Chapter 13

The next morning "The Rocket" was subjected to the regular test. Its assigned load was thirteen and a half tons which it drew back and forth over the two-mile track the full stent of forty times, making a spurt at times as high as twenty-nine miles, about three times what had been declared possible by the judges! Finally, to show how fast the engine could go and still keep the track, Mr. Stephenson ran it alone at the astonishing rate of thirty-five miles per hour.

Thus did "The Rocket" surpass all records and all expectations. The enthusiasm of every one was unbounded. All doubts were removed and Stephenson's opponents in the company became his ardent friends. His judgment seemed infallible, and his word was law.

This victory at Rainhill completed the triumph of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The road was opened the following year, 1830, with most imposing ceremonies. Members of Parliament, lords and ladies, and even the great Duke of Wellington, honored the occasion by their presence, and rode on the excursion trains.

The story of George Stephenson's great work is told. His railroad and his locomotive had come together, and to stay. All opposition was crushed, and no sooner was one road in successful operation than another, sometimes several, were on foot. George and Robert Stephenson were in demand everywhere and their locomotive works were full of orders. In twenty years England had nearly ten thousand miles of railways.

The spectacle of these two men, father and son, working together as equals was one often admired. Both became wealthy and full of honor. Titled men were proud to pay their respects to George Stephenson, and when he died, in 1848, at the age of sixty-seven, the whole nation rose up to do him honor.

Though probably Stephenson had never heard of Emerson, Emerson had heard of Stephenson, and he called upon him on his visit to England. Afterward Emerson said that "it was worth crossing the Atlantic to have seen Stephenson alone; he had such native force of character and vigor of intellect."

What a contrast that meeting offers! There face to face stood two men, two great philosophers, both of whom have broadly and deeply influenced mankind--one by deeds, the other by words. One wielded the pen, giving us noble, beautiful and inspiring thoughts, profoundly analyzing life and character; the other wielded those cunning tools with which man subdues nature and harnesses its forces to do his will. He wrote not for the pages of a book, but on lines of steel with a stylus that conquered time and space, bringing distant cities into companionship. I look up to each with an equal reverence. Each achieved the conquest of mind over matter, and each exhibited the exceeding manliness of a noble life and character.

There is no space with which to speak of Stephenson's safety-lamp, nor of the influence his life and character have had on the brain and brawn of working England. If my reader is interested to know him more and better, let him consult the nearest library.

One word about "The Rocket" and this brief sketch is done. For some years "The Rocket" did service on the Liverpool and Manchester road, but it soon proved too light for the heavy traffic, and was sold to a coal company in the North, where for years it faithfully hauled coal-cars from the mines. But even there it was superseded, and in contempt consigned to the back-yard. It was still fleet, but not strong. In that dreary back-yard among useless lumber, the once peerless "Rocket" spent a season or two in rain and snow and sunny weather, when George Stephenson bought it back and put it in his cabinet at the Newcastle works. After Stephenson's death the precious relic was placed in the British Museum in London.

"The Rocket" itself was exhibited a few years ago at the Railway Exposition in Chicago, and an exact copy of it was shown at the recent World's Fair.

[Signature: C. M. Woodward.]

SAMUEL F. B. MORSE

(1791-1872)

Samuel Finley Breese Morse, artist and inventor, was born at the foot of Breed's Hill, Charlestown, Mass., on April 27, 1791. His father was the Rev. Jedediah Morse, D.D., the author of Morse's "Geography." At the age of fourteen Samuel Morse entered Yale College; under the instruction of Professors Day and Silliman he received the first impulse toward those electrical studies with which his name is mainly identified.

In 1811 Morse, whose tastes during his early years led him more strongly toward art than toward science, became the pupil of Washington Allston, then the greatest of American artists, and accompanied his master to England, where he remained four years. His success at this period was considerable; but on his return to America, in 1815, he failed to obtain commissions for historical paintings, and after working on portraits for two years at Charleston, S.C., he removed first to Washington and afterward to Albany, finally settling in New York. In 1825 he laid the foundations of the National Academy of Design, and was elected its first president, an office which he filled until 1845. The year 1827 marks the revival of Morse's interest in electricity. It was at this time that he learned from Professor J. F. Dana, of Columbia College, the elementary facts of electro-magnetism. As yet, however, he was devoted to his art, and in 1829 he again went to Europe to study the old masters.

