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 lauds, 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 
