Part 14

Not long after this, some of Mrs. Greene’s guests were talking about the unprosperous condition of the South. It could be remedied, they thought, if a way could be devised to separate the short staple cotton from the seed, which would make cotton a profitable crop. The seed and lint of the sea island cotton do not adhere so closely, and these were separated by means of a roller-gin, acting on the principle of the clothes-wringer. But the sea island cotton can be grown only in a certain section near the coast. The seeds and lint of the short staple, or upland, cotton adhere so closely that they had to be separated by hand. Mrs. Greene suggested that Mr. Whitney, who was so clever with tools, should invent a machine to do this work. Whitney was willing to try. He had never even seen cotton in the seed; he got some and examined it and tried to devise a machine to do the work of the human fingers.

His first plan was to have a cylinder on which were fastened circular saws; as the cylinder revolved the saw-teeth would catch the cotton and drag it from the seeds. On the plantation he could not get tin or metal plates to make these saws; finally he decided that teeth of wire would do as well or better. He made a model of a gin which worked well, except for the fact that the cotton lint stuck to the saw-teeth and clogged them.

“I must devise some way to get the cotton off the teeth,” he said.

“Use a brush,” suggested Mrs. Greene, picking up a brush and with it removing the cotton from the wires. Mr. Whitney accepted the suggestion and put rows of small brushes on a second cylinder to meet the teeth and take off the cotton.

In 1793 Whitney went north to secure a patent for his machine. The Secretary of State then was Jefferson who was interested in all inventions and especially in those useful in agriculture. He asked many questions about the workings of the gin which he foresaw would prove a vast benefit to the cotton-growing states.

Cotton was raised and sold now at a profit, for one man could gin a thousand pounds in the time it had taken to seed one pound by hand. Macaulay said, “What Peter the Great did to make Russia dominant, Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin has more than equaled in its relation to the power and progress of the United States.”

I wish I could tell you that Whitney won fortune by his invention which was such a great benefit to his countrymen, but this was not the case. Men infringed his patent rights and there was for a long time a foolish prejudice among buyers against ginned cotton. Whitney spent thirteen years struggling for justice and recognition, and his patent had almost expired before his legal rights were established. Friends made an effort to get the patent, which ran only fourteen years, extended, but in vain.

Whitney was destined to be more successful in another undertaking. He thought that the United States ought to make its own firearms, and he succeeded in getting money advanced by the government to aid him in starting a factory near New Haven. He invented new methods which proved successful and profitable. His factory brought him fortune and his prosperous latter years were spent in his Connecticut home.

Another American benefactor of the farmer first and so of the whole country was Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaper. He was born in Virginia in 1809. In his boyhood, grain was cut with the sickle. It was gathered into bundles by hand, tied, and put up in stacks. The grain was separated from the straw and chaff by beating it with flails. This was slow and tiresome work.

Many men before McCormick tried to invent machines to reap grain. Some of the English machines were fairly successful. You would think that the English farmers would welcome the invention. Instead, they said that it would deprive laborers of work, and they threatened to kill the makers if they continued to manufacture these machines.

In sparsely-populated America people were on the lookout for labor-saving inventions; they welcomed the reaping machine which was invented by McCormick in 1831. This useful invention won both money and fame for Mr. McCormick; a part of his well-gained wealth was devoted to the endowment of schools.

In 1851 at the World’s Fair in London there was a trial of different reapers. Under unfavorable conditions, the McCormick machine did perfect work; at a timed trial it proved that it could cut twenty acres in a day. A farmer who was present broke his sickle across his knee, saying that it would no longer be needed. Wonderful improvements have been made in the reaper. There are great machines now on the prairie lands of the west which cut the grain, thresh it, and carry it from the fields in sacks ready for the mill.

Mowing-machines constructed on a plan similar to the reapers, cut grass, and horse-rakes and hay-forks handle the hay so cheaply that the production of hay now costs less than a fifth of what it did under the old methods. Flails, too, have been replaced by modern threshing machines.

The labor-saving machines used on a farm enable a few people to do with ease the work which formerly required the labor of many. As fewer men are required in the country, more are set free to engage in business and trade. For these purposes, they gather in cities, which have gained size and wealth that would have been impossible under old agricultural conditions.

Let us now consider the improvements in methods of communication. The carrying of letters and papers by the great postal system of our government, is done chiefly on the steam cars and steamboats, which have already been described. You know, however, that by means of the telegraph and the telephone messages can be transmitted much more promptly than by mail. Both these modes of communication are recent. Before they were invented, various methods were used to transmit intelligence quickly. You learned how, by the firing of cannon along the canal, in two hours it was announced in New York that the first boat was starting down the Erie Canal.

