the papyrus had been written upon, it was rolled up and became an Egyptian book. Papyrus was used for writing material not only by the Egyptians but by the Greeks and the Romans also, and for a long time it was the chief substance used for writing throughout the civilized world. It continued in use to a greater or less extent till about the seventh century after Christ.

On the plains of Asia lived the Chaldeans, whose civilization was about as old as that of the Egyptians. But their books were very different. Men use for their purposes the things that are close at hand. In Egypt the papyrus plant was utilized for making books. In Chaldea, instead of this marsh reed, there were great stores of clay and of this material the ancient Chaldeans, and the Babylonians and the Assyrians who followed them, made their books. The Chaldeans took bricks or masses of smooth clay and, while they were yet soft, made impressions on them with a metal stiletto shaped at the end like the side of a wedge. In Latin the word for wedge is cuneus. Hence this old writing of the Chaldeans is called cuneiform or wedge-shaped. Some of these wedge-shaped impressions stood for whole words, others for syllables. After the clay tablets had been written upon, they were burned or dried hard in the sun. A Chaldean book was thus made very durable and lasted for ages. During recent years many of them have been dug up in ancient Babylonia and deciphered. They consist of grammars, dictionaries, religious books and hymns, laws, public documents, and records of private business transactions.

The early Greeks and Romans used for their books tablets of ivory or metal or, more commonly, tablets of wood taken from the beech or fir tree. The inner sides of these tablets were coated with wax. On this wax coating the letters were traced with a pointed metallic pen or stiletto called the stylus. Our English word style, as used in rhetoric, comes from the name of this instrument. The other end of the stylus was used for erasing. Two of these waxed tablets, joined at the edges by wire hinges, were the earliest specimens of bookbinding. Wax tablets of this kind continued in partial use in Europe through the Middle Ages. Later the leaves of the palm tree were used; then the inner bark of the lime, ash, maple, or elm.

The next material that came into general use for writing purposes was parchment. This was made from the skins of animals, particularly sheep or lambs. Next came vellum, the prepared skin of the calf. Parchment and vellum were written upon with a metallic pen. As these substances were very costly, sometimes one book was written over another on the same piece of parchment or vellum. Of course this made the reading of the manuscript very difficult.

About the end of the ninth century or the beginning of the tenth, after Christ, parchment and vellum as material for books gave way to paper. At first paper was made of cotton, but during the twelfth century it was produced from linen. It is not known who invented linen paper, but its introduction gave the first great impulse to book making.

In the early Greek books the lines ran in opposite directions alternately. That is, there would be a line from left to right across the page, and then the next lower line would begin at the right and run towards the left. Among some of the Orientals the lines ran from right to left. In the old Chinese books the lines were vertical down the page, as they are still. Among Western and Northern peoples the lines ran from left to right as in our modern books.

The old civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia, in which the art of book-making originated, sprang up, flourished, and decayed, burying from the sight of men precious secrets in the arts and sciences. The beautiful flower of Greek culture budded, bloomed, and withered. Passing on from east to west, civilization knocked at the door of Rome and awakened there such military and legal genius as the world had not yet seen. Then a horde of wild barbarians poured over the mountains of northern Italy and overthrew the mighty city on the Tiber. The sun of civilization was setting, at least for a time. Night was coming on, the night of the Dark Ages, a night without a star of human thought or achievement, a night full of the noxious vapors of ignorance and superstition.

About the beginning of the fifteenth century after Christ there came over the world a great intellectual awakening. The human intellect began to awake, to stretch itself, to go forth and conquer. One of the first signs and causes of this intellectual awakening was an event that happened at Mainz in Germany or at Haarlem in Holland, or possibly in both places at the same time. Of all the events that have made for civilization and have influenced the progress of the human race, this event at Haarlem or Mainz is the most important. It is the invention of printing. Before this time, ever since man began to record his thoughts, whether on plank, stone, or papyrus, on bark of tree, skin of animal, or tablet of wax or paper, every letter was made by hand. The process was necessarily slow, books were rare and costly, and only the few could have them. But with the advent of a process that would multiply books and make them cheap, learning was made accessible to the multitude. The clang of the first printing press was the death knell of ignorance and tyranny.

An Advertisement of Caxton, the First Printer in England

Before the invention of printing with movable, metal types, a kind of block printing was used. The words or letters were carved on a block of wood; the block was applied to paper, silk, cloth, or vellum, and thus impressions were made.

It has always been a matter of dispute as to who invented printing. It is fairly clear that printing, both with blocks and with movable types, was practised in China and Japan long before it was in Europe. There is a tradition that as far back as 175 A.D. Chinese classics were cut upon tablets of stone, that these tablets were placed outside the university, and that impressions were made from them. However, we are not indebted to China or Japan for the art of printing. The real invention of printing, so far as the civilized world is concerned, occurred in Europe in the latter part of the fifteenth century. The inventor is often said to be Johann Gutenberg, of Mainz, Germany. Another strong claimant for this honor is Lourens Janszoon Coster, who lived at Haarlem, in Holland.

Concerning the lives of Coster and Gutenberg little is known. Coster was born at Haarlem, Holland, about 1370 A.D. He was a member of the Haarlem Council, assessor and treasurer. He probably perished in the plague that visited Haarlem in 1439-40. Gutenberg was born of noble parents at Mainz, Germany, in 1410. He had an active mind and gave attention to the manufacture of money, the polishing of stones, and the making of looking-glasses, besides his efforts in printing. He died in February, 1468, poor, childless, and almost friendless.

The first printed book, so far as can be determined, was made at Mainz, Germany, and bears the date of 1454 A.D. From certain legal records it is supposed that Gutenberg was the maker of this book and the inventor of printing. On the other hand, there is a story that Coster, while walking in the woods one autumn afternoon, chanced to make for his little grandchild some letters from the bark of a tree; that these letters suggested to him the idea of metallic types; and that he, and not Gutenberg, was the inventor of printing. As the story goes, a slave stole Coster's types and ran away with them from Haarlem to Mainz; and the books which, it is supposed, were made at the latter place came really from Coster's types, not Gutenberg's. The fact cannot be known. It has hopelessly gone with the years.

This first book, which was printed in two different editions, consisted of certain letters written by Pope Nicholas V in behalf of the kingdom of Cyprus. By about 1477 A.D. printing had extended from Mainz to all the chief towns of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and England. By the beginning of the sixteenth century it had spread to all the principal places of Europe.

In the type of the early books the various letter forms were not fixed as they are in modern books, but the type for each book was made as much as possible like the writing of the original manuscript. As printers moved from place to place introducing their art, it seems that not one carried away the types of his master but each made his own anew. Type was originally made and set up by hand, piece by piece, so that even the production of printed books was very slow. Various mechanical devices have been invented from time to time, quickening and cheapening the making of books and other printed matter, so that to-day printers turn out books and papers in large quantities in an amazingly short time.

The Printing Press in Boston at Which Franklin Worked

The first newspaper in the world is believed to have been the Frankfurter Journal, published about 1615 A.D. at Frankfort-on-the-Main, in Germany. But of this there is no certainty. Newspapers, however, had their beginnings in Germany and Italy some time in the latter part of the sixteenth or the first part of the seventeenth century. It is believed that the Weekly News, started in London in 1622, was the first newspaper published in England. In the United States there was a printing press attached to Harvard College, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, as early as 1638, two years after the college was founded, and only six years after the settlement of Boston. With this one exception, for a long time there were no printing presses in the colonies. A newspaper called Publick Occurrences was started in Boston in 1690, but it was soon afterward suppressed by the British government. The first permanent newspaper in America was the Boston News Letter, established at Boston in 1704.

One of the greatest wonders and triumphs of civilization is the great modern daily newspaper. It occupies a giant "sky-scraper" as its home, employs a small army of workmen, spends vast sums of money in obtaining and printing the news, and is sold for a cent per copy. The head of a newspaper staff is the editor-in-chief. He is in a general way responsible to the publishers for the paper. Next in command is the managing editor who has charge of the actual work of publication. Subordinate to the managing editor are other editors who have control over various departments of the paper. The telegraph editor looks after news sent by telegraph; the city editor has charge of happenings in the city of publication; the exchange editor clips items from other papers; the religious editor attends to affairs of religion; the sporting editor collects and arranges news of sports and games; the commercial editor works with the markets and matters of commerce and business; the society editor gives attention to social functions; and the dramatic editor takes note of the theaters. The city editor commands a company of perhaps half a hundred reporters, who are sent scurrying daily throughout the city to bring in the news from its various sources. One goes to the ball game, another to a funeral, another to the courts, another to a hotel to interview some prominent person, and still another goes to a political convention. There are also photographers, illustrators, and editorial writers.

