Part 18

“In a short time I set out for my own home; yes, my own home, my own soil, and my own humble dwelling; my own family, my own hearts, my own ocean of love and affection which nothing else nor time can dry up. Here, like the wearied bird, let me settle down for a while and shut out the world.”

Yet, much as Davy Crockett loved his home, he loved his country more. With this spirit he had also such reckless love of adventure that he could not bear to live at ease when his country needed him.

The American settlers were having terrible times down in Texas. Thousands of Americans in that country were struggling with the Mexicans, to decide who should control and own the Texas territory. General Santa Anna, the President of Mexico, had sent thousands of soldiers into that region, captured a brave little army of Americans, and, when these had been disarmed, coolly shot them down as if they had been cattle in a slaughter-house.

All these things were more than Davy Crockett’s flesh and blood could bear. In his opinion “such cattle as those Mexicans” should be treated like bears or murderous Indians. Armed with “Betsy,” his new rifle, “to use if need be for his country’s glory,” he was ready to leave for Texas. He was now fifty-four years old, but his heart was young. When his friends tried to convince him that the trouble in Texas was no affair of his, Crockett replied that the news from those struggling heroes down there wrung his heart. “Sorrow will make even an oyster feel poetical,” and Davy left behind him a farewell poem, of which this is a small part:

“The home I forsake where my offspring arose; The graves I forsake where my children repose; The home I redeemed from the savage and wild; The home I have loved as a father his child; The corn that I planted, the fields that I cleared, The flocks that I raised, and the cabin I reared; The wife of my bosom--Farewell to ye all! In the land of the stranger I rise or I fall.”

When Davy Crockett arrived at San Antonio, Colonel Travis, the commander of the Americans, had turned an old Spanish mission called the Alamo into a fort. Santa Anna was near at hand with a large army to capture the one hundred and eighty men who were waiting in the Alamo.

It would have made the hearts of that brave garrison glad if they could have looked into the future far enough to see that General Sam Houston would soon come there and drive the Mexicans out of the country; and that with the war-cry, “Remember the Alamo!” American soldiers would free Texas from Mexico’s cruel rule, and finally add the vast territory of Texas, New Mexico, and California to the United States. But they only knew that Santa Anna was near with five thousand Mexican soldiers and that there was no hope of relief.

When Santa Anna and his army had arrived and surrounded the flimsy Spanish convent-fort, he called on Colonel Travis to surrender. The American answer was a cannon-shot. Then the Mexicans raised a red flag as a signal that “no quarter” would be given; that is, that no American could expect anything but death at their hands.

Then the battle began. The walls of the Alamo were not strong, for the convent was not built for a fort. Yet it took that great Mexican army eleven days to capture it. Among the Americans were thirteen backwoods hunters like David Crockett and Colonel James Bowie, the inventor of the famous Bowie knife then much used in frontier fighting. Bowie was ill, but he fought like a hero, as did each of the others, to sell his life as dearly as possible. On the last day Colonel Travis offered to let the few men who were left go out with a white flag and ask the Mexicans to spare their lives, but not a man would go.

At last the walls of their frail fortress were battered down and four thousand Mexicans came rushing in. They found Crockett with only five men left--their backs to the wall fighting to the bitter end. It is said that Crockett was the last to fall. When beset by too many Mexicans to reload and fire “Betsy,” he took his gun by the barrel and clubbed several Mexicans to death before they shot him down.

The Alamo fell on the 6th of March, 1836.

When they found the journal Davy Crockett had kept during the fight, they read his last words in it, written late the night before:

“March 5. Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom!--throughout the day. No time for memorandums now. Go ahead! Liberty and independence forever!”

FAMOUS INVENTORS

HOW ELI WHITNEY MADE COTTON KING

Eli Whitney began to make things when he was a small boy. He was called a genius because he was so ingenious. But he was not satisfied with doing things with his hands. He had a strong desire to make the most of his mind. So he went to Yale College and studied philosophy. One day the professor said he could not show a certain method to the class because the machine he kept for the purpose was broken. He could not teach that lesson until a new apparatus could be brought from England or France. But the ingenious student looked at the machine, and said, “Let me fix it.” The professor thought it could do no harm to let him try. Eli made the fine machine work just as well as it did when it was new.

One of the bravest officers in the Revolutionary War, which ended a few years before this time, was General Nathanael Greene. After the war General Greene lived on a beautiful estate near Savannah, Georgia, and died there. When young Whitney finished his college course, he was engaged to teach a school in Savannah; but when he went down there he found that the school was not what he expected. So he acted as tutor in the family of General Greene’s widow.

