several of his friends on the ship were talking at the table about what
someone had done by way of sending signals like lightning by means of
electricity. “If they can do that,” said Mr. Morse, “why could we not
write letters in a second or two from New York to Charleston with it?”
The others laughed at the idea.
“Why not?” kept ringing in Mr. Morse’s ears. He stayed in his stateroom
to study and think. He remembered what he had learned from his
professors in college about electricity. With such materials as he could
get together on shipboard, he made magnets and electrical appliances. By
the time the ship sailed up New York harbor, Mr. Morse had not only a
good idea of the way to go to work to make a telegraph apparatus, but he
had made up the “dot-and-dash code,” now in use in telegraphy.
The idea took such a hold on his mind that he could no longer paint
pictures. But when he talked to others about it, it all seemed
impossible--“too good to be true”--and he could not find wealthy men who
would lend money enough to enable him to prove that a message could be
sent a long distance in a moment of time by telegraph.
While Mr. Morse was waiting and struggling to start “the
electro-magnetic telegraph” he made a bare living by taking the first
photographic likenesses, called daguerreotypes, in America.
After eleven years of hard work and poverty so keen that he had to go
hungry sometimes, Mr. Morse’s friends in Congress passed a bill in the
House to furnish him government money enough for a trial line forty
miles long. But on the last day of the session, which was to end at
midnight, there were over a hundred bills ahead of his in the Senate.
Mr. Morse went home that night utterly discouraged.
In the morning Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of the Commissioner
of Patents, came to congratulate him. His bill had been passed just
before midnight and the President had signed it, giving Mr. Morse all
the money he needed to show how he could “send letters by lightning.”
[Illustration: MORSE’S FIRST TELEGRAPH SOUNDER]
The overjoyed inventor told Miss Ellsworth that when his line was all
ready she should send the first message over it.
It was decided that the trial line should be put up between Washington
and Baltimore. It was completed before the 24th of May, 1844. One end of
it was in the Capitol at Washington and the other at Baltimore. Miss
Ellsworth’s first message, flashed by S. F. B. Morse to his partner, Mr.
Vail, in Baltimore, was this text of Scripture:
“What hath God wrought!”
The first news sent out to the whole country was that of James K. Polk’s
nomination at the Convention in Baltimore as the Democratic candidate
for President of the United States.
Mr. Morse’s struggles were now over. The telegraph became a wonderful
success and he was honored by presidents, kings, and princes with
medals, stars, crosses, and other decorations. The inventor now turned
his attention to running telegraph lines under water, and laid a cable
under New York harbor. About twenty years later another man, Cyrus W.
Field, succeeded in connecting America with Europe by laying a cable
beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
So S. F. B. Morse’s words were realized: “If I can make the telegraph
work ten miles, I can make it go around the globe.” He really made true
these words of Puck, one of Shakespeare’s fairies:
“I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.”
Men soon began trying to talk without connecting wires. Marconi invented
the radio-telegraph in 1896 and the radio-phone followed. Now it is
possible to send wireless messages almost around the world.
CYRUS H. M’CORMICK AND THE STORY OF THE REAPER
When little Abraham Lincoln was three days old in Kentucky, Cyrus H.
McCormick was born in Virginia. When the McCormick boy was seven he used
to go out to a shed and watch his father working at a machine to take
the place of the scythe which was then used in cutting grain. Father
McCormick was never satisfied, the neighbors said. He was “always
fussing and trying to invent and improve something.”
After working for years to make a machine to harvest grain, Farmer
McCormick gave it up, saying that it could not be done. Meanwhile young
Cyrus, who had inherited his father’s inventive turn of mind, went to
the fields to work with the men. He found it very hard to keep up with
them, so he invented a cradle, or improved scythe, which made his work
so much easier that he was able to do as much as a grown man. When he
was twenty-two, Cyrus McCormick had invented a plough that would throw
up a furrow on whichever side the farmer desired. Two years later he
made the first self-sharpening plough.
