THE MARVELS OF INVENTION
IT is not a pleasant thing to go hungry for twenty-four hours and to go
many days without half enough to eat. I think all my readers will agree
with me in this. I fancy none of you would like to find an empty table
before you when the dinner bell rings. But this is a thing that has
happened to many inventors; and one of these was Samuel F. B. Morse, to
whose genius we owe the electric telegraph.
You know about the invention of the steamboat, the locomotive, the
cotton-gin and various other early inventions; but there have been many
later inventions, and one of the most important of these is the
telegraph, which tells us every day what is taking place over the whole
world.
Professor Morse was a New York artist who studied painting in Europe,
and in the year 1832 took passage home in the ship "Sully." One day a
talk went on in the cabin of the ship. Dr. Jackson, one of the
passengers, told how some persons in Paris had sent an electric current
through several miles of wire in less than a second of time.
[Illustration: THE WRIGHT BROTHERS AND THEIR FAMOUS AEROPLANE.]
"If that is the case," said Morse, "why could not words and sentences be
sent in the same way?"
"That's a good idea. It would be a great thing if we could send news as
fast as lightning," said one of the passengers.
"Why can't we?" said Morse; "I think we can do it."
Very likely the rest of the passengers soon forgot all about that
conversation, but Morse did not. During the remainder of the voyage he
was very quiet and kept much to himself. He was thinking over what he
had heard. Before the ship had reached New York he had worked out a plan
of telegraphing. He proposed to carry the wire in tubes underground, and
to use an alphabet of dots and dashes, the same that is used by
telegraphers to-day.
When he went on shore Morse said to the captain: "Captain, if you should
hear of the telegraph one of these days as the wonder of the world,
remember that the discovery was made on board the good ship 'Sully.'"
"If I can make it go ten miles without stopping, I can make it go round
the world," he said to a passenger.
But it is easier to think out a thing than to put it in practice. Poor
Morse was more than ten years in working out his plans and getting
people to help him in them. He got out of money and was near starving,
but he kept at it. After three years he managed to send a message
through seventeen hundred feet of wire. He could read it, but his
friends could not, and no one was ready to put money in such a scheme.
They looked at it as a toy to amuse children. Then he went to Europe and
tried to get money there, but he found the people there as hard to
convince as those in America.
"No one is in such a hurry for news as all that," they said. "People
would rather get their news in the good old way. Your wires work, Mr.
Morse, but it would take a great deal of money to lay miles of them
underground, and we are not going to take such chances as that with our
money."
Mr. Morse next tried to get Congress to grant him a sum of money. He
wanted to build a wire from Baltimore to Washington and show how it
would work. But it is never easy to get money from Congress, and he kept
at it for five years in vain.
It was the 3d of March, 1843. At twelve o'clock that night the session
of Congress would end. Morse kept about the Senate chamber till nearly
midnight, in hopes his bill would pass. Then he gave it up in despair
and went to his boarding house. He was sure his little bill would not be
thought of in the crowd of business before Congress and was greatly
depressed in consequence.
He came down to breakfast the next morning with a very sad face, hardly
knowing how he was to pay his board and get home. He was met by a young
lady, Miss Annie Ellsworth, who came to him with a smile.
"Let me congratulate you, Mr. Morse," she said.
"For what, my dear friend?"
"For the passage of your bill."
"What!" he said, in great astonishment; "the passage of my bill?"
"Yes; do you not know of it?"
"No; it cannot be true!"
"You came home too early last night, Mr. Morse. Your bill has passed,
and I am happy to be the first to bring you the good news."
"You give me new life, Miss Ellsworth," he said. "For your good news I
promise you this: when my telegraph line is laid, you shall have the
honor of selecting the first message to be sent over it."
Congress had granted only thirty thousand dollars. It was not much, but
Morse went actively to work. He wanted to dig a ditch to lay his pipe
in, through which the wire was to run. He got another inventor to help
him, Ezra Cornell, who afterwards founded Cornell University. Mr.
Cornell invented a machine which dug the ditch at a great rate, laid the
pipe, and covered it in. In five minutes it laid and covered one hundred
feet of pipe.
But Cornell did not think the underground wire would work.
"It will work," said Morse. "While I have been fighting Congress, men
have laid short lines in England which work very well. What can be done
there can be done here."
For all that, it would not work. A year passed and only seven thousand
dollars of the money were left, and all the wires laid were of no use.
"If it won't go underground we must try and coax it to go over-ground,"
said Morse.
Poles were erected; the wire was strung on glass insulators; it now
worked to a charm. On May 11, 1844, the Whig National Convention at
Baltimore nominated Henry Clay for President, and the news was sent to
Washington in all haste by the first railroad train. But the passengers
were surprised to find that they brought stale news; everybody in
Washington knew it already. It had reached there an hour or two before
by telegraph. That was a great triumph for Morse. The telegraph line was
not then finished quite to Baltimore. When it reached there, on May
24th, the first message sent was one which Miss Ellsworth had chosen
from the Bible, "What hath God wrought?" God had wrought wonderfully
indeed, for since then the electric wire has bound the ends of the earth
together.