While he was tutor, Whitney made playthings for the children, and fixed many handy things for Mrs. Greene to use about the house. She told him he ought to make a machine that would take the seeds out of the bolls, or fluffy heads, of the cotton plant. Great machines had been contrived for spinning and weaving cotton, but it took a man or a woman all day to pick the seeds out of a pound of cotton wool.

Eli Whitney went to work to make something that would do what in those days seemed impossible. He not only had to invent a cotton-gin, as the new machine was called, but he was obliged to make tools for making the machine itself, and even tools for making the other tools. But within a short time he had invented and built a machine which worked quite well. Still he was not satisfied. He locked himself up in a room and worked day and night until he had built a perfect cotton-gin which would work very fast and would clear out all the fine cotton seeds. This was in 1793, while Washington was President, and Philadelphia was the capital of the United States.

Whitney would not let any one but Mrs. Greene and a friend named Miller see the model, or pattern, of his cotton-gin until he could take out a patent for it. But before he could get money enough to have his gin patented, someone broke into his little shop and carried off his precious model.

Then the poor inventor had to begin again and make another machine, to prove to the officials in the Patent Office that the cotton-gin was his invention, before they could make out for him the patent right, which said he was the only person allowed to make and sell that machine in the United States. Before he could get this patent he found that others were making, selling, and trying to get a patent for machines made like the stolen pattern.

Young Whitney’s friend Miller furnished him money, not only to secure his patent rights and make the machines, but to go into the courts and fight those who were trying to steal his rights as they had stolen his model. These people made him so much trouble and expense that it took thirteen years to beat them by lawsuits. A patent protected an inventor, by keeping others from making and selling that machine, for only fourteen years. When his rivals were beaten, Whitney had but one year left in which he and his friends could sell the machine so as to pay for all his time, labor, and expense. In that year he just made his cotton-gin pay for itself. But he had the great satisfaction of making the land in the southern states known as the cotton belt (because cotton could be grown in those states) worth hundreds of millions of dollars more than before. The raising of cotton grew to be such a great industry that negro slavery became more and more necessary in the cotton-growing states. So, without knowing it, Eli Whitney, by increasing the production of cotton, increased the number of black slaves in the south, and helped to cause the struggle for and against slavery, many years later. But as the inventor did not know that his cotton-gin would make slavery a curse to the United States, he was not to blame.

After his patent had run out and he could make no more money by selling his cotton-gins, Whitney got a government contract for the making of guns. He invented new machinery to make the parts of his guns and was the first to have each part made by a different man according to an exact pattern. When the parts were put together to make a complete gun no special fitting was necessary because each piece was exactly like every other piece for that same part. If a part of the gun was broken it could be replaced with a new one without any difficulty. Before that when one man made an entire gun all the parts were specially fitted and if one got broken a new one had to be made and fitted by hand, which took a long time and made repairs very expensive. His factories and the homes of his workmen formed a suburb of New Haven called Whitneyville.

Eli Whitney furnished hundreds of thousands of men with the weapons they used in putting down the slavery which his cotton-gin had been made the innocent cause of increasing.

“FULTON’S FOLLY”

Robert Fulton was a Pennsylvania boy. His father, a Quaker, died when Robert was a baby. His mother was a beautiful Irish lady, whose mind was as lovely as her face. She taught little Robert, and he knew much that was worth while before he began to go to school at the age of eight years.

In those days school teachers were often strict and harsh with young children. Parents seemed to think their children would not learn fast unless they were whipped or beaten with a ruler. Though little Robert was not a bad boy in school, he sometimes seemed to be idle because he was thinking of something else. So his strict Quaker teacher punished him one day by striking his hands with a ferule. Robert’s boyish sense of fairness rose up within him, and he exclaimed, “I came here, sir, to have something beaten into my _head_--not my _hands_!”

One of the pupils brought some artist’s brushes and paints to school, and Robert, who already showed real talent for drawing, was allowed to use them. He made such fine pictures that the other boy gave him the paints. This was the beginning of young Fulton’s career as a painter. But Robert was not content with painting pictures. He was always trying to make things, or to find ways of doing things more easily.

Robert was eleven when the American colonies went into the War for Independence. During this war, when candles were scarce, people were warned not to waste them in lighting up for the Fourth of July. It was to be a saving rather than a safe and sane holiday. The Fulton boy made up his mind to celebrate the day. So he got some gunpowder and pasteboard and made little tubes with a stick pointing out at one end of each. The neighbors were astonished on the night of the Fourth of July to see these tubes, one after another, go whizzing up in the sky, leaving a trail of sparks behind them. They said to one another, “That Fulton boy’s a genius!” Robert had made the first skyrockets these Americans had ever seen.

