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, t