A thousand years ago, beacon-fires were lighted along the coasts of England to warn people of the approach of an enemy; a hundred years ago, similar signals were used in our own country. Sometimes a wood fire was kindled, sometimes a pot of tar was set on fire. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the semaphore was used to some extent. This consists of a horizontal bar, set on a high post. By changes in its position, according to a method of signals agreed upon, messages are sent. Flags are used for signals and messages are sent by placing flags of different colors and shapes in different positions; this is less practicable on land than at sea where the range of vision is uninterrupted. Another method of signaling is by mirrors to reflect the sunlight. But all these methods have inconveniences and are limited to comparatively short distances.

Early in the nineteenth century, scientists thought that electricity which can be conducted by wires from place to place might be utilized to carry messages. This was at last successfully accomplished by an American, Samuel Finley Breese Morse.

Morse was born in Massachusetts in 1791 and was given the names of his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. As befitting a child with the reputation of so many to sustain, his education began early. At four he was sent to what was called a “dame school” conducted by an old lady in the neighborhood. At seven he was sent away from home to attend a preparatory school; later he went to an academy; and thence at fifteen to Yale College.

At Yale he was much interested in some experiments with which a professor illustrated a lecture on electricity. It seemed to young Morse that this great force which travels with such wonderful speed ought to be put to some use. During vacation he made many experiments in the college laboratory.

But art, not science, was the subject which interested him most. From his childhood, he had been fond of drawing; he developed such skill and interest in the pictorial art that when he left college he told his father he wished to become an artist. Dr. Morse had hoped that his son would choose a profession but he resolved to let the youth follow his own inclinations and talents. Young Morse studied art several years, first in America and afterwards in England. His pictures brought him praise and medals abroad, and at home he became a successful portrait painter. He organized the National Academy of the Arts of Design and was made its president. Then he went abroad again and spent three years studying his chosen art.

In 1832 he started home; he was now forty-one years old and his life-work up to this time had been art. At this time an incident turned his attention to science, to the mysterious force which had interested him in his college days. On shipboard coming home, there arose a discussion about electricity and the almost instantaneous passage of a current along a copper wire.

Morse said: “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted by it.”

The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that messages could be sent as he had suggested. When he got home, instead of painting portraits he spent his time trying to make an electric current carry a message along a wire and to invent an instrument to receive the message. He became very poor, and moved to an attic where he devoted himself to study and experiments. In 1835 he had devised an alphabet consisting of dots and dashes and had invented a machine, rough and crude but which would carry messages.

He did not have money to push his invention, but in 1837 Mr. Alfred Vail became interested in the machine and offered to furnish money and enter into partnership with the inventor. In 1840 a patent was secured. Morse tried to get an appropriation from Congress for testing his machine, but it was delayed so long that he despaired of success. One morning in March, 1843, a young friend, Miss Ellsworth, brought him news that an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars had been made by Congress for “constructing a line of electric-magnetic telegraph.” Morse promised that she might send the first message by telegraph between Baltimore and Washington. The line of wires put up on poles, was finished May 24, 1844. The first message sent was the text selected by Miss Ellsworth, “What hath God wrought.”

The Democratic National Convention was held in Baltimore about the time that the line was completed and the names of the nominees were telegraphed to Washington. People refused to believe the message was really sent till the news was confirmed by later tidings.

In 1842 Morse made experiments to prove that messages could be carried under water. As water is a good conductor of electricity, it was necessary to insulate the wire, which Morse did by wrapping it with hemp covered with pitch, tar, and rubber. This under-water wire worked well, and a plan was formed to put across the Atlantic a cable resting on the plateau between Newfoundland and Ireland.

This scheme was undertaken by Mr. Cyrus W. Field. The first cable made of insulated wire protected by twisted wire rope was broken in the attempt to lay it in 1857. The second cable was laid and it worked a few days. The first message sent by the cable which united Europe and America was “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.” The third cable failed also, but the fourth, laid in 1866, gave good service. For thirteen years Cyrus Field had worked for the cable and at last out of failure had come success. Since the fourth cable was laid, there has been constant communication between Europe and America.

The latest great step forward in telegraphy was made by Marconi, an Italian scientist, who invented a system of telegraphing without the use of wires.

