414 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



and into the room where he did the work, and there he showed me a box 

 about the size of a good-sized dry goods box, and he said, "That box has 

 250 miles of fine wire in it." And then he told me something about how 

 he had tried this idea, and then that idea, and one after another had 

 failed; but, believing he was on the right track, he persevered, and finally 

 he worked out by his investigations an attachment that may be placed 

 upon the telephone wire, or in a telephone terminal station, which will 

 reinforce those waves that are passing over the wire, and the attachment 

 may be put on as often as you please; and now, with his invention, you can 

 talk by long-distance telephone clear around the world, if a wire could 

 only be built there, with no limit at all, just repeating this strengthening 

 device. The American Telephone Company was so much pleased to get it 

 that it made him a Christmas present of a million dollars. 



But those investigations which command our attention and our 

 interest in mechanical lines are no more wonderful than the investi- 

 gations that are being made in agricultural lines. What do you think 

 of taking a cow, for example, that will produce only 120 pounds of 

 butter-fat in a year, and then, by intelligent breeding and feeding along 

 lines that have been developed by investigation, improving that ani- 

 mal, generation after generation, until you increase the amount of fat 

 that she gives in a year, not from 120 to 220, but to 1,200 pounds, 

 bringing the amount of fat that one cow gives in one year to more 

 than her weight? Isn't that a marvelous thing to do? What do you 

 think of a man who can go into a country and find 10,000 acres of land 

 lying idle, and that has been idle for years because it would not pro- 

 duce, and taking a sample of that soil into his laboratory and studying 

 it a month, two months, six months, a year, and two years, and then 

 finding that there is a missing element there which can be restored 

 at a cost of only $25 or $30 per acre? And when that is put into the 

 soil, and the soil is properly worked up again, it produces bountifully. 

 Isn't that a wonder? That is investigation, my friends, and we have 

 it always before us as a problem. 



Every farmer knows the fact that the seeds of the sweet clover 

 plant have very hard shells. All of the clover and alfalfa seeds have 

 hard shells, but the sweet clover is particularly hard, and the alfalfa 

 is more or less that way. Every farmer knows that a larger quantity 

 of that kind of seed must be put upon the soil than he expects to grow, 

 and if every seed that was planted would grow, he would have a crop 

 so heavy that the plants would suffocate one another. We all know 

 that seed costs a lot of money, and if we could just use less of it per 

 acre, we would save a lot of money. A scientist has been working on 

 that question for years, off and on at odd times, and he happens to 

 be one of the men in our experiment station at Ames. He tried acids 

 to soften the shells of the seeds, and that would not work. He tried 

 concussion to wear them down, and that would not work. Finally he 

 worked out a device that is so simple that it makes us all ashamed 

 that we did not think of it. He lets the seeds fall so that they are 

 caught by a soft blast of air from a fan and forced against the sur- 