At the close of the day, special correspondents and representatives of press associations in every nook and corner of the earth send the world's news for the day by telegraph and ocean cable direct into the newspaper office. A king has died; a battle has been fought; storm, earthquake, or fire has destroyed a city; or there has been some achievement in science or art. The local reporters have brought in the news of the city. After all has been quickly written, examined, and edited, the reports are sent to the composing room to be put into type.

The foreman of the composing room distributes the manuscript, called copy, among skilled operators, who by means of type-setting machines put it into type. Impressions are then made from this type on strips of paper. These impressions are called proofs. Proof readers compare these proofs with the original copy for the purpose of correcting errors. After the correction of errors the columns of type, called galleys, are locked up in a form which is the size of a page. The form is next sent to the stereotyping room, where an exact reproduction is made in metal. The metal plates are put in place on the presses. The machinery is started. Tons of white paper are fed into the presses at one end. Out at another in an instant comes the finished newspaper, printed, cut, and folded. These papers are counted and delivered automatically to the mailing room, at the rate of about 100,000 copies in an hour, for the improved, modern press. After their arrival at the mailing room, papers that are for out-of-town subscribers are wrapped in packages, addressed, and carried in express wagons to fast mail trains, which carry this record of what man did the previous day to readers hundreds of miles away.

This afternoon at five o'clock a prominent man dies suddenly in San Francisco. To-night at midnight the newspapers of St. Louis, Chicago, and New York will come from the press with his picture and a long sketch of his life. How is this possible in so short a time? The papers have on file, arranged in alphabetical order, photographs of prominent persons and places and biographical sketches of great men, kept up to date. Whenever any noted person, place, or thing is made conspicuous by any event, the picture and sketch are taken from the files and used.

It is the electric telegraph that makes possible the modern daily newspaper. Before its invention, papers resorted to various devices for transmitting news. For some years messengers riding ponies brought news from Washington to the New York papers. These papers also utilized small, swift-sailing vessels to meet incoming ships bearing news from foreign countries.

A recent bulletin on printing and publishing issued by the Census Bureau of the United States government showed that there were in the United States 21,394 newspapers and periodicals, printed in twenty-seven different languages. Of these, 2,452 were daily; 15,046 weekly; 2,500 monthly; 353 quarterly; 58 tri-weekly; 645 semi-weekly; and 340 of all other kinds. 20,184 of these papers were English; 619 German; 158 Scandinavian; 58 Italian; 41 French; 44 Bohemian; 31 Spanish; 18 Hebrew; 21 Dutch; 7 Chinese; 9 Japanese; 5 Greek; 46 Polish; 5 Hungarian; 3 Arabic; and two each in the Welsh, Syrian and Gaelic languages. The capital invested in printing and publishing in the United States was a little more than $385,000,000. It would take one person twelve hours a day every day for six thousand years, or from the beginnings of Egyptian and Babylonian civilization to the dawn of the twentieth century, to read at an average rate all the papers published in the United States during a single year.

CHAPTER III

THE STEAM ENGINE

THE SONG OF STEAM

By George Washington Cutter

Harness me down with your iron bands;

Be sure of your curb and rein;

For I scorn the power of your puny hands,

As the tempest scorns a chain.

How I laughed as I lay concealed from sight

For many a countless hour,

At the childish boast of human might,

And the pride of human power.

When I saw an army upon the land,

A navy upon the seas,

Creeping along, a snail-like band,

Or waiting the wayward breeze;

When I marked the peasant faintly reel

With the toil which he daily bore,

As he feebly turned the tardy wheel,

Or tugged at the weary oar;

When I measured the panting courser's speed,

The flight of the courier dove,

As they bore the law a king decreed,

Or the lines of impatient love,—

I could not but think how the world would feel,

As these were outstripped afar,

When I should be bound to the rushing keel,

Or chained to the flying car;

Ha, ha! they found me out at last;

They invited me forth at length;

And I rushed to my throne with a thunder-blast,

And I laughed in my iron strength.

Oh, then ye saw a wondrous change

On the earth and the ocean wide,

Where now my fiery armies range,

Nor wait for wind and tide.

Hurrah! hurrah! the waters o'er;

The mountain's steep decline;

Time—space—have yielded to my power;

The world—the world is mine!

The rivers the sun hath earliest blest,

Or those where his beams decline;

The giant streams of the queenly West,

And the Orient floods divine.

The ocean pales where'er I sweep,

I in my strength rejoice;

And the monsters of the briny deep

Cower, trembling, at my voice.

I carry the wealth and the lord of earth,

The thoughts of his god-like mind;

The wind lags after my going forth,

The lightning is left behind.

In the darksome depths of the fathomless mine

My tireless arm doth play,

Where the rocks never saw the sun decline,

Or the dawn of the glorious day.

I bring earth's glittering jewels up

From the hidden caves below,

And I make the fountain's granite cup

With a crystal gush o'erflow.

I blow the bellows, I forge the steel,

In all the shops of trade;

I hammer the ore, and turn the wheel,

Where my arms of strength are made;

I manage the furnace, the mill, the mint;

I carry, I spin, I weave;

And all my doings I put into print

On every Saturday eve.

I've no muscle to weary, no breast to decay,

No bones to be "laid on the shelf,"

And soon I intend you may "go and play,"

While I manage this world myself.

But harness me down with your iron bands,

Be sure of your curb and rein;

For I scorn the power of your puny hands,

As the tempest scorns a chain!

The most powerful and important mass of matter on the earth is the steam engine. It is the throbbing heart of civilization, even as the printing press is its brain. It would be difficult for man to compute his debt to steam. Upon it he relies for food, clothing, and shelter, the three necessities for which the race has always striven; and without it he could have scarcely any of life's comforts and luxuries. Steam is the mistress of commerce, manufacturing, and mining, and the servant of agriculture. Steam gives employment to millions of men. It plants cities and towns in waste places. It enables man to leave the little valley or hillside where his fathers lived, and makes of him a citizen of the world. It lessens the power of time and space, and makes neighbors of ocean-divided continents.

It would not be easy for men living in the twentieth century to imagine a society uninfluenced by the use of steam; but nearly all of man's life on the earth has been passed without its help. Fire and water, the two productive factors of steam, have always existed; but it was not until a few score of years ago that man learned to put them together successfully, and to produce the greatest force known to civilization. In the few years since its discovery it has spread to every nook and corner of civilization. Suppose you could ascend to some great height whence you could see working at one time all the steam driven machinery in the world. What a sight it would be! What if the noise from all this machinery—the screech of the speeding locomotive, the hum and roar of factory and mill, the hoarse yell of ships, and the puffing of mine-engines—should reach your ear at once? What a sound it would be!

The idea of using steam for driving stationary machinery originated in the early centuries. This was the first use to which steam was put. For a long time no one seems to have thought of using it for transportation purposes. As far back as 130 B.C., we find mention of "heat engines," which employed steam as their motive power, and were used for organ blowing, the turning of spits, and like purposes. But from this early date till the seventeenth century practically no progress was made in the use of steam. Though men had experimented with steam up to this time with more or less success, the world is chiefly indebted for the developed type of the steam engine to James Watt and George Stephenson.

Watt was born in Greenock, Scotland, January 19, 1736. He was a poor boy and early in life he was thrown upon his own resources. During his youth he struggled against ill health; for days at a time he was prostrated with severe headaches. But he was bright, determined, and had a genial disposition that made him many friends. When he was twenty-one years old, he secured a position as maker of scientific instruments for the university in Glasgow. He began discussing with some scientific friends at the university the possibility of improving the steam engine, which at that time was used only for pumping water, chiefly in the drainage of mines. He entered upon a scientific study of the properties of steam and tried to devise means for making the steam engine more useful. One Sunday afternoon early in 1765, while walking in Glasgow, the idea he had studied so long to evolve suddenly flashed into his mind. Without delay Watt put his plan to the test and found that it worked.

For a long time, owing to a lack of money, he had difficulty in establishing the merits of his improvements. Finally he formed a partnership with Matthew Boulton, a wealthy and energetic man who lived at Birmingham, England. They began the manufacture of steam engines at Birmingham, under the firm name of Boulton and Watt. This partnership was very successful. Watt supplied the inventions; Boulton furnished the money and attended to the business.