Although the neighbors had laughed at his father for being so foolish as
to wish to invent a labor-saving machine for harvesting, and in spite of
his father’s warnings that such a thing could never be made, the idea of
a reaper haunted the young man’s mind. He began to work at it as a boy
and kept it up until he was a grown man. He had improved the cradle and
his two ploughs without much difficulty, but the reaping machine was a
hard problem. It was more difficult because the grain is often lodged,
or matted down, and it is necessary not only to cut it but to lay it in
even rows, so that it can be bound in sheaves ready for threshing.
But in 1831, the same year in which he made his double-furrow plough,
McCormick built a machine that would reap quite well. He had made every
part of it by hand. This machine had vibrating blades which cut against
each other in about the same manner as shears. It also had a reel to
draw the standing grain within reach of the moving blades, and a
platform to catch the grain as fast as it was cut. He first tried the
machine by reaping several acres of oats. The next year he harvested
seventy-five acres of wheat, to the great astonishment of the
neighboring farmers, and his father’s pride.
Cyrus McCormick was not satisfied to let well enough alone. He spent
nine more years in making his reaper do everything just right before he
was willing to sell it. The farmers admired the clever machine, but they
were not ready to buy it, because they thought it would take work from
many laborers. The money panic of 1837 occurred during this time, and
young McCormick went into the iron-smelting business to make a living
during the hard times.
[Illustration: CYRUS H. MCCORMICK, INVENTOR OF THE REAPER.]
[Illustration: MCCORMICK’S FIRST REAPER.
_From a model_]
In 1840 he had put his reaper into more perfect shape and now began to
manufacture it, first in Cincinnati, then in Chicago. The farmers in the
western prairies could not hire laborers enough to harvest their great
fields of grain by hand. So the McCormick reaper began to be used in
that part of the country. Cyrus H. McCormick, unlike most inventors, was
a successful business man. He had to enlarge his factories. To his
harvester he kept adding devices until it gathered the grain into
sheaves, bound the sheaves with twine, and tossed them out sideways on
the ground. He made them so that they would mow grass also.
After his reapers and mowers became well known in America, the
successful inventor and manufacturer went abroad to introduce them in
Europe. He showed the machine at the first World’s Fair in London, in
1851. People in England laughed, and the London _Times_ reported that
the reaper was a “cross between a chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying
machine.”
But when the object of their laughter was taken out harvesting in
England, the joke was on the men who had made fun of a machine they
could not understand. The newspapers then began to praise the inventor
they had ridiculed, and Cyrus H. McCormick awoke one morning and found
himself famous. He not only received the Great Medal from the World’s
Fair, but was elected an officer of the Legion of Honor in Paris, and
received the high honor of being made a member of the French Academy of
Science.
So the McCormick boy, who did not mind being laughed at and was never
content with doing less than his very best, became not only one of the
wealthiest men in America, but added many hundreds of millions of
dollars to the wealth of his country, and gave an immense benefit to the
world.
ELIAS HOWE AND HIS SEWING MACHINE
Elias Howe was the son of a poor miller. He had to go to work when he
was six years old. He was a lame, sickly boy and could never do heavy
work. When he was old enough he went away to work in the mills. But as
he grew up, his health was still so poor that he had to go back and live
with his father.
Elias married when he was twenty-one and, within a few years, he had a
wife and three children to support. Once when he was ill, his wife took
in sewing to support their little family. As the young father lay on the
bed watching his wife slowly plying her needle, he thought what a
blessing it would be if a machine could be invented to sew much faster
and better than by hand. The idea seemed to fill his mind, for he was an
ingenious man. He said to himself, “I can’t do heavy work, but perhaps I
can invent that machine.” At first he said nothing about it to his wife,
but he watched her taking stitch after stitch for hours at a stretch.
[Illustration: ELIAS HOWE.]
When he was out of bed he made a model of the machine which he had been
planning. In this rude affair he first had the needle with an eye in the
middle. This needle was pointed at both ends, and worked sideways
through the cloth, which was held upright. The stitches on this first
machine were made like a chain, and the thread raveled out too easily.
