mountains and great rivers, lay prosperous California. The only
transportation to California was by stage-coach, a sixty days' journey,
or else across Panama, or else round the Horn, a choice of three evils.
But to establish quicker communication, even though transportation might
lag, the men of St. Joseph organized the Pony Express, to cover the
great wild distance by riders on horseback, in ten or twelve days. Relay
stations for the horses and men were set up at appropriate points
all along the way, and a postboy dashed off from St. Joseph every
twenty-four hours, on arrival of the train from the East. And for a time
the Pony Express did its work and did it well. President Lincoln's First
Inaugural was carried to California by the Pony Express; so was the news
of the firing on Fort Sumter. But by 1869. the Pony Express was quietly
superseded by the telegraph, which in that year had completed its
circuits all the way to San Francisco, seven years ahead of the first
transcontinental railroad. And in four more years Cyrus W. Field and
Peter Cooper had carried to complete success the Atlantic Cable; and the
Morse telegraph was sending intelligence across the sea, as well as from
New York to the Golden Gate.

And today ships at sea and stations on land, separated by the sea, speak
to one another in the language of the Morse Code, without the use
of wires. Wireless, or radio, telegraphy was the invention of a
nineteen-year-old boy, Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian; but it has
been greatly extended and developed at the hands of four Americans:
Fessenden, Alexanderson, Langmuir, and Lee De Forest. It was De
Forest's invention that made possible transcontinental and transatlantic
telephone service, both with and without wires.

The story of the telegraph's younger brother, and great ally in
communication, the telephone of Alexander Graham Bell, is another
pregnant romance of American invention. But that is a story by itself,
and it begins in a later period and so falls within the scope of another
volume of these Chronicles.*

* "The Age of Big Business", by Burton J. Hendrick, "The
Chronicle of America", vol. XXXIX.

Wise newspapermen stiffened to attention when the telegraph began
ticking. The New York Herald, the Sun, and the Tribune had been founded
only recently and they represented a new type of journalism, swift,
fearless, and energetic. The proprietors of these newspapers saw that
this new instrument was b