Before the time of Watt, the steam engine was exclusively a steam pump—slow, cumbrous, wasteful of fuel, and very little used. Watt made it a quick, powerful, and efficient engine, requiring only a fourth as much fuel as before. Under his first patent the engine was still used only as a steam pump; but his later improvements adapted it for driving stationary machinery of all kinds and, save in a few respects, left it essentially what it is to-day. Prior to Watt's inventions, the mines of Great Britain were far from thriving. Many were even on the point of being abandoned, through the difficulty of removing the large quantities of water that collected in them. His improvements made it possible to remove this water at a moderate cost, and this gave many of the mines a new lease of life. The commercial success of his engine was soon fully established.

Watt paid practically no attention to the use of steam for purposes of transportation. In one of his patents he described a steam locomotive; but he offered little encouragement when his chief assistant, Murdoch, who was the inventor of gas lighting, made experiments with steam for locomotion. The notion then was to use a steam carriage on ordinary roads. Railroads had not been thought of. When the idea of using steam on railways began to take shape in the later days of Watt, he refused to encourage the plan. It is said that he even put a clause in a lease of his house, providing that no steam carriage should ever approach it under any pretext whatever.

Besides developing the steam engine, Watt made other inventions, including a press for copying letters. He also probably discovered the chemical composition of water. He died at Heathfield, England, on the nineteenth of August, 1819.

It is denied many men to see the magnitude of their achievements. Moses died on Pisgah, in sight of the "Promised Land," toward which for forty years he had led the children of Israel through the wilderness. Wolfe gave up his life on the plains of Quebec just as the first shouts of the routed French greeted his ears. Columbus was sent home in chains from the America he had discovered, not dreaming he had given to civilization another world. Lincoln's eyes were closed forever at the very dawn of peace, after he had watched in patience through the long and fearful night of the Civil War. It never appeared to James Watt that the idea which flashed into his mind that Sunday afternoon while he was walking in the streets of Glasgow, would transform human life; that like a mighty multiplier it would increase the product of man's power and give him dominion, not over the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, but over tide and wind, space and time.

Victor Hugo calls locomotives "these giant draft horses of civilization." But man never harnessed these wonderful iron animals until the time of George Stephenson, less than a hundred years ago.

Stephenson was born at Wylam, near Newcastle, England, June 9, 1781. His father was a fireman of a coal-mine engine at that place. In boyhood George was a cowherd, but he spent his spare time making clay models of engines and other objects of a mechanical nature. When he was fourteen years old, he became assistant to his father in firing the engine at the colliery, and three years later he was advanced to engine driving. At this time he could not even read; but, stimulated by a strong desire to know more of the engines made by Boulton and Watt, he began in his eighteenth year to attend a night school. He learned rapidly. During most of this time he studied various experiments with a view to making a successful steam locomotive.

Modern railways had their origin in roads called tramways, which were used for hauling coal from the mines of England to the sea. At first ordinary dirt roads were used for this purpose; but as the heavy traffic wore these roads away, it become the practice to place planks or timbers at the bottoms of the ruts. Afterwards wooden rails were laid straight and parallel on the level surface. The rails were oak scantlings held together with cross timbers of the same material, fastened by means of large oak pins. Later strips of iron were nailed on the tops of the wooden rails. Over these rails, bulky, four-wheeled carts loaded with coal were pulled by horses.

Stephenson made what he called a traveling engine for the tramways leading from the mines where he worked to the sea, nine miles distant. He named his engine "My Lord." On July 25, 1814, he made a successful trial trip with it.

The successful use of steam in hauling coal from the mines led thoughtful persons to consider its use for carrying merchandise and passengers. At this time freight was transported inland by means of canals. This method was slow; thirty-six hours were required for traveling fifty miles. Passengers were conveyed by coaches drawn by horses. In 1821 a railroad for the transportation of merchandise and passengers was opened between Stockton and Darlington in England. The line, including three branches, was thirty-eight miles long. The plan was to use animal power on this road, but George Stephenson secured permission to try on it his steam locomotive.

In September, 1825, the first train passed over the road. It consisted of thirty-four cars weighing, all told, ninety tons. The train was pulled by Stephenson's engine, operated by Stephenson himself, with a signalman riding on horseback in advance. The train moved off at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, and on certain parts of the road it reached a speed of fifteen miles per hour. The trial was a complete success.

The road had been built chiefly for the transportation of freight, but from the first passengers insisted on being carried, and in October, 1825, the Company began to run a daily passenger coach called the "Experiment." This coach carried six persons inside and from fifteen to twenty outside. The round trip between Stockton and Darlington was made in two hours. A fare of one shilling was charged, and each passenger was allowed fourteen pounds of baggage free. The Stockton and Darlington was the first railway in the world over which passengers and freight were hauled by steam.

Stephenson was next employed to help construct a railway between Liverpool and Manchester. The most eminent engineers of the day predicted that the road could not be built. But it was built. On the fifteenth of September, 1830, Stephenson made a trial trip over the road with an improved locomotive named the "Rocket." On the trial trip the "Rocket" made twenty-nine miles an hour. This trip firmly proved the possibilities of steam as motive power on railways and started the modern era of railroad building. Other railways were quickly built and soon they radiated from London to nearly every English seaport.

An Early Railroad Train in England

Stephenson's son, Robert, assisted him in the construction of the "Rocket" and later attained considerable reputation as an engineer.

It is claimed that George Stephenson was the inventor of the safety lamp for use in mines, an invention usually accredited to Sir Humphry Davy. He was often consulted in the building of subsequent railroads, but he spent the last years of his life in farming and gardening at his home at Chesterfield, England, where he died August 12, 1848.

Before the days of railroads in America, freight was hauled on canals and passengers rode in stage coaches or on horseback. A coach made the trip from Boston to New York twice a week and the journey required six days. A trip from New York to Philadelphia took two days. From Philadelphia to Baltimore the roads were good, but south of Baltimore they were bad and even dangerous. South of the James River the traveler was compelled to make his journey on horseback. A coach from Charleston to Savannah was the only public conveyance south of the Potomac River.

In the days of the old colonial stagecoach, if a traveler wished to go from Boston to New York, he would have to be ready to begin the journey at three o'clock in the morning. The stage had no glass windows, no door or step, and passengers were obliged to climb in at the front. One pair of horses pulled the stage eighteen miles, and then they were relieved by another pair. At about ten o'clock in the evening, after a day's journey of forty miles, the stage drew up at an inn for the night. At three o'clock the next morning, after dressing by the light of a horn lantern, the traveler must resume his journey. If the roads were bad, he might have to alight from the stage and help the driver pull the wheels out of the mud. Rivers were crossed on clumsy flat-boats. When the streams were swollen with rains or filled with floating ice, the passage across was often dangerous. The trip from Boston to Philadelphia, which would have taken eight days of Washington's time, can easily be made now by train in as many hours. In these days of the modern railroad, San Francisco is nearer in time to New York than Washington was scarcely a hundred years ago.

The first railway in America was built in 1826. It connected a granite quarry at Quincy, Massachusetts, with the town of Milton in the same state. It was only two or three miles long, and was operated with horses. In May, 1829, three English locomotives—the first ever seen in America—were unloaded at New York City. On August 9 of the same year, one of these engines was tried at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. This was the first time that a locomotive ever turned a wheel on a railway in America.

A canal which the business men of Philadelphia proposed to construct from their city to Pittsburg, in order to give them access to the trade centers of the West, threatened the commercial prosperity of Baltimore. To offset the advantages which this canal would give Philadelphia, at a great public meeting in Baltimore it was decided to build a railway from Baltimore to some point on the Ohio River. The road was named the Baltimore and Ohio. In 1830 it was finished from Baltimore as far as Ellicott's Mills, a distance of fifteen miles. The Baltimore and Ohio was the first railroad in the United States built for the express purpose of carrying passengers and freight. The original intention was to pull cars over this road with horses. But Peter Cooper persuaded the railroad officials to try his engine "Tom Thumb," which he had built in 1829. The trial was successful, for "Tom Thumb" drew a car-load of passengers at the rate of fifteen to eighteen miles per hour. This engine was the first locomotive built in America, and its trial was the first trip ever made by an American locomotive.

The first railroad in the United States constructed with the original purpose of using steam as motive power was the South Carolina railroad, a line one hundred thirty-six miles long between Charleston and Hamburg. A locomotive built in New York City, called the "Best Friend," made its first trip over this road in November, 1830. It was the first locomotive to run regularly on a railroad in the United States.

