scale. So long as labor
was plentiful and cheap, only a comparatively few farmers could be
interested in expensive machinery, but when the war called the young
men away the worried farmers gladly turned to the new machines and
found that they were able not only to feed the Union, but also to export
immense quantities of wheat to Europe, even during the war. Suddenly the
West leaped into great prosperity. And long centuries of economic and
social development were spanned within a few decades.

CHAPTER VI. AGENTS OF COMMUNICATION

Communication is one of man's primal needs. There was indeed a time when
no formula of language existed, when men communicated with each other by
means of gestures, grimaces, guttural sounds, or rude images of things
seen; but it is impossible to conceive of a time when men had no means
of communication at all. And at last, after long ages, men evolved in
sound the names of the things they knew and the forms of speech; ages
later, the alphabet and the art of writing; ages later still, those
wonderful instruments of extension for the written and spoken word: the
telegraph, the telephone, the modern printing press, the phonograph, the
typewriter, and the camera.

The word "telegraph" is derived from Greek and means "to write far"; so
it is a very exact word, for to write far is precisely what we do when
we send a telegram. The word today, used as a noun, denotes the system
of wires with stations and operators and messengers, girdling the earth
and reaching into every civilized community, whereby news is carried
swiftly by electricity. But the word was coined long before it was
discovered that intelligence could be communicated by electricity. It
denoted at first a system of semaphores, or tall poles with movable
arms, and other signaling apparatus, set within sight of one another.
There was such a telegraph line between Dover and London at the time
of Waterloo; and this telegraph began relating the news of the battle,
which had come to Dover by ship, to anxious London, when a fog set in
and the Londoners had to wait until a courier on horseback arrived. And,
in the very years when the real telegraph was coming into being,
the United States Government, without a thought of electricity, was
considering the advisability of setting up such a system of telegraphs
in the United States.

The telegraph is one of America's gifts to the world. The honor for this
invention falls to Samuel Finley Bree