Howe kept patiently at work until he hit upon the idea of laying the
cloth to be sewed on a small table, and making the needle go up and down
through it. He thought of a way to have the cloth pulled along as it was
sewn. But the trouble was to get a stitch that would not rip or pull
out. At last he tried a shuttle, which looped another thread with that
in the needle so that the two made a lock-stitch. When he had done this,
he had invented the sewing machine.
Like most inventors, Elias Howe was poor. He found a coal dealer named
Fisher, who agreed to keep Howe and his family, and furnish five hundred
dollars to pay for the first machines and have them patented. For this
Fisher was to receive a half interest in the patents, and the sewing
machine business afterward.
At first no one would buy the machine. Tailors thought it would throw
too many men out of work. Mr. Fisher grew tired of his bargain and the
Howes had to leave his house. There seemed to be a better chance to sell
sewing machines in England; so the family went across the sea to London.
But the inventor was again disappointed. He was glad to come back to his
father’s house in America with his sick wife and his small children.
[Illustration: HOWE’S FIRST SEWING MACHINE.
_Photo. Brown Bros., N. Y._]
The wife died soon after their return and the inventor had to do
something to support his motherless children. He hired out to help an
engineer on one of the first railroads in the United States. While he
was working at that, a friend offered to see what he could do in
selling sewing-machines in New York City. They found that others were
making and selling machines very much like Howe’s.
Money was furnished to sue those dealers. Howe’s rights to his patents
were confirmed by the courts in 1846, and all other makers of sewing
machines were made to pay him a certain amount, called a royalty, on
every machine they sold. In this way Elias Howe soon became a very
wealthy man.
After the Civil War broke out, Howe enlisted as a private, and when the
government was slow in paying the soldiers’ wages, he lent the money
himself for the men in his company. He died before he was fifty years
old with medals and honors from many countries. He had brought a great
blessing to the women of the world, just as he had wished to do when he
lay on his bed watching his tired wife sewing, hour after hour, to
support him and their three little children.
EDISON, THE WIZARD OF MANY INVENTIONS
Thomas Alva Edison was born in the little village of Milan, Ohio. His
father was a mechanic, who could turn his hand to anything. While Alva,
as they called him at home, was a small boy, the family moved to Port
Huron. Here the lad was sent to school, but he asked so many questions
that the teacher sent him home.
Then Alva’s mother, who had been a school teacher, tried to educate him.
She had great patience with his questions, but there were so many that
neither she nor his father could answer that he took to reading books.
He had the same desire to “know the why” of everything that other great
men have shown when they were boys.
Though the Edison boy had no taste for school, he was fond of reading.
When he learned how much he could find out from books, he started in,
boy-like, to read all the books in a public library. He had worried
through several great sets of volumes when he discovered that not all
books were of interest to him. After that he chose only those on
subjects he liked to read about.
His father was a poor man, and as Alva was not in school he wanted to do
his part toward making a living for the family. He began by selling
papers around home. Then he had a chance to be train boy on the old
Grand Trunk railroad between Port Huron and Detroit. His mother was
afraid to have him run on trains and be away from home, but he showed
that he could take care of himself. It was during this time that he
began taking books from the Detroit Public Library.
He was such a wide-awake, good-natured lad that the trainmen liked him.
He found that he had a good deal of time to spare; so he got some old
type from a printer and, in a corner of the baggage car, began to print
a four-page newspaper about the size of a small handkerchief, which he
named _The Grand Trunk Herald_. The trainmen and their families and
friends liked this young Edison’s news. Soon he had about five hundred
subscribers, so he made about ten dollars a week from his little paper.
Meanwhile he attended strictly to business. During the Civil War he
would find out when there had been a battle and have the telegraph
operator send word of the event ahead of the train to the towns where
the trains would stop. This brought hundreds of people down to the
stations at
[Illustration: THOMAS A. EDISON AND ONE OF HIS EARLY DYNAMOS.]
train-time to learn the news of the battle. Young Edison would sell
hundreds--once he sold a thousand--newspapers at ten to twenty-five
cents apiece.