Railroad building spread rapidly in America, as it had in England. By 1835 there were twenty-two railroads in the United States, two of them being west of the Alleghenies, though no road was more than one hundred forty miles in length. There was no railroad west of the Mississippi River prior to 1853, and in that year a line only thirty-eight miles long was built. During 1906 alone, 5516 miles of railroad were constructed in the United States. At the end of that year, there was a total in the United States of 222,635 miles, or nearly enough to reach nine times around the entire globe. The United States now has thirty per cent. more miles of railway main track than all of Europe, and contains two fifths of the railroad mileage of the world. The railroads of the United States represent a value of about fifteen billion dollars, and give employment to a million and a half persons.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was originally owned by the state. Any one could use it by paying certain charges, and each person operating the road furnished his own cars, horses, and drivers. There were frequent blockades; when two cars going in opposite directions met, one had to turn back. If rival shippers came together and neither was willing to yield to the other, a fight probably settled the rights of precedence. After a time steam became the sole motive power, and the locomotives were owned by the state.

The railroad journeys of our grandfathers were very different from our own. In their day the rails were wooden beams or stringers laid on horizontal blocks of stone. Strips of iron were fastened with spikes to the tops of the wooden rails. The cars were small, each seating only a few passengers. The locomotive was crude. Its greatest speed was about fifteen miles an hour. It could not climb a hill, and when a grade was reached, the cars had to be pulled up or let down with ropes managed by a stationary engine. No cab sheltered the engineer; no brake checked the speed. Sometimes the spikes fastening the iron strips to the tops of the wooden rails worked loose, and these strips curled up and penetrated the bottoms of the cars, greatly to the annoyance and fright of the traveler. The bridges in those days were roofed. The smokestack of the locomotive, being too tall to pass under the roof, was made in two joints or sections fastened together with hinges. When the train approached a bridge, the top section of the stack was lowered. As wood only was used for fuel, the stack emitted a shower of sparks, smoke, and hot cinders. The passengers coughed and sputtered, and covered their eyes, mouths, and noses with handkerchiefs.

The trip from Chicago to New York is about a thousand miles, over prairie, river, and mountain. Should you make the journey between these cities over the Pennsylvania Railroad of to-day, there would be little danger of conflict because two rival trains might want the track at the same time. Nor would you have to wait while ropes pulled the train up a grade, for the locomotive can climb the hills. Instead of the old wooden rails with their strips of iron, there is a double track of solid steel rails all the way. The landscape would fly past you at the rate of a mile a minute, instead of fifteen miles an hour.

Let us suppose that you leave Chicago at 2.45 o'clock P.M., central time. Before the train starts you could telephone to a friend without leaving the car. You might sit down, in an elegant dining-car, to a dinner of all the delicacies the market could afford. You might occupy your own exclusive compartment in a luxuriously equipped Pullman car, lit by electric bulbs, or you could spend the evening reading the magazines, newspapers, and books provided in the train library. You might write at a comfortable desk with train stationery, or dictate letters and telegrams to the train stenographer. You are provided with hot and cold water, bathing facilities, and a barber shop. A maid could be summoned to the service of women and children; and a valet would be in attendance to sponge and press clothing over night. You would arrive in New York the next morning at 9.45 o'clock, having traveled the thousand miles in eighteen hours.

Simple as the idea of the sleeping-car is in reality, it was not introduced until 1858, when the Lake Shore Railroad ran the first crude and uncomfortable night-cars. George M. Pullman in 1859 set for himself the task of producing a palace car which should be used for continuous and comfortable travel through long distances by day and night. He remodelled into sleeping-cars two passenger coaches belonging to the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Though these cars fell far below the inventor's ideal, they were far in advance of the first make-shifts and in consequence created a demand for more and better cars of the same kind. In 1863, at his factory in Chicago, Pullman began the construction of the "Pioneer," the first of the Pullman palace cars. This car was built at a cost of $18,000. It was first used in the funeral train which conveyed the body of President Lincoln to his burial place in Springfield, Illinois.

Few inventions have been financially so remunerative to the inventors as the Pullman palace car. It brought Mr. Pullman an immense fortune. The Pullman Palace Car Company, founded by Pullman in 1867, is one of the largest and most successful manufacturing concerns in America. It employs a capital of $40,000,000, gives work to fourteen thousand persons, furnishes sleeping-car service for 120,000 miles of railway, and operates over 2,000 cars. Mr. Pullman adopted plans for the vestibule car in 1887. He died at his home in Chicago, October 19, 1897.

The idea of the steamboat did not originate in the brain of Robert Fulton. It is claimed that, as early as 1543, Blasco de Garay propelled a boat by steam, and that in 1707, just a hundred years before the time of Fulton's Clermont, Papin ran a boat with steam on a river in Germany. In 1763 William Henry experimented with a steamboat on the Conistoga River in Pennsylvania.

James Rumsey, a Scotchman living in Maryland, is said to have been the first American to discover a method for running a vessel with steam against wind and tide. He conceived the idea in August, 1783. During 1785 he made his boat, and in 1786 he navigated it on the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, Virginia, in the presence of hundreds of spectators. He wrote to General Washington of his invention, and Washington wrote concerning it to Governor Johnson of Maryland. In 1839 Congress voted a gold medal to James Rumsey, Jr., son and only surviving child of the inventor, in recognition of the elder Rumsey's achievement.

In 1787 John Fitch exhibited on the Delaware River a vessel to be propelled by steam, and in 1790, from June to September, he ran a steamboat on that river between Philadelphia and Trenton. But he could not induce the public to patronize his boat, and for lack of business it had to be withdrawn.

Some British authorities claim that the first practical steamboat in the world was the tug "Charlotte Dundas," built by William Symmington, and tried in 1802 on the Clyde and Forth Canal in Scotland. The trial was successful, but steam towing was abandoned for fear of injuring the banks of the canal. Symmington had built a small steamboat that traveled five miles an hour in 1788.

Robert Fulton

To Robert Fulton, an American, belongs the credit for placing the steamboat on a successful commercial basis. Fulton was born at Little Britain, Pennsylvania, in 1765. At the age of seventeen he adopted the profession of portrait and landscape painter. At twenty-two he went to England to study art. There he met James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, and soon he began to give attention to mechanics. In 1793 he started to work on the idea of propelling boats by steam. He made an unsuccessful experiment with a steamboat on the Seine River in France. The vessel sank because its construction was faulty. Fulton returned to America and in New York harbor began to build another boat which he named the Katherine of Clermont, shortened to the Clermont. Her engine was procured from Boulton and Watt in England. The boat was one hundred feet long and twenty feet wide, weighed one hundred sixty tons, and was equipped with side paddle wheels and a sheet-iron boiler. As the inventor worked patiently at his task, the newspapers gave him but little notice and the public ridiculed him. The New York legislature had passed a bill granting to Fulton and to Chancellor Livingston the exclusive right to navigate with steam boats the waters of New York State. This bill was a standing subject of ridicule among the legislators at Albany.

In August, 1807, the Clermont was ready for her trial trip. A large crowd of spectators lined the banks of the Hudson as the boat slowly steamed out into the river. The crowd jeered and hooted and shouted at the vessel their nick-name of "Fulton's Folly." As the Clermont moved up the river, making slow headway against the current, the crowd changed their jeers to expressions of wonder and finally to cheers. The dry pine wood used for fuel sent out a cloud of thick, black smoke, flames, and sparks, which spread terror among the watermen of the harbor. The Clermont made the voyage from New York up the Hudson to Chancellor Livingston's country estate near Albany, a distance of a hundred ten miles, in twenty-four hours. The trip was without mishap and it thoroughly established the practicability of steam for purposes of navigation.

Concerning this voyage Fulton wrote to a friend in Paris: "My steamboat voyage to Albany and back has turned out rather more favorably than I had calculated. The voyage was performed wholly by power of the steam engine. I overtook many sloops and schooners beating to windward, and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved. The morning I left New York there were not thirty persons in the city who believed that the boat would ever move a mile an hour, or be of the least utility. While we were putting off from the wharf, I heard a number of sarcastic remarks. This is the way in which ignorant men compliment what they call philosophers and projectors. I feel infinite pleasure in reflecting on the immense advantages my country will derive from the invention."

The Clermont was soon running as a regular packet between New York and Albany. The owners of sailing craft on the river hated her and tried to sink her. The New York legislature passed a bill declaring that any attempt to destroy or injure the Clermont should be a public offense punishable by fine and imprisonment. Then the enemies of the boat applied to the courts for an injunction restraining Fulton from navigating the Hudson with his steamboat. Daniel Webster appeared as Fulton's attorney. He won the case and secured for the Clermont the full rights of the river.

Fulton afterward built other steamboats, including a system of steam ferries for New York City. In 1814 he constructed the first United States war steamer. Before constructing the Clermont, Fulton was interested in canals and in the invention of machinery for spinning flax and twisting rope. He also made experiments with sub-marine explosives in England, France, and the United States; but these were considered failures. He died February 24, 1815.

