nal.
Morse was familiar with all that; he had been educated at Yale College,
and he knew that the sound of a gun will travel a mile while you are
counting five; but quick as that is, he wanted to find something
better and quicker still. He said, Why not try lightning or
electricity? That will beat sound, for that will go more than a
thousand miles while you are counting _one_.

222. What a telegraph[3] is; a wire telegraph; Professor Morse
invents the electric telegraph.--Some time after that, Mr. Morse set
sail for America. On the way across the Atlantic he was constantly
talking about electricity and how a telegraph--that is, a machine
which would write at a distance--might be invented. He thought about
this so much that he could not sleep nights. At last he believed that
he saw how he could make such a machine.

[Illustration: ONE KIND OF TELEGRAPH.]

Suppose you take a straight and stiff piece of wire as long as your
desk and fasten it in the middle so that the ends will swing easily.
Next tie a pencil tight to each end; then put a sheet of paper under
the point of each pencil. Now, if you make a mark with the pencil
nearest to you, you will find that the pencil at the other end of
the wire will make the same kind of mark. Such a wire would be a kind
of telegraph, because it would make marks or signs at a distance.
Mr. Morse said: I will have a wire a mile long with a pencil, or
something sharp-pointed like a pencil, fastened to the further end;
the wire itself shall not move at all, but the pencil shall, for I
will make electricity run along the wire and move it. Mr. Morse was
then a professor or teacher in the University of the City of New York.
He put up such a wire in one of the rooms of the building, sent the
electricity through it, and found that it made the pencil make just
the marks he wanted it should; that meant that he had invented the
_electric telegraph_; for if he could do this over a mile of wire,
then what was to hinder his doing it over a hundred or even a thousand
miles?

[Illustration: PROFESSOR MORSE AT WORK MAKING HIS TELEGRAPH.]

[Footnote 3: Telegraph (tel'e-graf): this name is made up of two
Greek words, the first of which means _far off_, and the second _to
write_.]

223. How Professor Morse lived while he was making his
telegraph.--But all this was not done in a day, for this invention
cost years of patient labor. At first, Mr. Morse lived in a little
room by himself: there he