IN THE ancient myths explaining the discovery of fire, it is almost always said that the gods objected to man’s having fire because when he could make a fire he would become like one of them. When Congress was discussing in 1842 whether it was willing to spend money to try out Morse’s newly invented telegraph by building a line between Washington and Baltimore, we find a like idea, that if man could bridge space in that way he would have gone beyond ordinary human powers and become superhuman. The chairman of the committee which was urging the building of the line said frankly that it was so startling as to seem almost irreverent for man to annihilate space. Only to God had it been possible to be everywhere at one and the same time. Yet here was this amazing invention by which it was claimed that a man might sit at an instrument in one place and send messages over a wire to a man twenty, thirty, forty, one hundred or even more miles away. If such a thing could be done, it would lift man above being a mere man into something greater. For practical purposes he would be able to do business in two places at the same time.

Congress did decide to put in the telegraph, as we shall see in the next story. Its members little thought that within fifteen years after that first line was installed the President of the United States and the Queen of the British Empire would be exchanging compliments over the Atlantic cable; that within thirty-five years men would be actually talking over wires; and that eighty years later men would be talking across space without wires. There is no more thrilling group of stories than those which tell how in the last hundred years man has achieved the conquest of space.

The telegraph was invented by a portrait painter. Samuel B. F. Morse was born in 1791, the year of Faraday’s birth. The son of a Massachusetts minister, he went to Phillips Academy, Andover, and to Yale College. At Yale he had courses with Professor Benjamin Silliman, one of the leading men of science in America at that time. There he learned of the new marvel, electricity.

But painting, not science, was Morse’s special interest. In college he painted small pictures of his friends which he sold them for five dollars apiece. After college he studied under one of the best-known painters of the day, and went with him to England for further study. There he won unusual notice for so young a man, receiving a gold medal for work in sculpture and having his paintings hung with those of England’s best artists. His money gave out, and he came home. While he found instant recognition as a painter, it was extremely hard, in spite of his popularity, to earn a living by his art. A year after his return we find him and his brother inventing an improvement for a fire-engine pump in an attempt to get a little extra money. In 1829 he went abroad again to spend three years working in the art centers of Europe.

It was on the voyage home in 1832 that his interest turned to electricity and the telegraph. One of his fellow passengers was a Boston physician, Dr. Charles T. Jackson, who had seen the famous French scientist, Ampère, perform brilliant experiments with electrical apparatus and was bringing home an electromagnet which he exhibited in the ship’s cabin. Morse was interested because of his early studies at Yale, and made many inquiries. Learning that electricity, induced by an electromagnet, could be made to pass over wires for any distance, and that its speed in such travel was practically instantaneous, he made the remark, "If that is so, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity." Or, in the simpler language of our day, why should not news be sent? In that moment the idea of the telegraph was conceived.

It is one thing to have an idea; another, to carry it out through the long processes and difficulties of invention. Would it be possible for Morse to arrange an electrical device containing an electric magnet, by means of which signals and messages could be sent long distances over a wire? To us the idea is so familiar that it seems obvious. One hundred years ago it was startling and revolutionary.

For all the rest of the long voyage Morse worked on the idea, filling his notebook with sketches of apparatus and schemes for an alphabet of dots, lines, and spaces. When he landed he remarked to the captain of the boat, "Well, Captain, should you hear of the telegraph one of these days as the wonder of the world, remember the discovery was made on board the good ship Sully."

The wonder is that Morse had the enthusiasm and persistence to push through to success. He had no money, hardly enough from his art work even to live. No one knew much about electricity; so it was hard to get the needed materials. A blacksmith’s was the nearest approach to an electrical shop, for here one might get iron to bend into a magnet and wind with wire. He had little scientific knowledge himself, and less experience with such apparatus. He rented a tiny studio in a New York office building where he ate (when he had money to buy food), cooking his own meals there, and sleeping and working in the midst of his clutter of art and electrical tools.

But he was possessed with his idea. The fact on which he worked was the discovery made by Hans Oersted a dozen years before. When an electric current is sent through a coil wound about a bar of soft iron, the iron becomes a magnet. Oersted proved that, you remember, by showing that a compass needle was pulled around by that magnet. When the current is shut off, the iron ceases to be a magnet. Somehow, by Morse’s plan, a machine must be made by which a person at one end of a wire could start a current and then break it, start it and break it, in a way that would give signals to a person sitting at the other end of the wire. That was what he was trying to accomplish. The difficulties in the way of carrying it out were tremendous, particularly to one who had neither money nor the right kinds of supplies.

