Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/679

Rh own use. But many years were still to elapse before man could turn the instrument to much service.

Forty years later, another observer noticed that, when a wire which was carrying a current of electricity generated by a battery was placed near the needle of a compass, it turned the needle one way or the other on its pivot. A few years later, Faraday discovered that if such a wire was wound around a piece of soft iron, it made a magnet of the iron. Out of these simple facts have arisen the inventions of the telegraph, the telephone, and the electric light. The oldest of these inventions, the telegraph, is only about forty-five years old, and there are many who can easily remember the feelings of incredulity and amazement with which the claim that the invention had been made was received.

Can any one calculate the influence which this invention is destined to have upon the condition of man? We think it has spread over the world with wonderful rapidity. And so it has. But the world has just begun to use it. Although we see telegraph lines spread all over this country, and we say and think that everybody uses the telegraph, yet the number of messages sent last year did not much exceed one to each two persons in the land, while the number of letters written, including postal-cards, probably exceeded ten to each individual. When messages can be sent, as they most certainly will be, to any part of the land for ten cents or less, multitudes of people, who never think now of using the telegraph except upon matters of pressing importance, will use it upon the most common occasions. How many times would the simple "all well" be exchanged daily between friends if it could be done for five or ten cents!

A multitude of inventors have been necessary to make the telegraph what it is, and its improvement was never going on more rapidly than to-day. I well remember how difficult it was for many persons to form an idea, when the telegraph was first invented, of the way it worked. It was not an uncommon belief that the paper on which the message was written was in some way sent along the wire to its destination. r>ut the idea became familiar after a little time that the electricity only traversed the line and operated a mechanism at the distant place which recorded the message in a new language, or delivered it directly to the ear, and people began to think that they understood how the telegraph was worked. But when inventors began to talk about sending two or three messages over the same wire, at the same time, the limit of belief seemed to have been reached, and people obstinately refused to believe that the thing could be done. But it has been done in more ways than one, and now there are numerous wires in the country over which four or even six messages are sent at the same time. As these inventions enable one wire to do the work of two or four or more, the wires which are wanting are called by the telegraph people "phantom-wires." The improvement of the