s; 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,