Morse toiled for three years and finally had a sending instrument which worked fairly well. When he was asked later why he did not make a second machine at the same time to send an answer back, he replied that he had not the money to construct it. He did not borrow, he went on to explain, because he had always had a principle against going into debt, and he preferred delay because he could not be sure that he would ever be able to pay back such a loan. To-day the materials for such an instrument would probably cost about five dollars.

Five years after Morse had begun his work there came the fortunate meeting with Alfred Vail, a young man whose father, Judge Stephen Vail, had built in his own iron works in New Jersey the engines for the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. Vail went to a private exhibition of the telegraph, and became very keen about its possibilities. He came in as a partner, went right to work with Morse, helped to improve the instruments and to work out the familiar Morse code of dots and dashes which should be used in signaling. Judge Vail gave his son two thousand dollars for the work, and allowed the use of his foundry.

In that same year, 1837, Congress became roused to interest by similar work being done abroad, especially by Sir Charles Wheatstone, who was to be the inventor of the English telegraph. A circular was sent out by the Secretary of the Treasury asking for reports on such work as was being done in private laboratories in this country. Morse sent at once a full description of his instrument.

Meanwhile Judge Vail was being laughed at by his friends for having put money into this crazy idea. He began to become a little doubtful himself as the weeks dragged on and he saw no results. On January 6, 1838, a foundry boy was sent to the Vail house to ask the judge to step over to his son’s shop in the foundry. There he was asked to write the message he wished to have sent and received on the new telegraph. He wrote the message, "A patient waiter is no loser," and handed it to his son. His son clicked it off on his instrument. Shortly Morse, who was at the other end of the line, reported the message that he had received. The test had worked, the message was accurately received, and the judge was most enthusiastic. The telegraph had been invented.

Six years later a bill was before the Congress of the United States to build a forty-mile telegraph line as a government experiment. Morse had been through all sorts of difficulties in those six years, during which it seemed impossible to arouse any interest in the invention. The bill finally passed the House by eight votes and was referred to the Senate. There it seemed doomed to certain defeat. There were hundreds of bills ahead of it.

On the last night of the session Morse sat in the gallery waiting for the vote. A Senator came to him and said: "There is no use in your staying here. The Senate is not in sympathy with your project. I advise you to give it up, return home, and think no more about it."

The inventor went back to his hotel utterly discouraged. His last chance seemed gone. He paid his bill through breakfast the next morning, bought a ticket to New York, and had just thirty-seven cents left in his pocket.

Morse was called out from breakfast next morning to be congratulated by Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, the daughter of his friend, the Commissioner of Patents.

"I have come to congratulate you," she said.

"Indeed, for what?" inquired the downcast inventor. "On the passage of your bill."

Morse assured her that she must be mistaken. He had stayed late, and there was no hope for it in the press of business. She told him that her father had stayed until the end, heard the measure carried through without debate, and then had seen the President put his name to the bill.

"You shall send the first message over that telegraph line when it is opened," exclaimed Morse in delight; and so it happened.

On May 24, 1844, the line was to be opened. Annie Ellsworth handed to Samuel Morse, who was sitting at a sending instrument in the Supreme Court Room of the Capitol Building, a paper with the Bible words, "What God hath wrought." Morse ticked them over the wires to Baltimore, where Vail received them and in a few moments ticked them back.

The telegraph had become a working invention.

Although this first sending of a message was a success, it did not rouse any particular interest. But two days later something happened that stirred people to a sense of its importance.

The national Democratic convention was at that time in session at Baltimore. On May 26th, two days after the first public telegraphic message, this convention nominated James K. Polk for President and Silas Wright for Vice-President. Vail telegraphed the news to Morse at Washington. Morse took the message, wrote it out, and handed it to Mr. Wright who was in the Senate chamber. Wright at once said, "Tell them I cannot serve." Morse sent the message back over the wire, and Vail took it to the convention hall. There it was not believed; the report was credited to Wright’s enemies as a trick to keep the election from him. The convention adjourned until a committee could go to Washington and see Mr. Wright. The next day the committee returned. The message as it had come over the wire was correct. The convention had simply wasted a day and the committee a trip to prove it.

When this story was reported in the newspapers, the public began to wake up. They had caught a glimpse of the immense future possibilities of the telegraph as it would bridge distances and annihilate space.

