Christian Oersted and Ampere and Arago and Faraday, all of them
diligent searchers after the true nature of the electric forces.

They freely gave their discoveries to the world and Samuel Morse (who
like Fulton began his career as an artist) thought that he could use
this new electric current to transmit messages from one city to another.
He intended to use copper wire and a little machine which he had
invented. People laughed at him. Morse therefore was obliged to finance
his own experiments and soon he had spent all his money and then he was
very poor and people laughed even louder. He then asked Congress to help
him and a special Committee on Commerce promised him their support. But
the members of Congress were not at all interested and Morse had to wait
twelve years before he was given a small congressional appropriation. He
then built a "telegraph" between Baltimore and Washington. In the year
1887 he had shown his first successful "telegraph" in one of the lecture
halls of New York University. Finally, on the 24th of May of the
year 1844 the first long-distance message was sent from Washington to
Baltimore and to-day the whole world is covered with telegraph wires
and we can send news from Europe to Asia in a few seconds. Twenty-three
years later Alexander Graham Bell used the electric current for his
telephone. And half a century afterwards Marconi improved upon these
ideas by inventing a system of sending messages which did away entirely
with the old-fashioned wires.

While Morse, the New Englander, was working on his "telegraph," Michael
Faraday, the Yorkshire-man, had constructed the first "dynamo." This
tiny little machine was completed in the year 1881 when Europe was
still trembling as a result of the great July revolutions which had so
severely upset the plans of the Congress of Vienna. The first dynamo
grew and grew and grew and to-day it provides us with heat and with
light (you know the little incandescent bulbs which Edison, building
upon French and English experiments of the forties and fifties, first
made in 1878) and with power for all sorts of machines. If I am not
mistaken the electric-engine will soon entirely drive out the "heat
engine" just as in the olden days the more highly-organised prehistoric
animals drove out their less efficient neighbours.

Personally (but I know nothing about machinery) this will make me very
happy. For the electric engine which can be run by waterpower is a clean