The telephone has one advantage over the telegraph; it enables a person not only to send messages but to carry on a conversation with persons at a distance. The electric telephone was invented in 1875 by Alexander Graham Bell. His father was a Scotch educator and scientist who invented a method called “Bell’s visible speech” to teach deaf-mutes to speak. Telephones now connect places hundreds of miles apart.

As great advances have been made within the last century in methods of lighting houses as in modes of travel and of communication. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, people still used candles and crude lamps, similar to those which had been in use for hundreds of years. The principle of the candle and the lamp is the same; oil or grease, liquid or solid, is burned by means of a wick. During our great-grandfather’s days, well-to-do people used chiefly wax candles and poor people used candles made of tallow. In many families the only light was furnished by pine knots, called lightwood because the pitch burned making a bright light. It was by such a light that Abraham Lincoln studied.

About the beginning of the nineteenth century an Englishman invented practical gas-light and carried gas made from coal through his house in pipes. In 1821 illuminating gas was made and used in Baltimore for the first time in this country. About a half-century later, another stride forward was made in the lighting of houses. Edison invented the electric light, the brightest, cleanest, and safest light, and the one requiring least care of any yet devised. There are two kinds of the electric light, both widely used. The incandescent, or “glow lamp” as it is called in England, is most common. The arc light is used for lighting large buildings and city streets.

Thomas Edison is an American scientist who has made it his life-work to make practical use of the great force of electricity. He was born in 1847 and is still living and still working. He was the son of a hard-working laborer. His mother had been a school teacher and she gave her son as good an education as she could. When only twelve years old, he started out to earn his own living as a news-boy on the Grand Trunk Railroad.

He was a business-like, enterprising youngster. When there was exciting news in his papers, he telegraphed the fact to stations in advance and bought extra supplies of papers which he disposed of at a good price. He decided that he would like to print a paper of his own, so he got some old type and fitted up part of a freight-car as an office. Here he published a weekly paper, “The Grand Trunk Herald,” which became popular with railroad people. He undertook a second paper called the “Paul Pry” but for some personal remarks in it he was severely punished and he soon after gave up journalism.

He now became interested in chemistry. He bought cheap apparatus and some chemicals and in his freight-car office devoted himself to experiments. Unfortunately, an over-turned bottle of phosphorus set the floor on fire; the conductor put the young editor and scientist, with his printing press and chemical outfit, off the car.

When Edison was about fifteen, he saved the life of a two-year-old child, dragging it from in front of the engine at risk of his own life. The grateful father was a station agent and he offered to teach Edison telegraphy. The boy became a rapid operator, but was too fond of experimenting to devote himself to work and he drifted from one place to another. Finally he went to New York City. For his inventions of stock-printing and other telegraph appliances, he received forty thousand dollars and this enabled him to establish a laboratory to work out his ideas.

For many years Edison was laughed at because he believed that a telegraph wire can be made to carry two messages at once; by his duplex system he made it do so, and later by his quadruplex system he made it carry four messages.

He added some improvements to the telephone invented by Bell, invented a phonograph to record and repeat the sound of the human voice, and a megaphone to carry the sound to a distance, and the kinetoscope.

His greatest work, however, was in connection with the electric light. He worked on it a long time before he succeeded. The chief trouble was in securing a good non-conducting filament. He sent men to search in China, Japan, South America, and Ceylon for bamboo and other plants which would answer his purpose. Out of three thousand specimens of vegetable fiber, he found three or four which would do. In 1880 the light which is now used all over the world was perfected and exhibited.

Edison has made few, if any real scientific discoveries, but he has made many ingenious inventions, and has applied scientific principles to practical purposes so as to increase the comfort and economy of living.

Andrew Jackson

The Man of the People

While Washington, the aristocrat, was using his sword and Jefferson, the scholarly gentleman, was using his pen, to form in America a government of the people, there was growing up in a border settlement a youth who was to be a “man of the people” and bear rule over it.

Andrew Jackson was the son of a poor Irish emigrant, who spent the years after his coming to America in a brave fight for bread for his wife and children. Worn out by the struggle, he died, and the children were left to their mother’s care. Andrew was born at the Waxhaw settlement which is partly in North Carolina and partly in South Carolina, both of which states have been claimed as Jackson’s native place. In childhood he attended an “old field school” where he gained the rudiments of an education and at work and play held his own among his comrades.

“I could throw him three times out of four,” said an old schoolmate, in later days “but he never would _stay throwed_. He was dead game and never would give up.”

Neither then nor in later life was he handsome, with his pale, sharp-featured face, his sandy red hair, and his keen steel blue eyes.