Morse was fifty-three years old when these first messages were sent. The next twelve years of his life, as he tried to establish and improve the telegraph, were far from easy. But he lived to be eighty-one years old and to see his system established all over the United States. He was honored by all, and the bitter poverty of his years of struggle was balanced by the comfort and wealth which his invention brought him.

On August 5, 1858, President Buchanan received the following message:

To the President of the United States, Washington, D. C.
DEAR Sir:
The Atlantic Telegraph cable on board the U. S. steam frigate Niagara and her British Majesty’s Agamemnon was joined in mid-ocean, July 29th, and has been successfully laid; and as soon as the two ends are connected with the land lines, Queen Victoria will send a message to you, and the cable will be kept free until your reply has been transmitted. With great respect,

I remain
Your ob’d’t serv’t,
CYRUS W. FIELD.

In this brief letter is told the story of one of the great moments in world communication, when England and the United States were joined by slender wires stretched under two thousand miles of ocean, and Queen Victoria and President Buchanan could exchange within a few brief minutes messages of mutual congratulation.

That moment had not been reached without tremendous effort amid heart-breaking disappointments. Reading the story of some of these early undertakings, like the telegraph, the telephone, and the submarine cable, one stands aghast at the series of trials and misfortunes through which these pioneers worked. Time and again their hopes were wrecked by accident or poverty or some mischance due to facts unknown to any one until they had been learned by costly experience. Yet the faith in their inventions carried them on until they were borne on the crest of the wave to success.

As the cable is simply an under-water telegraph system, it is natural that Morse should have built one of the first cable lines. He laid it under New York Harbor in 1842, while he was still waiting for Congress to become interested in his invention. Other lines were laid abroad, under the Channel, and between England and Ireland. In 1852 Cyrus W. Field, a young merchant of New York, became interested in the idea of laying a cable which should connect the Old World with the New. From the moment when the idea first came to him until the deed was done, this was his ruling passion. To it he devoted every ounce of his strength and enthusiasm.

Both the British and the American governments responded cordially to the idea of a submarine telegraph. Navy vessels made soundings of the depths of the ocean for the proposed routes. A company was organized to finance the project, with Cyrus Field putting in one fourth of the money which was thought to be needed. It seemed as if the idea was on its way to quick fulfillment. But these enthusiasts reckoned without the difficulties.

First the cable must be made. It was decided to build 2,500 miles of cable, although the distance over the proposed route between Ireland and Newfoundland was a little less than two thousand miles. The cable was to carry seven copper wires, these being insulated with gutta-percha, wound with tarred hemp, and protected by a heavy casing of iron wires. To lay the cable England offered the Agamemnon and the United States the Niagara, warships large enough to carry this bulky load and the machinery with which it should be paid out into the water. Experience proved that this machinery was one of the most important and difficult problems of the task.

In 1857 the vessels set out from the Irish coast. When four hundred miles had been safely laid, the cable broke. All the section that had gone overboard was hopelessly lost. Half a million dollars had been sunk in the enterprise. There was nothing to do but give up for the time.

In June, 1858, another attempt was made. This time the two vessels were to go to mid-ocean, each with half of the cable coiled in its hold. There they were to splice the two parts and begin to lay them in opposite directions. On the way out there was a terrible storm which the overloaded vessels barely survived. Arrived at mid-ocean, they spliced the cable and began to pay it out. With three miles laid the cable broke. They returned and spliced it again. This time they got fifty miles apart, and it broke. Again they returned and made another splice. They went very cautiously this time, and got two hundred miles apart. Suddenly and without warning the cable broke and disappeared into the sea. The expedition must be given up.

Now surely the attempt would be abandoned. But no! in July they were at it again with better machinery. This time the vessels had been separated only three hours after the splicing was done when a very large whale appeared, approaching the Agamemnon with great speed. It seemed as if it were making direct for the cable, but fortunately it merely grazed it and passed on. The Niagara meanwhile passed alarmingly near enormous icebergs, but steered by them without having the cable hit. On August 5th Mr. Field could report to President Buchanan that both ends of the cable had been safely landed. The Queen and the President exchanged greetings, and the great achievement was regarded as completed.

Then, with the cable a little less than a month old, after 732 despatches had been sent, messages ceased. The electricians had not fully understood the needs of such a cable. Too much pressure had been put on it in the effort to send messages so great a distance, and it was ruined. Think of the disappointment to Cyrus Field and to the men who had put their money in again and again! Years of effort, thousands of dollars spent, two governments involved, one month of messages—and then only a useless collection of wires running for two thousand miles under water but silent forever!