The Clermont on the Hudson

The first steamboat in the West was built at Pittsburg in 1811, and within a few years after the first trip of the Clermont, steamboats were being used on all the leading rivers of the country.

From the earliest times men had sailed the seas, but their ships were small and slow and subject to wind, tide, and current. The success of the river steamboat led to the use of steam in ocean navigation. The first steamship to cross the Atlantic was the Savannah, in 1818. The vessel relied almost as much upon wind as upon steam for motive power, but during the voyage of twenty-five days steam was used on eighteen days.

The wood required for fuel left little room in the vessel for freight. With the advent of coal for fuel, and better machinery, steamships grew in importance, and in 1837 two ships, the Sirius and the Great Western, crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York with the use of steam alone. By 1850 the average time for a trans-Atlantic voyage had been reduced to eleven or twelve days.

The Lusitania of the Cunard Line

If the old Savannah could be placed beside the Lusitania, the giantess of the Cunard line of ocean steamers, a comparison would demonstrate the triumphs of the century in ocean navigation. If you were to cross the ocean on the Lusitania or her sister-ship the Mauretania, you would enter a vast floating mansion seven hundred ninety feet long, eighty-eight feet wide, eighty-one feet high from keel to boat deck, and weighing thirty-two thousand five hundred tons. Her height to the mastheads is two hundred sixteen feet; each of her three anchors weighs ten tons; and her funnels are so large that a trolley car could easily run through them. The Lusitania has accommodation for three thousand passengers, officers, and crew, and is driven by mighty turbine engines of sixty-eight thousand horse power. The steamer was built at a cost of $7,500,000. She has traveled the three thousand miles across the Atlantic in about four and a half days—the quickest trans-Atlantic voyage ever made. She moves through the great waves of the ocean with such steadiness that passengers can scarcely tell whether they are on water or land. A telephone system connects all parts of the ship; there are electric elevators, a special nursery in which children may play; a gymnasium for exercise, shower baths, and an acre and a half of upper deck. There are five thousand electric lights, requiring two hundred miles of wire. Wireless telegraphy flashes messages to the moving ship from distant parts of the world, and bears back greetings from her passengers. A daily illustrated newspaper of thirty-two pages is published on board ship.

CHAPTER IV

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.

Alfred Vail set to work to construct the apparatus. A room in his father's factory was set apart for this purpose. William Baxter, a bright mechanic employed in the iron shops, was chosen to assist him. As secrecy was required for the work, the room was kept locked. For several months Vail and Baxter occupied together the locked room, sharing each other's confidence and each other's elation or disappointment as the work went well or ill. On January 6, 1838, Baxter, without hat or coat, rushed to the elder Vail's residence to announce that the apparatus was completed.

Mr. Vail had become discouraged. However, he went to see the trial of the apparatus. He found his son at one end of the three miles of wire that was stretched around the room, and Morse at the other. After a short explanation had been made to him, he wrote on a piece of paper, "A patient waiter is no loser." He then said to his son, "If you can send this, and Mr. Morse can read it at the other end, I shall be convinced." The message was sent and read at the other end of the wire. The apparatus was taken to Washington, where it created not only wonder but excitement.

Samuel F. B. Morse

In September, 1837, Morse filed an application for a patent on his invention. In December of the same year he failed in his effort to secure from Congress an appropriation for an experimental line which he proposed to build between Washington and Baltimore. In May, 1838, he went to Europe seeking aid. The governments there refused him funds or patents. In May, 1839, he returned to the United States and began an heroic struggle for recognition. During this period he often suffered for the barest necessities of life. Sometimes he could afford but a single meal in twenty-four hours.

Finally, after repeated disappointments, when Morse himself had almost given up hope, the House of Representatives of the Twenty-seventh Congress, on the last night of its session, March 3, 1843, by a vote of ninety to eighty-two, appropriated thirty thousand dollars for building a trial line between Washington and Baltimore. After the bill had passed the House, the outlook for its passage in the Senate was not bright. One Senator who was favorable to the bill advised Morse to "give it up, return home, and think no more of it." The bill had been made the object of opposition and ridicule; one prominent official, to show his contempt for the project, proposed that half the amount asked for should be used in mesmeric experiments. Morse, believing that the Senate would defeat the appropriation, went to his lodging place to retire for the night. He found that after paying the amount he owed at the hotel, he would have less than forty cents left. Early the next morning information reached him that a little before midnight the Senate had passed the bill. Apparent failure had turned into victory; the fight was won.

"Work was begun at once.[ [1] On April 30 the line reached Annapolis Junction, twenty-two miles from Washington, and was operated with satisfactory results.

"May 1, 1844, was the date upon which the Whig convention was to assemble in Baltimore, to nominate the candidates of that party for President and Vice-President. It was arranged between Morse and Vail that the latter should obtain from the passengers upon the afternoon train from Baltimore to Washington, when it stopped at Annapolis Junction, information of the proceedings of the convention and transmit it at once to Morse at the Capitol in Washington.

"The train arrived at half-past three o'clock, and from the passengers, among whom were many of the delegates to the convention, Mr. Vail ascertained that the convention had assembled, nominated the candidates, and adjourned. This information he at once dispatched to Morse, with whom was gathered a number of prominent men who had been invited to be present. Morse sat awaiting the prearranged signal from Vail, when suddenly there came from the instrument the understood clicking, and as the mechanism started, unwinding the ribbon of paper upon which came the embossed dots and dashes, the complete success of the telegraph over twenty-two miles of wire was established.

"Slowly came the message. When it had ended, Morse rose and said: 'Gentlemen, the convention has adjourned. The train bearing that information has just left Annapolis Junction for Washington, and Mr. Vail has telegraphed me the ticket nominated, and it is—' he hesitated, holding in his hand the final proof of victory over space, 'it is—it is Clay and Frelinghuysen.'

"'You are quizzing us,' was the quiet remark. 'It's easy enough for you to guess that Clay is at the head of the ticket, but Frelinghuysen—who is Frelinghuysen?'

"'I only know,' was the dignified answer, 'that it is the name Mr. Vail has sent to me from Annapolis Junction, where he had the news five minutes ago from the train bound this way bearing the delegates.'

"At that time the twenty-two miles from the Junction to Washington required an hour and a quarter for the fastest trains, and long before the train reached Washington the newsboys—enterprising even in those days—had their 'extras' upon the streets, their headings 'By Telegraph' telling the story, and being the first time that such a legend had ever appeared upon a printed sheet.

"A great and enthusiastic crowd greeted the delegates as they alighted from the train at the station. They were struck dumb with astonishment when they heard the people hurrahing for 'Clay and Frelinghuysen,' and saw in cold type before their very eyes the information which they supposed was exclusively their own, but which had preceded them 'by telegraph.' They had asked Mr. Vail at the Junction what he was doing when they saw him working the telegraph key, and when he told them, they joked about it most glibly, for no one had any belief in the success of the telegraph."

The First Message by Telegraph

By May 23 the entire line was completed from Washington to Baltimore. On the next day, May 24, 1844, Morse from Washington sent to Vail at Baltimore the first message ever sent over the completed wire, "What hath God wrought?"

This famous message was dictated by Miss Ellsworth, daughter of the commissioner of patents at that time. She had taken a keen interest in the success of the bill appropriating the thirty thousand dollars for the experiment, and was the first to convey to Morse the news that the bill had passed. Morse thereupon gave Miss Ellsworth his promise that the first message to pass over the line should be dictated by her. A bit of the original wire and the receiver that Vail used at Baltimore are now preserved in the National Museum in Washington. The transmitter used by Morse at the Washington end of the line has been lost.

Morse lived to see his system of telegraphy adopted by the United States, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, and Australia. Ninety-five per cent of all telegraphy is by his system. He finally received a large fortune from his invention. Unlike Columbus, Morse was honored in his lifetime for his achievement. Foreign nations bestowed upon him honors and medals, and in August, 1858, a convention of European powers called by Napoleon III at Paris gave Morse four hundred thousand francs (about $80,000) as a testimonial of his services to civilization. In October, 1842, he laid the first sub-marine telegraph line. It was across the harbor of New York. Later he assisted Peter Cooper and Cyrus W. Field in their efforts to lay the first Atlantic cable. Honored by all the civilized world, he died in New York City April 2, 1872. Thirteen years earlier Vail had died at his home in Morristown, New Jersey.

