IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 27 



almost instantaneous transmission of motor and sensory 

 impulses throughout the body politic. In general terms 

 we may compare the growth of the communicating system 

 of society to the development of the nervous system in the 

 history of animal life, where the scattered central cells of 

 Nature's first sketch of such a system are later gathered 

 into ganglia and ganglia massed into a brain connected 

 with every part of the body by ramifying nerve filaments. 

 Of all social organs this seems the most retarded in its 

 evolution. In primitive society it is only the smallest 

 groups, such as the family and the village community, 

 which have a facility of communication comparable to 

 that of the lowest of the metazoa. In the larger groups 

 of the tribe and nation we find a stage more advanced than 

 that of the hydra only after science has made possible the 

 railway post and the telegraph and telephone. 



That Morse is the inventor of the electric telegraph is a 

 statement more veracious than that of the Vermont farmer 

 who said that everybody knew that Edison invented elec- 

 tricity. But the name of the inventor of every great tool 

 of society is legion. Morse set the key stone of the arch, 

 but its voussoirs had been built by investigators unknown 

 to popular fame in many lands, and even the keystone 

 was almost placed in the hands of the distinguished 

 inventor by the great physicist, Henry Oersted, who in 

 1819 deflected the magnetic compass by a voltaic current 

 in a neighboring wire; Arago, whose experiments with 

 iron filings proved that this current would generate mag- 

 netism; Ampere, with his suggestion of the possibility of 

 signalling at a distance by the deflection of needles; 

 Sweiger, who took up Oersted's experiment, and discov- 

 ered that the deflecting force of the current was increased 

 when the wire was coiled about the magnet; Sturgeon, who 

 making use of Arago's discovery, replaced Sweiger's mag- 

 netic needle with soft' iron and thus constructed the first 

 temporary or soft magnet; Henry, who strengthened the 

 electro-magnet, and used it with over a mile of wire to give 

 signals by tapping a bell; Gauss and Weber, who strung 

 their wires at Goettingen and read the deflections of the 