Happily the month of its operation had shown its value. In one despatch the London War Office had countermanded the departure of two regiments which were about to leave Canada for England and had saved by that single message two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. When a difficulty came up a little later between England and America, we find the London Times speaking of the cable as a peacemaker, and saying, "We nearly went to war with America over the Trent affair because we had no telegraph across the Atlantic." In 1859 the British Government appointed engineers to study into the matter of whether a cable could be laid and kept working. They reported in 1863 that it could. Meanwhile the Civil War was on in America.

In 1865 Cyrus Field organized another company, chiefly with English money, and chartered the Great Eastern, a vessel large enough to carry the whole cable at once. This time they proceeded with the most anxious care, and got two thirds of the way across the Atlantic when the ship’s machinery broke under the tremendous strain and the cable snapped and was lost. Three times they grappled for it in 11,000 feet of water and three times they brought it to the surface, only to lose it overboard again. The Great Eastern went back to home waters, but did Field give up? Not for a day. A new company was formed, new money was obtained, and in July, 1866, a second cable was successfully laid in the short period of two weeks. Then the Great Eastern was put to work to reclaim the cable lost the year before. Again and again this cable was located, lifted part way to the surface of the water on grappling hooks, and lost. Twenty-nine times that ship’s crew caught. it, lifted it, and lost it again. The thirtieth time they brought it to the surface of the water and carried it to the station at Newfoundland. So that summer’s work resulted in two cables uniting the British Isles and the American continent, both incomparably better in quality than the original one that gave only a month’s service.

Since that summer the two worlds have been in constant communication under the broad ocean that divides them.

"If I can make a deaf mute talk, I can make iron talk." In these words, spoken by Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone was born.

Bell could make deaf mutes talk. He was doing it at a school which he had started in Boston. His father, a distinguished Scotsman, had invented a system which he called "visible speech." He showed deaf mutes who had never heard a sound in what positions the mouth, lips, throat, and tongue were held to make sounds. By imitating people who spoke, they learned to speak. Young Alexander had known about these things from childhood. When he was a boy he and his brother had invented a device which said "Ma-ma" as well as some of our modern dolls say it. He knew as hardly any other man in the world knew just how sounds were made, how they were carried in the air, and how they could be heard.

Of course, such a man was exactly the one to invent the telephone. The marvel is that so famous a teacher should get interested in the idea and gain the electrical knowledge to make such a machine.

Bell went up to London as a young man and there met Sir Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of the English telegraph. He became tremendously interested in the telegraph and also in some German experiments in which a tuning fork was being set in motion by an electric current and made to give out sounds without being struck. If a tuning fork could be made to give out sounds in this way, why should a telegraph wire signal only by long clicks and short? Why should it not be possible to have a musical telegraph in which sounds were carried over the wire? Bell pictured a musical telegraph with as many notes as the keys of a piano. Several messages could then be sent over the wire at the same time by "playing" different tunes on the keys.

After he came to Boston and started his famous school there, he was at first too busy to think of his plan for a musical telegraph; but later, with an inventor friend who was the father of one of his pupils, he returned to it. Finally with the backing of this man and of the father of another pupil, he gave up the school to put all his time on this invention.

As he worked on it, the larger idea came to him, "If I can make a deaf mute talk, I can make iron talk." No longer was he satisfied with the idea of sending only the notes of the scale over a telegraph wire. He wanted to be able to talk into a wire, and have someone at the other end of the wire hear the words as he had spoken them.

To us, to whom the telephone is so familiar, the idea seems simple and reasonable. To Bell’s two backers, who were paying all his bills, and to others with whom he talked, it seemed crazy. A musical telegraph they had begun to believe in, but talking over a wire was beyond reason. So Bell had to agree to devote half his day to the musical telegraph, saving only half for his new idea.

The steps by which he came to his success are too many to tell here. He worked in the attic of an electrical shop in Boston, with an apprentice assistant by the name of Watson. One hot June day, when they were trying one of their endless tests, a faint sound came over the wire. Bell rushed into the room where Watson was trying to send signals. "What did you do then?" he cried. "Don’t change anything. Let me see." For forty weeks Bell worked on the discovery made on that June day. Then, on March 10, 1876, Watson standing in the basement at one end of a telephone wire, heard Bell who was in the attic say over the wire, "Mr. Watson, please come here. I want you." That was the first telephone message ever sent.