He was always trying to do something new. After his little paper became
well known, he began to buy chemicals and keep them in bottles in his
printing office in the car. One day the phosphorus jar fell off the
shelf and broke. This set fire to the floor of the car. While Alva was
putting out the fire the conductor came through. It made him so angry to
have a boy around who might burn up the train with his experiments, that
he threw out bottles, printing-press, and type, and pushed the boy after
them.
Alva did not hold a grudge against that conductor. He only wondered that
the trainmen had stood that sort of thing so long. He saved all he could
out of the ruins and set up his printing plant in the cellar of his
father’s house. He went back to work as though nothing had happened, and
attended only to selling papers. One day while waiting on the platform
of a station he saw the station agent’s child on the tracks and an
express train coming. Throwing down his newspapers he jumped, seized the
child, and sprang across the track just in time to save its life and his
own.
The station man wept as he seized the heroic newsboy’s hand. “I am a
poor man,” he said, “so I can’t repay you for saving my child’s life;
but I can teach you telegraphy.”
Edison was delighted. He stopped at that station several times a week
and learned very soon to send and receive messages. It is harder to take
than to send telegraph dispatches. Young Edison invented a machine which
would run more slowly than the telegraph and which gave him time to
write out the words while the “dots and dashes” of the telegraph
alphabet were clicking away. But sometimes it is impossible to attach
this appliance; so young Edison practised till he could receive the
fastest news story.
He knocked about the country, hiring out as telegraph operator, but he
was always trying to make new machines and improvements. This was more
interesting to him than telegraphing. After living in several western
cities the young telegrapher and inventor applied for a job in the
Western Union office in Boston. Here is Mr. Edison’s own account of his
first experience there:
“I had been four days and nights on the road, and, having had very
little sleep, I did not present a very fresh or stylish appearance.
The manager asked me when I was ready to go to work. ‘Now,’ I
replied. I was then told to return at 5.30 P.M., and punctually at
that hour I entered the main room and was introduced to the night
manager. My appearance caused much mirth, and, as I afterwards
learned, the night operators consulted together how they might put
up a job on the jay from the woolly West. I was assigned to New
York No. 1 wire.
“After waiting upwards of one hour I was told to come over to a
certain table and take a special report for the _Boston Herald_,
the conspirators having arranged to have one of the fastest senders
in New York send the dispatch and ‘salt’ the new man. I sat down
without suspecting and the New York man started slowly. I had
perfected myself in a simple and rapid style of handwriting,
without flourishes, which could be increased from forty-five to
fifty-four words a minute by reducing the size of the lettering.
This was several words faster than any other operator in the United
States could write.
“Soon the New York man increased his speed and I easily adapted my
pace to his. This put my rival on his mettle, and he was soon doing
his fastest work. At this point I happened to look up, and saw the
operators all looking over my shoulder with their faces shining
with fun and excitement. I knew then that they were trying to put a
job on me, but I kept my own counsel and went on placidly with my
work--even sharpening a pencil now and then, as an extra
aggravation.
“The New York man then commenced to slur over his words, running
them together, and sticking the signals; but I had been used to
this style of telegraphy in taking reports and was not in the least
discomfited. At last, when I thought the fun had gone far enough, I
opened the key and clicked back to him: ‘Say, young man, change off
and send with the other foot!’ This broke the New York man all up,
and he turned the job over to another man to finish.”
Young Edison got the greatest benefit he could from the Boston Public
Library. The following year he went to New York and found work with the
Gold Reporting Telegraph Company, where he invented the “ticker” now so
common in stockbrokers’ offices. He was employed at a salary of three
hundred dollars a month. He now began to devote all his time to
inventing. In a short time he had devised and constructed several
machines and improvements for which he was offered forty thousand
dollars. This enabled him to begin inventing and manufacturing on a
large scale. He built a factory and employed three hundred men to carry
out his fast-increasing ideas and make the necessary machines and
drawings for securing his patents.