Robert Fulton afterward became acquainted with Dr. Benjamin Franklin and learned much from the kind old inventor. When Fulton was a young man he went to London and studied painting with Benjamin West, the greatest American painter up to that time. He went also to France to study art. Meantime he kept on inventing things. The French were at war with many of the countries of Europe at that time. Fulton had always been interested in boats; and we have seen that he knew how to use gunpowder. He planned a new kind of boat, which he thought would help the French in their war. It was a submarine, and was provided with torpedoes which could be shot under water. They would have pierced the wooden sides of the best ships built in those days. Fulton’s diving boat was shown to the French minister of war, but the government experts could not understand its great value in war and refused to make use of it in the war. Shortly after, a British officer remarked that Napoleon’s loss of Fulton’s diving boat was the most important event of the century.

Napoleon, who was then emperor of the French, wrote to one of his own advisers:

“I have just received the project of Citizen Fulton, which you have sent me too late--since it may change the face of the world!”

But, harmful as Fulton’s submarine might have proven to Napoleon’s enemies, the chance which Napoleon missed was not important compared with the results of Robert Fulton’s next invention.

Robert Fulton had, as a lad, gone fishing with some neighbors on a flatboat in the river. This craft they had to push along with poles, which was very slow, hard work. Bob began at once to try to fix something which would make the boat go faster and more easily. He arranged paddles at the stern which worked quite well. Then he improved this by making paddle wheels. After that he attached the wheels to an engine. He went on working with engines and wheels until at last, while he was in Paris, he succeeded in building a boat with a steam-engine to make it go. He tried it on the River Seine, which flows through Paris. The boat did go a little; but the engine was too heavy, and the watching crowds saw Fulton’s queer boat sink to the bottom.

After he returned to America, Fulton went on improving his steamboat until he had built one which he thought would run up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. He named this odd-looking craft the _Clermont_, and invited a few of his friends to make the trial trip. A great crowd came down to the wharf in New York City to have a little fun watching “Fulton’s Folly,” as they called the steamboat. People laughed at the idea that a heavy iron engine could make a boat go anywhere but to the bottom.

Even Fulton’s friends, waiting on the deck of the queer-looking vessel, felt foolish and looked anxious. The boat, however, started off, and the people on the shore began to cheer. Out in the river it stopped like a balky horse, and the cheers were turned to jeers. Fulton looked hurriedly at the engine, found out what was the trouble, and soon fixed it. Then the boat went puffing away up the river against the current at the rate of six miles an hour, and the friends on deck thought they were going very fast, as there were no railroads then and this was faster than a sailboat could go. Fulton kept on improving his boats so that within a few years there were steamboats on other rivers of the country. Within a century “ocean greyhounds” were racing across the Atlantic, and “superdreadnoughts,” the largest battleships, were being built for the great navies of the world. Submarines were used by many nations in the World War, but their invention, important as it was, could not well be called the greatest event of the century. It was the sailing of “Fulton’s Folly” which might have been said to change the face of the world, because it was the first step on the way to the wonderful steamships of to-day.

Just as that ingenious little boy tried to help his friends by making their flatboat run faster so Robert Fulton, as a man, had made the people of the world richer, happier, and better for all the ages to come.

HOW MORSE SENT LETTERS BY LIGHTNING

Into the family of Doctor Morse, a much respected minister living on the side of the hill on which the battle of Bunker Hill was fought, there came a little baby boy. They named him Samuel Finley for his great-grandfather, a president of Princeton College. To this was added Breese, the maiden name of the boy’s mother. When this baby grew up, he was known all over the world as S. F. B. Morse.

This Morse boy had the best kind of schooling at home. His father was a teacher as well as a preacher, and wrote the Morse geographies which were used in the schools of that day. Finley, as he was called at home, showed real talent as a boy for drawing and painting. One of his first pictures showed the Morse family around a table, with the father teaching them from a large globe showing all the countries of the world.

Finley Morse was sent to Yale College, where he was much interested in science and philosophy. But he kept at his drawing and coloring, and became a successful painter. That was years before any one knew how to take photographs; so Mr. Morse painted a great many portraits and did such good work that he received high prices for them. Believing that the artists of America could help one another, he influenced some of them to organize the National Academy of the Arts of Design, and they elected him their first president. When Lafayette, who had been a young officer on General Washington’s staff nearly fifty years before, came to America again as an old man, the people of America wished to have the best portrait that could be painted of the Frenchman who had helped the Americans in the War

for Independence. Finley Morse was chosen to paint this picture of General Lafayette.