The first telephone really did seem to make iron talk. There was a mouthpiece with a small disk of soft iron set into it. When words were spoken into it, they set sound waves moving in the air, which set the iron disk to moving or vibrating. The movements in the disk varied the electric current in the wire which led to the receiving instrument at the other end. Here there was another iron disk. The electric current made this second iron disk vibrate exactly as the first one had done. By vibrating in this way the second iron disk said into the air the words spoken at the other end of the wire. It was as if the first iron disk listened to the words; they were changed into electric current and traveled along the wire; the second iron disk caught them and changed them back into sound, into the same words. That is practically the same system as that on which our telephones work to-day.

The telephone had been invented, but no one was particularly interested. The great Centennial Exposition for the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence was then opening in Philadelphia. Mr. Hubbard, one of the two men who had backed Alexander Bell through all the years of work on the telephone, got a small table in a remote corner of the building behind the stairway for the exhibition of the new machine. It was there for six weeks and no one paid any attention to it. Finally Bell went to Philadelphia himself and sat at the table behind it. Sometimes a passer-by stopped to look at it and allowed him to show how it worked. They were interested in it as a curious scientific toy. But of what use could it ever be? Suppose speech could be sent over a wire, who cared?

At last the judges came to inspect this machine, as they were inspecting every exhibit in the building. It was seven o’clock in the evening. They were tired, hot, and hungry. One took up the telephone receiver, looked at it, and put it down without even lifting it to his ear. The group was passing by when suddenly their attention was caught.

Dom Pedro, the young Emperor of Brazil, the most picturesque figure at the Exposition, came up accompanied by the Empress Theresa and attended by a retinue of gaily attired countrymen. Seeing the young inventor he rushed up to him and greeted him with enthusiasm. He had visited his school for deaf mutes in Boston years before and been greatly interested. He inquired what Professor Bell was doing here. Bell showed him his machine and gave him one of the receivers. Dom Pedro stood holding it at his ear while the group of judges and attendants looked on. Bell, at a little distance, spoke low into the other end of the wire.

"My God, it talks," said Dom Pedro.

The great moment had come. The judges, looking on, returned to hear for themselves this toy. They stayed till ten o’clock that night "listening in" as one after another spoke into it. The machine which has been said to be "the most valuable single patent ever issued" was pulled out from its dark corner behind the stairs and placed in the judge’s pavilion where the public could see and wonder at it. The telephone had come into its own.

Bell had received his patent on his twenty-ninth birthday. On March 10, 1876, he had stood in the attic of the Boston shop and spoken to Watson in the cellar. Watson had dropped the receiver and rushed joyfully up three flights of stairs to say, "I can hear you. I can hear the words!" In January, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell, full of years and honor, sat in New York at an instrument which was an exact reproduction of his first machine. He was opening the first transcontinental telephone line. Again as on that first memorable day he said, "Mr. Watson, please come here. I want you." And Watson, who was sitting at the other end of the line in San Francisco replied, "It would take me a week now."

THOMAS EDISON AND HIS PHONOGRAPH The first words solemnly recited by this astonishing machine were, "Mary had a little lamb."

One summer day in 1877 the young inventor, Thomas Edison, was at work in his laboratory when one of his assistants, John Kruesi, came and put on his table a model of a little machine which Edison had told him to make. It was Edison’s custom to draw on paper a design of a machine he wanted made, write instructions as to the way to put it together and the materials to be used, put down the amount of money he would pay for it, and hand the paper to one of his men. Kruesi, one of his best model makers, had received such a paper a few days before, with instructions and a price limit of $18. Now the machine was done, and he brought it to Edison.

Edison looked at it, turned its handle, took a sheet of tin-foil and fastened it around a revolving cylinder which was turned by the handle. By this time not only Kruesi was watching, but other men in the laboratory had gathered round, for they had heard that Edison had said that this queer model was to "record talking" and they wanted to see if it would work. Edison adjusted the mouthpiece, which was like that of a telephone, and began to turn the cylinder with the handle, shouting into the mouthpiece as he did so:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.

"Mein Gott in Himmell" exclaimed John Kruesi, the faithful instrument maker who had just built the machine which was giving this performance. And Edison himself confesses to equal surprise.

"I never was so taken aback in my life," says Edison of that moment. He had expected to catch a word or two imperfectly. But here were the words given back clearly and exactly.