In the Morse system the alphabet is represented by combinations of dots and dashes. The dots denote short currents of electricity flowing through the wire; the dashes, longer ones. Credit for the alphabet really belongs to Vail; Morse had devised a somewhat complicated system, but Vail invented the dots and dashes. He discovered that e and t are the most frequently used letters. He denoted e by one dot, or one short current; t he indicated by one dash, or one long current. The other letters are denoted by dots and dashes, as a, one dot and one dash; b, one dash and three dots, etc.

In 1838 Steinheil, a German investigator, contributed an important element to the practical operation of the electric telegraph by discovering that the earth could take the place of the return wire, which up to that time had been deemed necessary to complete the circuit.

At first only one message could be sent over a wire at a time. Now several messages may be transmitted in opposite directions over the same wire at the same time.

Wireless telegraphy is based on the principle discovered and announced by the English scientist Michael Faraday, that heat, light, and electricity are transmitted by ether waves, and that these ether waves permeate all space. The first to demonstrate the practical operation of wireless telegraphy was Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian. In 1890 he undertook experiments to prove his theory that the electric current readily passes through any substance, and when once started in a given direction follows a direct course without the aid of a conductor. Marconi made the first practical demonstration of wireless telegraphy in 1896. In March, 1899, he sent a wireless message across the English channel from France to England. In December, 1901, be began his first experiments in wireless telegraphy across the Atlantic. In December of the following year the first official trans-Atlantic wireless message was sent. Now wireless telegraphic messages are sent regularly to and from moving ships in mid-ocean, and across the three thousand miles of the Atlantic between Europe and America.

One of the most striking illustrations of the power of perseverance is the successful struggle of Cyrus West Field in laying the Atlantic cable. Mr. Field was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, November 30, 1819. His schooling, which was slight, was secured in his native town. When he was fifteen years old, he secured a position in a business house in New York City at a salary of fifty dollars a year. He subsequently founded a prosperous business in the manufacture and sale of paper. In 1854 Mr. Field's attention was directed to an attempt to lay an electric cable at Newfoundland, which had failed for want of funds. The idea of laying a cable across the Atlantic occurred to him. He laid his plans before a number of prominent citizens of New York. On four successive evenings they met at his home to study the project, and they finally decided to undertake it. On May 6, 1854, a company was organized to lay the cable, with Peter Cooper as president.

The next twelve years Field devoted exclusively to the cable. He went to England thirty times. The first cable was brought from England and was to be laid across the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Forty miles had been successfully laid, when a storm arose and the cable was cut in order to save the ship. Then came a year's delay. Meantime the bottom of the sea was being explored and a vast tableland was discovered stretching from Newfoundland to Ireland. Field went to England, where he had little difficulty in organizing a company, and work was then begun on the construction of a new cable. Next he laid his enterprise before Congress, and asked for money. An appropriation bill was finally passed in the Senate by a majority of one, and was signed by President Pierce on March 3, 1857, the day before he retired from office. Field returned to England to superintend the construction of the cable and to make preparations for laying it. At last it was ready, tested, and coiled on the ship. On August 11, 1857, the sixth day out, after three hundred and thirty-five miles had been laid, the cable parted.

Lord Clarendon, in an interview with Field, had remarked: "But, suppose you don't succeed? Suppose you make the attempt and fail—your cable is lost in the sea—then what will you do?" The reply came promptly, "Charge it to profit and loss, and go to work to lay another." Lord Clarendon was so well pleased with the reply that he pledged his aid. The loss of three hundred and thirty-five miles of cable was the loss of half a million dollars. Field came back to America and secured from the Secretary of the Navy the vessels needed for another trial. On June 10, 1858, the United States steam frigate Niagara, then the largest in the world, and the British ship Agamemnon set out from opposite shores, bound for mid-ocean. The vessels met, and the two sections of the cable were spliced; then they began laying it toward both shores at the same time. After a little more than a hundred miles had been laid, this cable parted in mid-ocean, and Field hurried to London to meet the discouraged directors.

On July 17, the ships set sail again for mid-ocean. The cable was spliced in fifteen hundred fathoms of water and again the ships started for opposite shores. Field was on the Niagara headed toward Newfoundland. Scarcely any one looked for success. Field was the only man who kept up courage through this trying period. On August 5, 1858, he telegraphed the safe arrival of the ship at Newfoundland. The shore ends of the cable were laid and on August 16 a message from Queen Victoria of England to President Buchanan flashed under the sea. There was great excitement everywhere. The two worlds had been tied together with a strange electric nerve.

Cyrus W. Field

On the evening of the first of September a great ovation was tendered Field in New York. National salutes were fired; processions were formed; there was an address by the mayor, and late at night a great banquet. While the banquet was in progress, the cable parted.

Everyone except Field was disheartened. He went to work again, and during the next five years, the long years of the Civil War, he labored unceasingly. A larger cable with a greater resisting force was made. On the twenty-third of July, 1865, the steamship Great Eastern began another attempt to lay the cable. When it was within six hundred miles of Newfoundland, the cable parted again. For nine days attempts were made, in two and a half miles of water, to grapple the cable, splice it, and continue the work of laying it. Three times the cable was grappled, but the apparatus on the ship was not strong enough to hoist it aboard. Still Field never faltered. Another British company was formed and another cable was constructed. The Great Eastern was again loaded and on July 13, a Friday, set sail westward laying the cable. After an uncertain voyage of two weeks the Great Eastern arrived at Newfoundland, and the undertaking had again been successfully accomplished. Field telegraphed his arrival as follows: "Hearts Content, July 27, 1866. We arrived here at nine o'clock this morning. All well. Thank God, the cable is laid, and is in perfect working order. Cyrus W. Field."

Twelve years of unfaltering perseverance had won. Honors were heaped upon Field. Congress voted him a gold medal and the thanks of the nation. The prime minister of Great Britain declared that only the fact of his being the citizen of another nation prevented his receiving the highest honors in the power of the British government to bestow. The Paris "Exposition Universelle" of 1867 honored him with the Grand Medal, the highest prize it had to give.

Mr. Field was afterward interested in the laying of cables connecting Europe, India, China, Australia, the West Indies, and South America. In 1880-81 he made a trip around the world, full of satisfaction in his own part in making a new era of the world's civilization. He died at his home in New York on July 11, 1892.

The effect of the electric telegraph on government, intelligence, and civilization in general can scarcely be overstated. Sydney Smith, writing to Earl Grey after the admission of California into the United States, said that this marked an end to the great American republic; for how could people with such diversified interests, with such natural barriers, hold together? He did not foresee how strongly a fine copper wire could bind together the two seaboards and the great plains of the interior. Without the electric telegraph, neither the great daily newspaper nor the modern operation of railroads would be possible. It wipes away the natural boundaries of nations and makes neighbors of all men.

In 1819 Sir Charles Wheatsone, an English physicist, invented an instrument popularly known as the "magic lyre," but which he called the telephone. The first part of this word is the same Greek adverb tele that is found in telegraph. The phone is from another Greek word meaning "to sound." To telephone, therefore, means "to sound afar." The use of the English word telephone by Wheatsone is historically the first appearance of the word in our language. His device did nothing but reproduce music by means of sounding boards. The inventor of the modern telephone is Alexander Graham Bell.

Mr. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847. His father was Alexander Melville Bell, a Scotch educator, inventor of a system of visible speech, and author of some text-books on elocution. His grandfather was Alexander Bell, noted for his efforts to remove impediments of speech. Alexander Graham Bell was therefore well fitted by heredity for the invention of an instrument to transmit speech. He was educated in the Edinburgh high school and in the University of Edinburgh, and in 1867 he entered the University of London. Hard study broke down his health and he moved to Canada. Thence he moved to the United States, becoming first a teacher of deaf mutes, and afterward professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. In 1874, at the suggestion of the Boston Board of Education, he began some experiments to show to the eye the vibrations of sound, for the use of the deaf and dumb. The results of these experiments convinced Bell that articulate speech could be transmitted through space. Early in 1876 he completed the first telephone. The same year he exhibited it at the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, where it was pronounced the "wonder of wonders."

He filed application for a patent on his invention at the Patent Office in Washington, February 14, 1876. It is a singular fact that another application for a patent on the telephone was received at the Patent Office a few hours later on the same day from Elisha Gray, an electrical inventor of Chicago. The patent was issued to Bell, not because his invention was superior in merit to Gray's, but on the ground that his application was received first. This is a case where "the early bird catches the worm," for the profits arising from the patent have made Mr. Bell very wealthy, and high honors have come to him as the inventor of one of the world's greatest and most marvelous inventions.