The year of his return, 1832, may be said to close the period of his artistic, and to open that of his scientific, life. On board the packet-ship Sully, which sailed from Havre, October 1, 1832, while discussing one day with his fellow-passengers the properties of the electro-magnet, he was led to remark: "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 electricity."

It was not a novel proposition, but the process of formulating it started in his mind a train of new and momentous ideas. The current of electricity, he knew, would pass instantaneously any distance along a wire; and if it were interrupted a spark would appear. It now occurred to him that the spark might represent a part of speech, either a letter or a number; the absence of the spark, another part; and the duration of its absence, or of the spark itself, a third; so that an alphabet might be easily formed, and words indicated. In a few days he had completed rough drafts of the necessary apparatus, which he displayed to his fellow-passengers. Five years later, the captain of the ship identified under oath Morse's completed instrument with that which Morse had explained on board the Sully, in 1832.

During the twelve years that followed Morse was engaged in a painful struggle to perfect his invention and secure for it a proper presentation to the public. The refusal of the Government to commission him to paint one of the great historical pictures in the rotunda of the Capitol, seemed to destroy all his old artistic ambition. In poverty he pursued his new enterprise, making his own models, moulds, and castings, denying himself the common necessaries of life, and encountering embarrassments and delays of the most disheartening kind. It was not until 1836 that he completed any apparatus that would work, his original idea having been supplemented by his discovery, in 1835, of the "relay," by means of which the electric current might be reinforced or renewed where it became weak through distance from its source. Finally, on September 2, 1837, the instrument was exhibited to a few friends at his room in the University building, New York, where a circuit of 1,700 feet of copper wire had been set up, with such satisfactory results as to awaken the practical interest of the Messrs. Vail, iron and brass workers in New Jersey, who thenceforth became associated with Morse in his undertaking.

Morse's petition for a patent was dated September 28, 1837, and was soon followed by a petition to Congress for an appropriation to defray the expense of subjecting the telegraph to actual experiment over a length sufficient to establish its feasibility and demonstrate its value. The Committee on Commerce, to whom the petition was referred, reported favorably. Congress, however, adjourned without making the appropriation, and meanwhile Morse sailed for Europe to take out patents there. The trip was not a success. In England his application was refused, on the alleged ground that his invention had been already published; and while he obtained a patent in France, it was subsequently appropriated by the French Government without compensation to himself. His negotiations also with Russia proved futile, and after a year's absence he returned to New York.

On February 23, 1843, Congress passed the long-delayed appropriation of $30,000; and steps were at once taken to construct a telegraph from Baltimore to Washington. On May 24, 1844, it was used for the first time, Mr. Morse himself sending over the wires the first and ever-to-be-remembered message, "What hath God wrought."

Morse's parents were already secured to him and his associates, and companies were soon formed for the erection of telegraph lines all over the United States. In the year 1847 he was compelled to defend his invention in the courts, and successfully vindicated his claims to be called the original inventor of the electro-magnetic recording telegraph. Thenceforward Morse's life was spent in witnessing the growth of his enterprise, and in gathering the honors which an appreciative public bestowed upon him. As years went by he received from the various foreign governments their highest distinctions, while in 1858 the representatives of Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Piedmont, Russia, the Holy See, Sweden, Tuscany, and Turkey appropriated the sum of 400,000 francs in recognition of the use of his instruments in those countries.

The telegraph is not the only great success with which the name of Samuel Morse is honorably connected. Having made the acquaintance of Daguerre in Paris, he studied with him the infancy of photography, and was the first to take sun pictures, or daguerreotypes, in America. Also it was he who made the first submarine electric cable. This was laid in New York Harbor; and from it he was the first to conceive that stupendous idea of the transoceanic telegraph. In the preparations for laying the first Atlantic cable he took an active part, though the attempt of 1857, in which he personally engaged, was not successful. He died April 2, 1872, at New York, where his statue in bronze now stands in the Central Park.

PETER COOPER[12]

[Footnote 12: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By CLARENCE COOK

(1791-1883)

It may be said, without exaggeration, that few men in our time and country, not occupying official position, have been so widely and sincerely mourned as the late Peter Cooper. Other men have been as genuinely good as he, and have founded charitable institutions as worthy and as useful, in their way, as the one which is to be the lasting monument to his memory. But Peter Cooper held a place in the hearts of his fellow-citizens which belonged to him alone. A man, to outward seeming, in manners and conversation as plain and homespun as his name, he held unshaken from youth to old age--and to few men is it allotted to live in uninterrupted health and action to the age of ninety-two--the confidence, the respect and the affection of all sorts of people: the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the learned and the unlearned, people of all parties and of all religions. Character is the accumulation of little actions, and makes its deepest impression, of course, when these actions have been observed by great numbers of people during a long period of time. The whole of his ninety-two years, with the exception of a short time passed in his youth in its vicinity, were spent by Mr. Cooper in the city of New York. It was little more than a country town when he was born; it was already one of the great cities of the world when he died; and in all that time he had been associated with the business enterprises that had helped its growth, as one of the chief actors.