Andrew’s elder brothers, mere lads at the time of the Revolution, served in the patriot forces and Andrew joined them when he was only thirteen. He was taken prisoner by the British and it was then that a well-known incident occurred.

A British officer ordered Andrew to black his boots and the lad refused.

“I am a prisoner of war,” he said, “and demand to be treated as such.”

The angry officer drew his sword to chastise the young rebel; Andrew, raising his arm to parry the blow, received a wound, the scar from which he carried to his grave. One of his brothers died from neglected wounds. Andrew and Robert were confined with about three hundred other American prisoners in a stockade at Camden. Andrew, through a hole in the fence, watched the battle of Hobkirk’s Hill and the last hope of release departed when brave General Greene was forced to retreat. Not long after, however, the two brothers were released, probably in an exchange of prisoners. With their mother they made their way home. Robert died of smallpox caught while in prison and Mrs. Jackson died soon after of fever contracted while nursing American prisoners. Thus Andrew was left alone in the world,--with a bitter feeling that his mother and brothers had been sacrificed to British injustice.

The orphaned and penniless lad set to work, first at a trade, then as a school teacher; finally he studied law. When he began to practice his profession, he crossed the mountains and went west to the region now forming the state of Tennessee. In that rough border country, as it then was, his strong will, courage, and common sense were even more valuable than his small store of legal knowledge. People soon came to respect and depend on him. When offenses against the law were reported to the governor, he said, “Just inform Mr. Jackson; he will be sure to do his duty and the offenders will be punished.”

Mr. Jackson soon became Judge Jackson. We are told that on one occasion he ordered the sheriff to arrest a desperate criminal; the officer returned and reported that he was unable to do so, the man resisted his authority. Judge Jackson descended from the bench, went out and arrested the man, marched him into court, resumed his seat, tried the case, and sentenced the offender. It was a characteristic incident.

In 1791 Jackson married and between him and his wife there existed a simple-hearted devotion which was never broken. Some one who saw her years later when the beauty of youth was gone, described her as a “coarse-looking, stout little old woman,” but she remained beautiful to his eyes.

After Tennessee was admitted to statehood, Jackson was sent to Congress, first as representative, then as senator. From Washington he returned to the mountains which he loved, and busied himself as store keeper, cotton-planter, and stock-raiser,--recognized in his community as a man of undoubted integrity, a staunch friend, and a relentless foe. He took part in two duels, in one of which he was severely wounded and killed his opponent.

Jackson offered his services as soon as the war of 1812 broke out. He was ordered to lead the militia to New Orleans, which it was thought would be attacked. When he had gone about five hundred miles he was ordered to disband his troops.

Soon after, he led a force against the Creek Indians who took advantage of the war in progress to attack outlying settlements and kill white settlers. The troops failed to receive needed supplies and Jackson gave up his private stores to the sick and wounded and set his soldiers an example of cheerful endurance of hardship. At one time, it is said, he invited some officers to share his breakfast and they found--a bowl of acorns and a pitcher of water.

At last Jackson agreed that if provisions did not come in two days the troops might return home. Soon after they turned back, they met supplies; they refreshed themselves and then started to continue the homeward march. Jackson galloped to the front, raised his rifle and furiously swore that he would kill the first man who made a step homeward. The troops, driven back to the path of duty, defeated the Indians in several battles. After one battle Jackson found an Indian baby in the arms of its dead mother. The Indian women refused to care for it and Jackson took it to his own tent, fed it with brown sugar and water and finally sent it to his home, the Hermitage, where the young Indian was cared for and reared.

Jackson’s military merit was now recognized and he was made major-general.

At New Orleans which was attacked by British forces about the close of the war, he won the one important land victory of the war. The British, secure in their superior numbers and discipline, were confident of success.

“I shall eat my Christmas dinner in New Orleans,” said one of the British officers.

“Perhaps so,” said General Jackson to whom this remark was repeated, “but I shall have the honor of presiding at that dinner.”

With wonderful skill and energy, he put the place in condition for defence and made ready for the British attack which took place January 8, 1815. Fortune as well as good generalship favored the Americans. The British were defeated with a loss of about three thousand men, including their commander. The Americans lost only eight men killed and thirteen wounded. A treaty of peace had been signed two weeks before, but there was then no ocean-cable to convey the tidings, and the news did not reach America until after the battle had been fought and the repulsed British had sailed away.

In 1818 Jackson led troops to put down the Seminoles in Florida who were making war on the border settlements and had massacred the people at Fort Mimms.