Edison had hit on the idea of a machine that would talk while he was working on an improvement for the telegraph. He was trying to make a device that would record more rapidly than any operator could receive them the messages as they came in over the wire. To do this he had made a revolving disk of paper on which the dots and dashes were to be recorded and had set a metal point like a pen to writing on it. One day as the disk was turning rapidly, a sound was given out. Edison studied on what caused that sound, and made up his mind that a talking machine could be made. This model was the result.

When the men in the laboratory realized what Edison had accomplished, they joined hands and sang and danced around him. Then they began putting on new strips of tin-foil, talking, shouting, singing into them, and then turning the crank and hearing it repeat what they had said or sung. None of them went home that night. They stayed till dawn, marveling at the wonderful, simple toy.

The next morning Edison took his little phonograph under his arm and went over to the office of the Scientific American in New York. Here he did the same thing, putting his model on the desk of the editor, solemnly reciting

Mary had a little lamb—.

What was it about this machine that gave it such an appeal? Why was it a great moment in science when it was invented? Once more man had won a notable victory over time and space. A man might speak or sing into it in Paris or New York. The machine would take the speech or song as the camera takes the record of an event by a flash of light. That speech or song could then be heard all over the world in exactly the tones in which it was given. Not only that! it could be heard ten, twenty, one hundred years later as well as the day after the record was made. Through phonograph records our children’s children will hear the voices of men and women who will have gone from the earth before they were born. The phonograph has many interesting and practical uses in everyday business life and in entertainment. But its real place is in its wider service in giving man this victory over time and space.

To no one man can be given the credit for discovering the facts and thinking out the theories which led to the modern miracle of talking across space without wires. Perhaps Faraday began it with his wonderful studies of the "fields of force" about a magnet and of the general principles of electricity. "Action at a distance" was his striking description of some of the effects which he observed. Maxwell a few years later announced the theory that electromagnetic waves traveled through the ether of space at the same rate and in the same manner that light waves did. Hemrich Hertz a few years later produced and detected those waves. Sir William Crookes wrote in 1892: "Here is unfolded to us a new and astonishing world. . . . Rays of light will not pierce through a wall, nor, as we know only too well, through a London fog. But the electrical vibrations . . . will easily pierce such mediums. . . Here, then, is revealed the bewildering possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our present appliances."

Guglielmo Marconi, son of an Italian father and an Irish mother, was twenty-one years old when he began to try to use these electric waves for the practical purpose of sending messages across space. In 1895 he made experiments at his father’s villa on the outskirts of Bologna in Italy. At first he sent his message over a space of only a few yards, and then from room to room. Next he tried longer distances in the garden. In 1896 he went to England and took out his first patent. He used a Morse key for sending and an equally familiar "eye" or "detector" for receiving. In one sense there was nothing new in his apparatus so far as its single pieces went. The novelty came in the way he put them together and the result he accomplished with them.

Marconi’s first English experiments were made in London between government buildings. The British post-office officials showed a cordial interest in his invention and gave him every facility for carrying out tests. Their wildest dream, as one of them later remarked, was that such signals might come through for half a mile. In 1897 Marconi sent messages under their observation over a space of four miles on Salisbury Plain. In 1898 a Dublin newspaper got news of boat races at Kingstown from a ship which followed the boats and sent reports ashore. Messages were successfully sent across the Channel, and on January 19, 1903, a message of greeting was sent from Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States, to the King of England. This was only forty-five years after the notable interchange between President Buchanan and Queen Victoria over the Atlantic cable. But while that exchange of greetings had come only after two thousand miles of heavy cable had been laboriously laid under the sea, this message covered a greater distance from Wellfleet on Cape Cod to Poidhu, England, without an intervening wire. To-day a message can be sent around the world in a few seconds.

By radio the world is made one. The peoples of the earth are bound together by an invisible bond over which speech can be freely carried. An ocean cable can be cut. Telephone wires may be blown down. But the invisible ether through which electric waves travel knows no national boundaries and can meet with no accidents. A whole country, half the world, can be audience at a single speech. News can be given a world-wide distribution in a few moments. The airplane circles the globe more rapidly than man has ever before traveled. The radio is as swift as human speech. Through it man has won his greatest victory over time and space. By its means the world is made one.

RADIO ANTENNA ON THE U.S.S. "TEXAS" The "voice" of a battleship precedes it around the world.