The fortune that he built up was both earned and expended here; the manner of its earning was known of all men, but the way in which it was expended was rather felt than known, for, like all great and generous benefactors, Mr. Cooper was without ostentation; but as he gave while he was alive and all the time that he was alive; and as he gave to the people among whom he lived, and not to outsiders, it naturally followed that his name, his person, his traits of character, became, as it were, a common possession to the people of New York; but few men upon whom such a glare of publicity had fallen for so many years would have been able to bear the scrutiny so well as Peter Cooper.

He was born on February 12, 1791, presumably in Little Dock Street, now Water Street, Coenties Slip, where his father, John Cooper, carried on the trade of a hatter. His shop was near the store of John Jacob Astor, from whom he bought the beaver-skins which he made up into hats. John Cooper had served in the war of the Revolution, and when it ended, he retired with the rank of lieutenant. He married Margaret, the daughter of John Campbell, who also had served in the Continental army, as quartermaster, and who now carried on the trade of potter and tile-maker on the spot where St. Paul's Chapel now stands.

To John and Margaret Cooper nine children were born, two daughters and seven sons, of whom Peter was the fifth, and was named after the apostle in the belief, as his father expressed it, that he would come to something. Following the fashion of the time, he was set to work at his father's trade as soon as he was old enough to work, as all his brothers had been before him: and in later years he described himself as a little boy, with his head just reaching the top of the table where he was set to pulling out the hairs from rabbit skins to use in making fur hats; and he was kept at the business until he was fifteen, when, as he used to tell, he had learned to make every part of a hat. So independent is business success of what is commonly called education, that it may be of interest to record that Peter Cooper never went to school for more than one year, and only in the half of each day of school: his parents were poor, and could not spare what his labor earned, and besides his health was delicate, and the confinement of school was thought more injurious to him than the work in the shop. In consequence of this restriction Peter Cooper grew to manhood with very little learning beyond reading, writing, and the rudiments of arithmetic, and while this was a source of regret to him all his life, it was in reality the spur that drove him to found an institution that should take away all excuses for ignorance from the coming generations of poor boys in his native city.

The elder Cooper would seem to have been a man of small practical capacity or staying power, for he moved about from place to place, changing his business in the hope of bettering his condition; now going to Peekskill to set up a brewery; thence to Catskill, where he added brick-making to making beer; then to Brooklyn to try hatting again; and finally to Newburgh, where he returned to brewing. In all these shiftings of home and business Peter remained with his father and gave him what help he could; he used in later life to recall his carrying about the beer-kegs to his father's customers; but at the age of seventeen, with his parents' consent, he came back to New York, and looked about for work on his own account. He had saved up from his small earnings, while with his father, the sum of ten dollars, and with this, he tells us, he bought a lottery ticket, which drew a blank. This seeming misfortune he turned to good account, for he then determined never to trust to luck again, but to be content to earn his bread in the appointed way: it was his first and last speculation. On reaching New York he had the usual difficulty in finding employment, but at length was accepted as an apprentice by a firm of carriage-makers, to whom, with his father's consent, he bound himself until he should come of age; his masters agreeing to pay him $25 a year and his board. His grandmother had a house on Broadway, in which she gave him the use of an upper room, and here in his spare hours he employed himself in wood-carving, in which he acquired some proficiency. In his business he worked so industriously, and made himself so valuable to his employers, that when his time expired they offered to lend him the money to go into business for himself; but he did not accept this generous offer, as he was determined never to be in debt. While with Messrs. Burtis and Woodward he had invented a machine for mortising wheel-hubs, thus giving the first evidence of an inventive faculty which, though never accomplishing great things, was often of considerable service both to himself and the community. On leaving the business of carriage-making Peter Cooper went to Hempstead, L. I., where he found work in a woollen factory. Here he invented and patented an improvement on the machine in use for shearing the nap of cloth; and as during the war of 1812 all commerce with England ceased, cloth-making in America flourished, and from the sale of his machines, which he could hardly make fast enough to supply the demand, young Cooper reaped a considerable profit. One of his first customers was the late Matthew Vassar, of Poughkeepsie, to whom he not only sold some of his machines, but also the right to dispose of them in Dutchess County. When he found that his earnings had enabled him to lay by the sum of $500, he thought himself justified in asking a young woman, Miss Sarah Bedel, whom he had met when in Hempstead, to become his wife; but before doing so, he determined to visit his parents in Newburgh, and inform them of his intention. He found them in great trouble, his father in debt and needing help; and without hesitation he placed his small savings at his disposal, paid the most pressing of the debts, and made arrangements for paying off the rest. His father was thus saved from bankruptcy by his son's devotion; but the action was characteristic of Peter Cooper, both in its unselfishness, and as indicative of his business integrity. He would never be in debt himself, and he was equally resolved to keep those belonging to him as free as himself. He took pride in the fact that neither he nor his father had ever failed in business; and this is the more remarkable, since in the course of his business life the country passed through no less than ten serious commercial panics.