The Bell Telephone Company was organized in 1877, and in 1878 the first telephone exchanges were constructed. By the following year the telephone was firmly established as a social and commercial necessity. It has grown with great rapidity. It is now found in every city of the world; hotels, large buildings, and ships have their private exchanges, and it has found its way recently into thousands of farmhouses.

Bell had to fight hard in the courts to sustain his patent. Suit after suit was brought by rival claimants, attacking his right to the patent. The litigation was bitter and protracted. One of the most noteworthy of these suits was brought by a Pennsylvania mechanic named Drawbaugh. He claimed that about 1872 he had made a working telephone out of a cigar box, a glass tumbler, a tin can, and some other crude materials; and that with the apparatus thus constructed he had talked over a wire several hundred feet long. Many persons testified that they were acquainted with Drawbaugh's apparatus, some of them having used it. Some instruments, said to be the original ones which Drawbaugh had constructed, were brought into court and exhibited. It was shown that speech could be transmitted with them in a crude way. Drawbaugh claimed that he was too poor at the time of making the apparatus to take out the necessary patent. The Court decided in favor of Bell. Elisha Gray, whose application for a patent had been received the same day that Bell's was, also brought suit against Bell. Before making his application, Gray had filed some preliminary papers looking forward to a patent on the telephone. In his suit against Bell he charged that the patent examiner had fraudulently and secretly conveyed to Bell the contents of those papers. But Bell won this suit, and he finally established over all rivals his legal title as the inventor of the telephone.

Recently a wireless system of telephoning has been in process of development, and it will not be strange if, within a few years, we shall be talking through space without wires, so boundless seem the possibilities of the age.

[1] From an account by Stephen Vail used in Graded Literature Readers, by permission of Truth.

CHAPTER V

ELECTRICITY: LIGHTING, TRANSPORTATION, AND OTHER USES

Man must have discovered artificial light as soon as he discovered fire, for the two exist together. The first light was probably produced by burning sticks or pieces of wood. In his search for more light, man learned how to make the tallow candle. Lights made in one form or other from the fats of animals persisted almost to the threshold of the present. The next step forward was to the use of oil; and the next, to the use of gas.

The first practical use of gas for purposes of illumination was in 1792. In that year William Murdoch, an English engineer, produced gas artificially from coal, and with it lighted his house in Cornwall, a county of England. Nine years afterward a Frenchman named Lebon illuminated his house and garden in Paris with gas produced from wood. Street lighting by gas was introduced in 1807 by an Englishman named F. A. Winzer or Windsor, in Pall Mall, one of the fine streets of London. The first gas lights in America were installed in 1806 by David Melville, of Newport, Rhode Island, in his residence and in the streets adjacent. Baltimore was the first city in the United States to adopt gas lighting for its streets. This was in 1817.

When gas was first used, there was much opposition to it, as there usually has been to improvements in general. The citizens of Philadelphia protested for more than twenty years against the introduction of gas into that city for purposes of illumination. Some of the newspapers of the time called gas a "folly and a nuisance"; and one of the professors in the University of Pennsylvania declared that even if gas were the good thing its supporters were declaring it to be, tallow candles and oil lamps were good enough for him. But gas triumphed, and to-day the world could scarcely do without it, either for illumination or for fuel.

The electric light had its beginning about 1800 in the experiments of Sir Humphry Davy, a British investigator. He discovered that if two pieces of carbon are brought into contact, completing a circuit through which an electric current flows, and if the carbon points are separated by a short distance, the points will become intensely hot and emit a brilliant light. The word arc, used in connection with the arc lamp or light, refers to the gap or arc between the two carbon points, across which the electric current leaps in creating the light.

Following Sir Humphry Davy's experiments, several arc lights were invented, with greater or less degree of success, and about 1860 electricity was tried successfully for lighting in some lighthouses along the British coast. The widespread usage and the usefulness of the arc electric light, however, are due to Charles Francis Brush, an electrical inventor of Cleveland, Ohio, who in 1876 simplified the arc light so as to bring it into general use for lighting streets, large rooms, halls, and outdoor spaces. Brush was also the inventor of an electric-dynamo machine that has added to his fame. After the invention of the arc light, he took out more than fifty other patents. The incandescent electric light, for lighting residences and small rooms, came a little later as the invention of Edison.

Thomas Alva Edison is one of the most remarkable men of all times and places. Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon together did not benefit mankind as has this quiet American inventor. He was born at Milan, Ohio, February 11, 1847. His father was of Dutch descent and his mother was Scotch. The mother, who had been a teacher, gave him all the schooling he received. Early in life he showed great mental vigor and ingenuity. When he was twelve years old, he is said to have read the histories of Hume and Gibbon.

Thomas A. Edison

When Thomas was seven years old, the Edison family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. He soon became a newsboy on the Grand Trunk railway running into Detroit. He also became proprietor of a news stand, a book store, and a vegetable market, each a separate enterprise in Port Huron, employing eleven boys in all. His spare hours in Detroit, between the arrival and departure of his train, he spent reading in the Free Library. Before long he had bought a small hand printing press, some old type, and plates for "patent insides" from the proprietor of a Detroit newspaper, and using the baggage car for an office, he started the Grand Trunk Herald, the first and only newspaper ever published on a railway train. His inquiring mind led him one day to make some chemical experiments in the car. He overturned a bottle of phosphorus, set the car on fire, and as a result was not permitted to use it longer for a newspaper office.

One day young Edison snatched the child of the station agent at Mount Clemens, Michigan, from beneath the wheels of a locomotive. In gratitude for this act, the station agent taught him telegraphy. In a few months his ingenuity, one of the chief characteristics of the great inventor, led him to string a private telegraph wire from the depot to the town. Over this wire he forwarded messages, charging ten cents for each message. Next he went to Stratford, Canada, as night operator for the Grand Trunk railway. One night he received an order to hold a train. He stopped to reply before signaling the train, and when he reached the platform the train had passed. A collision resulted, though not a serious one, and Edison was ordered to report at the office of the general manager. Edison hastily climbed on a freight train, went to Port Huron, and probably has not yet called on the general manager.

Edison worked as telegraph operator at various places. Although he was a brilliant and rapid telegrapher, his fondness for playing pranks and making fun lost him several positions. After making his first experiments with a telegraph repeater, he left Indianapolis for Cincinnati, where he earned sixty dollars per month, besides something extra for night work. He Worked next in Louisville and Memphis. He was poor in purse, for all his money went to defray the expenses of his experiments. His fondness for Victor Hugo's great work, Les Miserables, gained for him the nicknames of "Victor" and "Hugo."

At Memphis he perfected his telegraph repeater and was the first to bring New Orleans into direct communication with New York. However, the manager at Memphis was jealous of him and dismissed him. Shabby and destitute, he made his way back to Louisville, walking a hundred miles of the way, and resumed his old position. After he had worked in the Louisville office for two years, his experimenting again got him into trouble. He upset some sulphuric acid, part of which trickled through the floor and spoiled the carpet in the manager's room below. For this he was discharged. He next went to New Orleans, intending to sail for Brazil; but the ship had gone and an old Spanish sailor advised him to stay in America. He went back to Cincinnati, where he made some of his first experiments in duplex telegraphy, a system whereby two messages may be sent over the same wire at the same time.

A little while afterward, as poor as ever and as unattractive in dress, he walked into the telegraph office in Boston, where he had procured work. His co-workers there, thinking they would have some fun at his expense, set him to receiving messages from the most rapid operators in New York. Instead of throwing up his hands in defeat, as his companions expected, he received the messages easily, with a good margin to spare, and asked the operator sending at the other end of the line to "please send with the other foot." He was at once placed regularly on the New York wire. While in Boston, Edison opened a small workshop, put many of his ideas into definite shape, and took out his first patent. It was upon a chemical apparatus to record votes. He tried to introduce this into Congress, but failed, although he proved that it "would work."

He left Boston not only without money, but in debt, and went to New York. This was in 1871 when he was twenty-four years old. At that time an apparatus called a "gold indicator" was in use in the offices of about six hundred brokers, to show fluctuations in the prices of gold. The system was operated from a central office near Wall street. One day this central office was filled with six hundred messenger boys, each bringing the complaint that the machinery had broken. No one knew how to repair it. A stranger walked up, looked at the apparatus, and said to the manager, "Mr. Law, I think I can show you where the trouble is." The machinery was repaired, the office was cleared, and order was restored. "What is your name, sir?" asked the delighted manager. "Edison," was the reply. He was engaged as superintendent at a salary of $200 per month, and from that hour his fortunes were assured.

