ularity of the furrows, killed the horses, and
ruined the temper of the farmer. Every few minutes the plowman had to
scrape off the soil from the moldboard with his boot-heel or stick or
paddle.

When a local rival fitted out a plow with a leather pocket tacked on to
his plow-beam, and offered to give a paddle with every plow, James
Oliver laughed aloud. "I give no paddles, because I do not believe in
them, either for punishment or plow use--my plows and my children do not
need paddles," was his remark.

The one particular thing--the Big Idea--in the Oliver Plow was the
chilled moldboard. Chilling the iron, by having a compartment of water
adjoining the casting-clay, gives a temper to the metal that can be
attained in no other way. To produce a chilled moldboard was the one
particular achievement of James Oliver. Others had tried it, but the
sudden cooling of the metal had caused the moldboard to warp and lose
its shape, and all good plowmen know that a moldboard has to have a form
as exact in its way as the back of a violin, otherwise it simply pushes
its way through the ground, gathering soil and rubbish in front of it,
until horses, lines, lash and cuss words drop in despair, and give it
up. The desirable and necessary thing was to preserve the exact and
delicate shape of the moldboard so that it would scour as bright as a
new silver dollar in any soil, rolling and tossing the dirt from it.

An Oliver moldboard has little checkerboard lines across it. These come
from marks in the mold, made to allow the gas to escape when the metal
is chilled, and thus all warping and twisting is prevented.

Morse, in inventing the telegraph-key, worked out his miracle of dot and
dash in a single night. The thought came to him that electricity flowed
in a continuous current, and that by breaking or intercepting this
current, a flash of light could be made or a lever moved. Then these
breaks in the current could stand for letters or words. It was a very
simple proposition, so simple that men marveled that no one had ever
thought of it before.

Watt's discovery of the expansive power of steam was made in watching
the cover of his mother's teakettle vibrate.

Gutenberg's invention of printing from movable type, Arkwright with his
spinning-jenny, and Eli Whitney with his cotton-gin, worked on
mechanical principles that were very simple--after they were explained.
Exactly so!

Oliver's invention was a simple one, but tremendously