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.

"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 CÆsar 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.