Edison at once busied himself with inventing. He improved and invented various machines used in the stock markets, and in 1872 perfected his system of duplex telegraphy. Two years later he brought out the wonderful quadruplex system, by which four messages may be sent over the same wire at the same time. This system saved millions of dollars and dispensed with thousands of miles of poles and wires.

He started a large factory at Newark, New Jersey, employing some three hundred men. Sometimes he was working on as many as forty-five improvements and original inventions at once. In 1876 he stopped manufacturing and turned all his attention to inventing. In that year he established a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, twenty-five miles from New York City. When this laboratory was outgrown, he founded a new one at Orange, New Jersey, the largest laboratory ever established by one man for scientific research and invention. It comprises one building 250 feet long and three stories high, and four smaller buildings, each one hundred feet long and one story high. The principal building contains a library of thirty thousand reference books, a lecture room, and an exhibition room, where a remarkable collection of instruments of almost every kind is to be seen.

When Edison began working to produce an incandescent electric light for illuminating residences and small rooms, most of the scientists of England said that such a light could not be produced. For nine years he worked on this invention. The chief problem was to find, for the horseshoe thread or filament used to give off the light, a material that should glow with sufficient intensity and yet not be consumed by the great heat necessary to produce the light. In his search for this material he tried all kinds of rags and textiles steeped in various chemicals, different kinds of paper, wood, inner and outer bark, cornstalks, etc. Finally he sent one of his assistants to the East, and in Japan a kind of bamboo was found answering the requirements. Perseverance won, and the incandescent electric light became a reality about 1880.

An Incandescent Light

Thomas Edison is one of the most systematic of workers, and nearly all his inventions have been the result of intelligent and methodical labor directed toward a definite aim. He reads carefully what other investigators have found out, so as not to waste time in going over fruitless ground. He also keeps copious note books of his own operations, so that there may be no loss of time and energy. His invention of the phonograph, however, was accidental. While he was working to improve the telephone, the idea of the phonograph suddenly came into his mind. A little while afterward the first phonograph, crude but successful, was finished. At first this instrument was regarded as a toy, but later the invention was sold for a million dollars.

Edison is a man of remarkable personality. Once when someone referred to him as a genius and said that he supposed a genius worked only when the spirit moved him, the inventor replied, "Genius is two per cent inspiration and ninety-eight per cent perspiration." He certainly possesses great native talent for inventing. This was apparent in his early boyhood. But much of his marvelous success is due to the intelligent direction of effort, to tireless perseverance, and to long hours of work. In 1897 he devoted his attention exclusively to the invention of a new storage battery, upon which he had been working for five years. For more than a year he worked harder than a day laborer. He was in his laboratory by half past seven in the morning; his luncheon was sent to him there; he went home to dinner, but he returned by eight o'clock. At half past eleven his carriage called for him, but often the coachman was compelled to wait three or four hours before the inventor was willing to suspend his work. While the first incandescent electric lighting plant was being prepared in New York City, Edison himself worked part of the time in the trenches, to be sure that the work would be properly done.

There is scarcely an electrical apparatus or an electrical process in existence to-day that does not bear the mark of some great change for the better coming from this most ingenious of American inventors. He has taken out more than four hundred patents on original inventions and improvements. Mr. Edison is still living in his beautiful home at West Orange, New Jersey, near his laboratory. He is frequently called the "Wizard of Menlo Park."

The idea of using electricity as motive power on railroads is nearly as old as the railroads themselves. In 1837, when the utility of steam for purposes of transportation was doubted, Robert Davidson propelled a car with an electric engine on the Edinburgh and Glasgow road. In the fifties Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith, constructed an electric engine containing all the essential elements of the modern electric motor. Little progress, however, was made in the use of electricity for motive power, because the cost of producing the electric current was so great. In 1887 Lieut. Sprague, overcoming most of the difficulties then existing, installed at Richmond, Virginia, the first successful electric railway in the world. Managers of street railways in other cities visited Richmond, and after an inspection of what Sprague had done there, decided to substitute electricity for animal power. No other construction has had a more rapid growth since the time of its invention than the electric railway. In 1890 there were only thirteen unimportant electric roads. Now there is hardly a city of the civilized world where the hum of the electric street car is not heard at all hours of day and night. Modern urban life could scarcely exist without it. It is rapidly pushing its way into the country and giving the farmer the privilege of rapid and cheap transit.

The uses of electricity are by no means exhausted in the four major inventions of the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, and the electric street car. It has been put to many minor uses. Among the most interesting and important of these are the Roentgen or X-rays, discovered by Wilhelm Konrad von Roentgen, a German physicist, in 1895. They were named X-rays by their discoverer, because the ultimate nature of their radiation was unknown, the letter X being commonly used in algebra to represent an unknown quantity. The X-rays are peculiar electric rays having the power to penetrate wood, flesh, and other opaque substances. They are of much value to surgery in disclosing the location of bullets, foreign substances of various kinds, and other objective points in the interior of the human body.

The United States government has demonstrated through its Department of Agriculture that electricity applied to the soil will quicken and help the growth of certain vegetables. It has also shown that certain crops are forwarded by the application of electric light.

The New York legislature in 1888 passed a law providing that criminals should be executed in that state thereafter by electrocution, that is, by sending through the body of the condemned person, a current of electricity strong enough to produce death. Execution in this way makes death quicker and apparently less painful than by hanging, the method used previously, and subsequently several other states have passed laws for electrical execution, following the example of New York.

Elisha Gray, who contested with Bell the invention of the telephone, was the inventor of a peculiar machine called the telautograph. Tele and graph have been previously explained. Auto is from a Greek word meaning "itself." The meaning of telautograph, therefore, is "to write afar by itself." By means of the telautograph, which is operated with electric currents, if a person writes with an ordinary lead pencil on paper, say in Washington or any other place, at the same time the writing will be reproduced with pen and paper at the other end of the line, in New York or wherever the message may be sent.

One of the important uses of electricity is in connection with the electric block signal. This is a device for preventing railroad collisions. The signals are operated with electricity, and show engineers whether or not a certain section of the track ahead of them is clear.

Electricity is used also in the production of certain chemical substances; in covering base metals with a coating of a precious metal, as gold or silver, called electroplating; in producing a solid metal page from rows of type, called an electrotype, which is used in printing; in the navigation of small boats and the propulsion of automobiles; in playing organs and pianos; in driving electric fans; in drawing elevators in high buildings; in call-bells and door-bells; in police-alarms and fire-alarms; in the treatment of certain diseases; and in many other useful ways. What electricity may do for the future cannot even be guessed.

CHAPTER VI

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

The birthplace of mankind is supposed to have been somewhere in Asia, untold thousands of years ago. The race is thought to have spread thence to the northern coast of Africa and to the peninsulas that jut down from the south of Europe. The travelers of ancient times were the Phœnicians. They occupied a narrow strip of land along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Their country was small and with difficulty supported an increasing population. To the east of them were barbaric hordes, who poured over the mountains and pushed the Phœnicians to the sea, making of them traders and colonizers. As early as twelve centuries before Christ they were founding colonies, exploring strange lands, trading all over the known world, and leaving their alphabet wherever they went. Arriving at a favorable place, they would pull their ships ashore, plant a crop, wait till it had matured, reap it, and go on. They founded many colonies on such sites.

Herodotus, a Greek, born in Asia Minor nearly five hundred years before Christ, is called the father of history and geography. He tells us that in his time the earth was thought to consist of the coast regions of the Mediterranean Sea, extending rather vaguely north and south, and bounded on the west by the Atlantic Ocean and on the east by the great Persian Empire. The word Mediterranean is made up of two Latin words meaning "the middle of the earth." Eratosthenes, a Greek geographer who was born on the northern coast of Africa about three centuries before Christ, wrote a geographical treatise in which he announced his belief that the earth was in the form of a sphere revolving on its own axis. He succeeded in convincing only a few, however, that his theory was right. The next great geographer was Strabo, born in the northeast part of Asia Minor in the year 64 B.C. He was a great traveler and observer, and wrote a work on geography that has come down to us. The parts dealing with his own observations are especially valuable.

The great traveler of mediæval times was Marco Polo, an Italian, born in Venice in 1254 A.D. He traveled widely, had many adventures, and published an account of his travels. His experiences were a great stimulus to geographical inquiry and discovery. About this time also the mariners' compass was introduced into Europe. Civilization seems to be indebted to the Chinese for the compass, for it is mentioned by them as an instrument of navigation as early as the third or fourth century after Christ. With the advent of the compass, seamen were no longer compelled to hug the shore; they acquired more daring to sail the open sea, and geographical exploration was correspondingly widened.