Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/135

 PETER COOPER 299 Holy See, Sweden, Tuscany, and Turkey appropriated the sum of 400,000 francs in recognition of the use of his instruments in those countries. The telegraph is not the only great success with which the name of Samuel Morse is honorably connected. Having made the acquaintance of Daguerre in Paris, he studied with him the infancy of photography, and was the first to take sun pictures, or daguerreotypes, in America. Also it was he who made the first submarine electric cable. This was laid in New York Harbor ; and from it he was the first to conceive that stupendous idea of the transoceanic telegraph. In the preparations for laying the first Atlantic cable he took an active part, though the attempt of 1857, in which he personally engaged, was not successful. He died April 2, 1872, at New York, where his statue in bronze now stands in the Cen- tral Park. PETER COOPERS Bv Clarence Cook (1791-1883) r t may be said, without exaggeration, that few men in our time and coun- try, not occupying official position, have been so widely and sincerely mourned as the late Peter Cooper. Other men have been as genuinely good as he, and have founded charitable institutions as worthy and as useful, in their way as the one which is to be the lasting mon- ument to his memory. But Peter Cooper held a place in the hearts of his fellow-citizens which belonged to him alone. A man, to outward seeming, in manners and conversation as plain and homespun as his name, he held un- shaken from youth to old age and to few men is it allotted to live in uninter- rupted health and action to the age of ninety-two the confidence, the respect and the affection of all sorts of people : the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the learned and the unlearned, people of all parties and of all religions. Character is the accumulation of little actions, and makes its deepest impression, of course, when these actions have been observed by great numbers of people during a long period of time. The whole of his ninety-two years, with the ex-
 * Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.