While Mr. Morse was in Washington at work on this picture, he received word from his home in New Haven that his young wife had died suddenly of heart disease. Before he could receive the letter she was buried. People in those days traveled by stage-coach, and it took at least a week for a letter to go from Boston to Washington. When the sorrowing father went home to arrange for the care of his three motherless children, he spoke of the slowness of sending word from place to place, and said he hoped the time would come when news could be sent long distances in an instant. But of course he had no idea then that he would have anything to do with bringing that blessing to mankind.

When Morse was returning from one of his visits to Europe to study art, several of his friends on the ship were talking at the table about what someone had done by way of sending signals like lightning by means of electricity. “If they can do that,” said Mr. Morse, “why could we not write letters in a second or two from New York to Charleston with it?” The others laughed at the idea.

“Why not?” kept ringing in Mr. Morse’s ears. He stayed in his stateroom to study and think. He remembered what he had learned from his professors in college about electricity. With such materials as he could get together on shipboard, he made magnets and electrical appliances. By the time the ship sailed up New York harbor, Mr. Morse had not only a good idea of the way to go to work to make a telegraph apparatus, but he had made up the “dot-and-dash code,” now in use in telegraphy.

The idea took such a hold on his mind that he could no longer paint pictures. But when he talked to others about it, it all seemed impossible--“too good to be true”--and he could not find wealthy men who would lend money enough to enable him to prove that a message could be sent a long distance in a moment of time by telegraph.

While Mr. Morse was waiting and struggling to start “the electro-magnetic telegraph” he made a bare living by taking the first photographic likenesses, called daguerreotypes, in America.

After eleven years of hard work and poverty so keen that he had to go hungry sometimes, Mr. Morse’s friends in Congress passed a bill in the House to furnish him government money enough for a trial line forty miles long. But on the last day of the session, which was to end at midnight, there were over a hundred bills ahead of his in the Senate. Mr. Morse went home that night utterly discouraged.

In the morning Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of the Commissioner of Patents, came to congratulate him. His bill had been passed just before midnight and the President had signed it, giving Mr. Morse all the money he needed to show how he could “send letters by lightning.”

The overjoyed inventor told Miss Ellsworth that when his line was all ready she should send the first message over it.

It was decided that the trial line should be put up between Washington and Baltimore. It was completed before the 24th of May, 1844. One end of it was in the Capitol at Washington and the other at Baltimore. Miss Ellsworth’s first message, flashed by S. F. B. Morse to his partner, Mr. Vail, in Baltimore, was this text of Scripture:

“What hath God wrought!”

The first news sent out to the whole country was that of James K. Polk’s nomination at the Convention in Baltimore as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

Mr. Morse’s struggles were now over. The telegraph became a wonderful success and he was honored by presidents, kings, and princes with medals, stars, crosses, and other decorations. The inventor now turned his attention to running telegraph lines under water, and laid a cable under New York harbor. About twenty years later another man, Cyrus W. Field, succeeded in connecting America with Europe by laying a cable beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

So S. F. B. Morse’s words were realized: “If I can make the telegraph work ten miles, I can make it go around the globe.” He really made true these words of Puck, one of Shakespeare’s fairies:

“I’ll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes.”

Men soon began trying to talk without connecting wires. Marconi invented the radio-telegraph in 1896 and the radio-phone followed. Now it is possible to send wireless messages almost around the world.

CYRUS H. M’CORMICK AND THE STORY OF THE REAPER

When little Abraham Lincoln was three days old in Kentucky, Cyrus H. McCormick was born in Virginia. When the McCormick boy was seven he used to go out to a shed and watch his father working at a machine to take the place of the scythe which was then used in cutting grain. Father McCormick was never satisfied, the neighbors said. He was “always fussing and trying to invent and improve something.”

After working for years to make a machine to harvest grain, Farmer McCormick gave it up, saying that it could not be done. Meanwhile young Cyrus, who had inherited his father’s inventive turn of mind, went to the fields to work with the men. He found it very hard to keep up with them, so he invented a cradle, or improved scythe, which made his work so much easier that he was able to do as much as a grown man. When he was twenty-two, Cyrus McCormick had invented a plough that would throw up a furrow on whichever side the farmer desired. Two years later he made the first self-sharpening plough.