If I should attempt to tell you about all our inventors I am afraid it
would be a long story. There is almost no end to them, and many of them
invented wonderful machines. I might tell you, for instance, about
Thomas Blanchard, who invented the machine by which tacks are made,
dropping them down as fast as a watch can tick. This is only one out of
many of his inventions. One of them was a steamboat to run in shallow
water, and which could go hundreds of miles up rivers where Fulton's
steamboat would have run aground.
Then there was Cyrus McCormick, who invented the reaping machine. When
he showed his reaper at the London World's Fair in 1851, the newspapers
made great fun of it. The London "Times" said it was a cross between a
chariot, a wheelbarrow and a flying-machine. But when it was put in a
wheat-field and gathered in the wheat like a living and thinking
machine, they changed their tune, and the "Times" said it was worth more
than all the rest of the Exhibition. This was the first of the great
agricultural machines. Since then hundreds have been made, and the
old-fashioned slow hand-work in the fields is over. McCormick made a
fortune out of his machine. I cannot say that of all inventors, for many
of them had as hard a time as Morse with his telegraph. Two of them,
Charles Goodyear and Elias Howe, came as near starving as Professor
Morse.
All the rubber goods we have to-day we owe to Charles Goodyear. Before
his time India-rubber was of very little use. It would grow stiff in the
winter and sticky in the summer, and people said it was a nuisance. What
was wanted was a rubber that would stand heat and cold, and this
Goodyear set himself to make.
After a time he tried mixing sulphur with the gum, and by accident
touched a red-hot stove with the mixture. To his delight the gum did not
melt. Here was the secret. Rubber mixed with sulphur and exposed to heat
would stand heat and cold alike. He had made his discovery, but it took
him six years more to make it a success, and he never made much money
from it. Yet everybody honors him to-day as a great inventor.
Elias Howe had as hard a time with the sewing machine. For years he
worked at it, and when he finished it nobody would buy it or use it. He
went to London, as Morse had done, and had the same bad luck. He had to
pawn his model and patent papers to get home again. His wife was very
sick, and he reached home only in time to see her die.
Poor fellow! life was very dark to him then. His invention had been
stolen by others, who were making fortunes out of it while he was in
need of bread. Friends lent him money and he brought suit against these
robbers, but it took six years to win his rights in the courts. In the
end he grew rich and gained great honor from his invention.
There has been no man more talked of in our time than Thomas A. Edison.
All of you must have heard of him. He went into business when he was
only twelve years old, selling newspapers and other things on the cars,
and he was so bright and did so well that he was able to send his
parents five hundred dollars a year. When he was sixteen he saved the
child of a station-master from being run over by a locomotive, and the
father was so grateful that he taught him how to telegraph. He was so
quick in his work that he become one of the best telegraph operators in
the United States.
After he grew up Edison began to invent. He worked out a plan by which
he could send two messages at once over one wire. He kept at this till
he could send sixteen messages over a wire, eight one way and eight the
other. He made money out of his inventions, but the telegraph companies
made much more. Instead of sending fifty or sixty words a minute, he
showed them how they could send several thousand words a minute.
Then he began experimenting with the electric light. He did not invent
this, but he made great improvements in it. The electric light could be
made, but it could not be controlled and used before Edison taught
people how to keep it in its little glass bulb. How brilliantly the
streets, the stores, and many of the houses are now lit up by
electricity. All from Edison's wonderful discoveries.
Then there was the telephone, or talking telegraph, which many of you
may have used yourselves. That was not known before 1876; but people now
wonder how they ever got along without it. It is certainly very
wonderful, when you have to speak with somebody a mile or a hundred
miles away, to ring him up and talk with him over the telephone wire as
easily as if you were talking with some one in the next room. The
telephone, as I suppose you know, works by electricity. It is only
another form of the telegraph. The telephone was not invented by Edison,
but by another American named Alexander Bell. But Edison improved it. He
added the "transmitter," which is used in all telephones, and is very
important indeed. So we must give credit first to Bell and second to
Edison for the telephone.
Edison's most wonderful invention is the phonograph. This word means
"sound writer." One of you may talk with a little machine, and the sound
of your voice will make marks on a little roll of gelatine or tinfoil
within. Then when the machine is set going you may hear your own voice
coming back to you. Or by the use of a great trumpet called a megaphone,
it may be heard all over a large room.
The wonderful thing is that the sound of a man's voice may be heard long
after he is dead. If they had possessed the phonograph in old times we
might be able to hear Shakespeare or Julius Caesar speaking to-day. Very
likely many persons who live a hundred or two hundred years from now may
hear Edison's voice coming out of one of his own machines. Does not this
seem like magic?
In every way this is a wonderful age of invention. Look at the trolley
car, shooting along without any one being able to see what makes it
move. Look at the wheels whirling and lights flashing and stoves heating
from electric power. Steam was the most powerful thing which man knew a
century ago. Electricity has taken its place as the most powerful and
marvelous thing we know to-day. More wonderful than anything I have said
is the power we now have of telegraphing without wires, and of
telephoning in the same way. Thus men can now stand on the shore and
talk with their friends hundreds of miles away on the broad sea.
Such are some of the inventions which have been made in recent times. If
you ask for more I might name the steam plow, and the typewriter, and
the printing machine, and the bicycle, and the automobile, and the
air-ship, and a hundred others. But they are too many for me to say
anything about, so I shall have to stop right here.