Such a wire would be a kind
of telegraph, because it would make marks or signs at a distance.
Mr. Morse said: I will have a wire a mile long with a pencil, or
something sharp-pointed like a pencil, fastened to the further end;
the wire itself shall not move at all, but the pencil shall, for I
will make electricity run along the wire and move it. Mr. Morse was
then a professor or teacher in the University of the City of New York.
He put up such a wire in one of the rooms of the building, sent the
electricity through it, and found that it made the pencil make just
the marks he wanted it should; that meant that he had invented the
_electric telegraph_; for if he could do this over a mile of wire,
then what was to hinder his doing it over a hundred or even a thousand
miles?
[Illustration: PROFESSOR MORSE AT WORK MAKING HIS TELEGRAPH.]
[Footnote 3: Telegraph (tel'e-graf): this name is made up of two
Greek words, the first of which means _far off_, and the second _to
write_.]
223. How Professor Morse lived while he was making his
telegraph.--But all this was not done in a day, for this invention
cost years of patient labor. At first, Mr. Morse lived in a little
room by himself: there he worked and ate, when he could get anything
to eat; and slept, if he wasn't too tired to sleep.
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