l8 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



There are many things that perhaps at first sight do not seem 

 to have any relation whatever to our own prosperity. And yet, 

 as I have already indicated many times, these things finally 

 come around to be the greatest things in our own development. 

 May I illustrate by a story connected with the development of 

 the telephone? Some thirty or forty years ago there came 

 into the city of New York, on an emigrant ship, a boy front 

 Servia, very poor, landing there with nothing, securing work 

 upon one of the docks at a very low wage. He managed to 

 live in the simplest sort of a way. Filled with a desire to know, 

 however, he was soon enrolled in one of the night schools of 

 New York City. His desire to know was so great, and his am- 

 bition so strong, his intellect so acute, that in a few years he 

 was able to take an examination and enter Columbia University, 

 He made such a 'brilliant record there that upon his graduation 

 he was taken into the faculty as an instructor, received rapid 

 promotion, and soon became a professor in that institution. 

 His chosen branch was mathematics, that dry subject. He de- 

 voted himself particularly to the application of mathematics 

 to various mechanical, electrical, physical problems. He learned 

 one day that the telephone was in trouble because when it 

 extended its line beyond a few miles it was impossible to carry 

 on conversation. There seemed to be a muffling of the sound, 

 an interference of some sort. This man decided there was a 

 problem worth studying, and he began applying his mathematics 

 to it, and his knowledge of the interference of wave motions, 

 and he figured out that under the known laws of electricity 

 this interference ought ^to occur at about a certain distance. 

 He determined almost exactly what that interference ought 

 to be. He contrived a means of overcoming it, tested what he 

 had worked out as a result of his theory, and sold it to the tele- 

 phone company for two million dollars, and the telephone com- 

 pany was at once able, by ineans of his diagram, to extend their 

 lines, and we have the long distance telephone as a result of 

 this man's work. 



Here was the cooperation of a man devoting his time to a 

 pure science, a man simply immersed in formulas and theories, 

 with one of the most practical inventions of the age, making it 

 really worth w'hile, as an instrument of conversational relation- 

 ship, bringing all parts of the country into what we might 