He improved the telegraph so that six messages could be sent at once
over the same wire. He made improvements in electric and other motor
cars, as well as in the telephone. He also made a delicate instrument to
measure the heat of the stars, which he called the tasimeter. Out of
more than fourteen hundred different inventions, any one of which would
have made him famous, the best known are the incandescent electric
light, the phonograph and the moving-picture machine.
Thomas A. Edison is the greatest inventor that ever lived. He has done
more for the world’s wealth, comfort, and happiness than any other man
save, perhaps, Dr. Benjamin Franklin. Yet he is one of the most modest
of men. When he was invited to a dinner at which several distinguished
men wished to pay him some of the high honors due him, he said:
“I would not sit and listen to an hour of such talk for a hundred
thousand dollars!”
When asked how he gained his great success, Mr. Edison replied:
“By not looking at the clock.”
THE GREATEST AMERICANS
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, THE BOY WHO WAS DILIGENT IN BUSINESS
When Benjamin Franklin was a little boy he lived in Boston, where his
father was a maker of soap and candles. Little Ben was only ten years
old when his father took him out of school and set him at work in his
shop. Dipping candles all day long is hard, disagreeable work and Ben,
who loved books, often wished that he was back in school. His uncle
Benjamin sometimes tried to cheer the lad at his tiresome toil by
telling him: “It is not so much what you do in life as how you do it.”
One day Ben’s uncle brought a Bible into the smoky soapfat room and read
from it: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand
before kings.”
Ben Franklin was a thoughtful boy. While he was bending over the little
vat of hot tallow all that long day, he could not help thinking of what
his uncle had read to him. Half smothered by the burning grease he
whispered to himself: “‘Stand before kings?’ I’m so tired, and my back
is so lame when night comes that I can hardly stand at all!”
After Ben had worked at home for two long years, his father said to him,
“My son, you have been so faithful that I cannot bear to let you dip
candles all your life. You are fit for something better. What trade
would you like to learn?”
Ben was delighted. He was so fond of books that he felt sure he would
like to learn how to make them. He answered his father’s question by
saying, “I would like to be a printer.”
When a boy went to learn a trade in those days, he had to serve as an
apprentice. That is, he was bound out by law to work for a master until
he was twenty-one. At first he received nothing for his work but his
board and clothes, and when he was nineteen or twenty he was given very
small wages. At that time James Franklin, Ben’s older brother, had a
printing office in Boston. It was soon arranged that Ben should be his
brother James’s apprentice, and work for nine years to learn the
printing business.
Ben was clever and willing. The work of a printing office boy was very
hard. More than this, James Franklin was a hard master. He sometimes
boxed Ben’s ears and treated him very unkindly. The more the young
brother tried to please, the crosser James seemed to be.
Ben bore this abuse for five years. He soon learned to set type well,
and to run the “hand”--or foot--press, which was hard even for a man to
do. James was so mean to him at home that the boy asked for just half
the money it cost his brother to feed him, so that he might board
himself. Of course, James was pleased with such a bargain.
The boy was so eager to learn that he saved half of that small sum to
buy books. He ate no meat--only bread and a few plain vegetables.
Instead of going out, as the men and the other apprentices did, to get a
good dinner, he stayed in the shop at noon to eat his dry bread and
read. Benjamin Franklin liked books, which other boys thought too dry,
even better than good things to eat.
Besides being studious, Ben was ingenious. He had the knack of finding
out what was wrong with things and making them right. When the printing
press would not work, he fixed it and set it going again. He soon wrote
pieces for his brother’s newspaper. He was so bright, willing, and
useful that every one praised him--except his brother, who, instead of
being proud of Ben, was jealous, and treated him worse than ever.
So Ben had to run away--not to sea, but to Philadelphia, where he could
get printing work to do. He quickly found a place there and worked with
a royal will. If ever a young man was “diligent in his business,” it was
Benjamin Franklin. When he was about twenty-one, he became the owner of
the largest printing business in America. He was soon editing and
publishing the best newspaper in the country. Before long he also
started “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” a sort of yearly magazine containing
Franklin’s maxims, or short, wise sayings. These have been translated
into many languages and are quoted all over the world.