Peter Cooper and Miss Bedel were married on December 22, 1813, when he was twenty-two and the lady twenty-one. Their married life, as it was exceptionally long, so it was exceptionally happy. It lasted fifty-six years; Mrs. Cooper died in 1869, and Mr. Cooper survived her fourteen years, dying in 1883. Their golden wedding was celebrated in 1863. They had six children, but only two lived to grow up; the Hon. Edward Cooper, once mayor of the city, and Sarah Amelia Cooper, the wife of the Hon. Abram S. Hewitt. Mr. James Parton says: "There never was a happier marriage than this. To old age Mr. Cooper never sat near his wife without holding her hand in his. He never spoke to her, nor of her, without some tender epithet. He attributed the great happiness of his life and most of his success to her admirable qualities. She seconded every good impulse of his benevolence, and made the fulfilment of his great scheme possible by her wise and resolute economy."

Mr. Cooper seems to have inherited something of his father's business restlessness, for in addition to the many pursuits in which we have seen him engage, he now bought a grocery stand, and in about a year gave that up and purchased a glue factory, selling his grocery business and buying a lease of the glue factory for twenty-one years, for $2,000, his whole savings. He differed from his father in this, that everything prospered with which he had to do. The grocery had done well, but the glue factory did better. "At that time nearly all the glue used in this country was imported from Ireland, and sold at a high price. Mr. Cooper studied the subject and experimented, until he was able to make better glue than the Irish and sell it at a lower price, and he soon had nearly the entire glue business of the country in his hands." But chance had nothing to do with Mr. Cooper's success: the secret of that success was unremitting industry and generous economy. He worked that he might earn, and he saved that he might use and give. For twenty years while he held the glue factory, he was his own bookkeeper, clerk, and salesman; going to the factory at daybreak to light the fires, and spending the evenings at home, posting his books, writing, and reading to his family.

In 1828, moved by the interest in business circles in the completion of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Mr. Cooper, with two partners, bought a tract of three thousand acres within the city limits of Baltimore. By the failure of his associates to meet the payment of their shares, Mr. Cooper was obliged to shoulder the whole cost, amounting to $105,000. The road, too, owing to unexpected difficulties in construction, was dreading bankruptcy, from which it was saved by Mr. Cooper's ingenuity in devising a locomotive that enabled the company to overcome certain difficulties that had been thought insurmountable. Failing in the end to sell his land as he had hoped, Mr. Cooper decided to utilize the timber growing on it in the manufacture of charcoal iron. When he had, after many difficulties, established his works, he sold out to some Boston capitalists, who formed the Canton Iron Company. Mr. Cooper took a large part of the purchase in stock at $45 a share, which he finally sold out at $230 a share.

This was the beginning of his interest in the iron business, where the greater part of his fortune was made. The remainder came from his glue works and the industries connected with them. In 1873, the year of the great panic, in a letter to President Grant suggesting remedial legislation, Mr. Cooper said that not less than a thousand persons depended for their bread on the business carried on in the circle of his family. He had at that time two rolling-mills running, and two mills for the manufacture of wire and springs; and his glue, oil, and isinglass works gave employment to two hundred persons.

The story of Mr. Cooper's connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable has been so often told, that we do not repeat it here. It adds further testimony to his indomitable energy, his largeness of view, his financial ability, and the confidence that was felt in him by his fellow-men. The story of the difficulties, failures and final success of this grandest achievement of modern science and enterprise, is as romantic as any episode in social history.