^^o^^EMBEE 23, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



649 



June, two hundred and twenty-five secured 

 positions in this great establishment. 



I do not argue here nor do I wish it to 

 be understood that as soon as a graduate 

 has secured his diploma he is ready to take 

 a position as a full-fledged astronomer, 

 electrician, engineer, chemist or other posi- 

 tion for which the university has prepared 

 him, but I do say and believe that the 

 earnest student will in his three or four 

 years become so well grounded in the fun- 

 damental principles taught him that a very 

 few years of practical work will place him 

 as far along as the self-made man after 

 half a lifetime of hard, hard struggle to 

 gain such knowledge. There are noble ex- 

 ceptions to this statement, but they are all 

 too rare. 



A number of years ago I was invited to 

 a luncheon given by the friends of Rose 

 Polytechnic Institute, of Terre Haute, to a 

 body of scientific men. Richard Thomp- 

 son, so well known as 'Old Dick' Thomp- 

 son, who was Secretary of the Navy under 

 President Hayes, was an honored guest, 

 and when called upon for a speech, gave 

 us this interesting experience that hap- 

 pened when he was a member of congress 

 from that district in 1844, 



He with his colleague from the state de- 

 cided that year to go to New York before 

 going to Washington. At the hotel he 

 found several congressmen from the east. 

 The day after his arrival he was asked by 

 a member from Massachusetts if he would 

 not go across the way and see a machine 

 invented by a man by the name of Morse, 

 by which, it was claimed, he could send a 

 message from Washington to Baltimore in 

 less than a second of time. You may be 

 sure we- were all deeply interested in the 

 old man's story as he stood before us with 

 his flowing white hair. "I saw the ma- 

 chine," he said, "and after Mr. Morse 

 described it to me, he very kindly said. 



' If you will ask me a question I will answer 

 it through the ten miles of wire I have 

 placed through this house.' 



"I asked him," said Mr. Thompson, 

 "who would be the next President of the 

 United States. Immediately there came 

 the message on a little paper ribbon, and 

 the answer was Henry Clay!" 



Mr. Thompson replied that 'he knew 

 nothing about the machine, but he liked its 

 politics,' and promised to vote for a sub- 

 sidy to put a telegraph line between Balti- 

 more and Washington. He then told us 

 that he voted for the $25,000 asked for by 

 Mr. Morse, as did also his colleague. At 

 the next election he was elected by 'the 

 skin of his teeth,' but his colleague was 

 defeated because he had wasted the public 

 money. I need not enlarge on how Morse 

 lost his signals by laying his wires under- 

 ground, how Ezra Cornell, the founder of 

 Cornell University, came to his rescue and 

 enabled him to place his wires upon poles, 

 and that one of the first messages that came 

 over the wires was the announcement of 

 the result of the election of the President — 

 but it was not Henry Clay. 



This story is recorded here solely for the 

 purpose of showing how great have been 

 the results brought about in telegraphy, 

 largely due to the work of college men who 

 ha,ve evolved it to such a degree of perfec- 

 tion that it now answers almost every de- 

 mand made upon it, exacting as they are. 



I was a guest at the laboratory of my 

 friend Professor Rowland some years ago 

 when he was developing his system of 

 quadruple telegraphy, sending four mes- 

 sages both ways over one wire and printing 

 the messages in letters of the alphabet. 

 Your restless scientific investigators, not 

 satisfied, have taken another step forward 

 and are now sending electric waves across 

 old ocean without the conventional wire. 

 Some day they may girdle the earth in this 



