Chapter 13

INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS

After the purchase of Louisiana and the explorations of Lewis and Clark, the number of settlers who went from the eastern part of the country to find new homes in the West kept on increasing as it had been doing since Boone, Robertson, and Sevier had pushed their way across the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, twenty-five or thirty years earlier.

These pioneers, if they went westward by land, had to load their goods on pack-horses and follow the Indian trail. Later the trail was widened into a roadway, and wagons could be used. But travel by land was slow and, hard under any conditions.

Going by water, while cheaper, was inconvenient, for the travellers must use the flatboat, which was clumsy and slow and, worst of all, of little use except when going down stream.

The great need both for travel and for trade, then, was a boat which would not be dependent upon wind or current, but could be propelled by steam. Many men had tried to work out such an invention. Among them was John Rumsey, of Maryland, who built a steamboat in 1774, and John Fitch, of Connecticut, who completed his first model of a steamboat in 1785.

In the next four years Fitch built three steamboats, the last of which made regular trips on the Delaware River, between Philadelphia and Burlington, during the summer of 1786. It was used as a passenger boat, and it made a speed of eight miles an hour; but Fitch was not able to secure enough aid from men of capital and influence to make his boats permanently successful.

The first man to construct a steamboat which continued to give successful service was Robert Fulton. Robert Fulton was born of poor parents in Little Britain, Pennsylvania, in 1765, the year of the famous Stamp Act. When the boy was only three years old his father died, and so Robert was brought up by his mother. She taught him at home until he was eight, and then sent him to school. Here he showed an unusual liking for drawing.

Outside of school hours his special delight was to visit the shops of mechanics, who humored the boy and let him work out his clever ideas with his own hands.

A story is told of how Robert came into school late one morning and gave as his excuse that he had been at a shop beating a piece of lead into a pencil. At the same time he took the pencil from his pocket, and showing it to his teacher, said: "It is the best one I have ever used." Upon carefully looking at the pencil, the schoolmaster was so well pleased that he praised Robert's efforts, and in a short time nearly all the pupils were using that kind of pencil.

Another example of Robert's inventive gift belongs to his boyhood days. He and one of his playmates from time to time went fishing in a flatboat, which they propelled with long poles. It was hard work and slow, and presently Robert thought out an easier way. He made two crude paddle-wheels, attached one to each side of the boat, and connected them with a sort of double crank. By turning this, the boys made the wheels revolve, and these carried the boat through the water easily. We may be sure that Robert's boat became very popular, and that turning the crank was a privilege in which each boy eagerly took his turn.

While still young, Robert began to paint pictures also. By the time he was seventeen he had become skilful in the use of his brush and went to Philadelphia to devote his time to painting portraits and miniatures. Being a tireless worker, he earned enough here to support himself and send something to his mother.

At the age of twenty-one his interest in art led him to go to London, where he studied for several years under Benjamin West. This famous master took young Fulton into his household and was very friendly to him.

After leaving West's studio Fulton still remained in England, and although continuing to paint he gave much thought also to the development of canal systems. His love for invention was getting the better of his love for art and was leading him on to the work which made him famous. He was about thirty when he finally gave up painting altogether and turned his whole attention to inventing.

He went from England to Paris, where he lived in the family of Joel Barlow, an American poet and public man. Here he made successful experiments with a diving boat which he had designed to carry cases of gunpowder under water. This was one of the stages in the development of our modern torpedo-boat.

Although this invention alone would give Fulton a place in history, it was not one which would affect so many people as the later one, the steamboat, with which his name is more often associated.

Even before he had begun to experiment with the torpedo-boat Fulton had been deeply interested in steam navigation, and while in Paris he constructed a steamboat. In this undertaking he was greatly aided by Robert R. Livingston, American minister at the French court, who had himself done some experimenting in that line. Livingston, therefore, was glad to furnish the money which Fulton needed in order to build the boat.

It was finished by the spring of 1803. But just as they were getting ready for a trial trip, early one morning the boat broke in two parts and sank to the bottom of the River Seine. The frame had been too weak to support the weight of the heavy machinery.

Having discovered just what was wrong in this first attempt, Fulton built another steamboat soon after his return to America, in 1806. This boat was one hundred and thirty feet long, eighteen feet wide, with mast and sail, and had on each side a wheel fifteen feet across.

On the morning of the day in August, 1807, set for the trial of the Clermont--as Fulton called his boat--an expectant throng of curious onlookers gathered on the banks of the North, or Hudson, River, at New York. Everybody was looking for failure. For though Fitch's boats had made trips in the Delaware only some twenty years earlier, the fact did not seem to be generally known. People had all along spoken of Fulton as a half-crazy dreamer and had called his boat "Fulton's Folly." "Of course, the thing will not move," said one scoffer. "That any man with common sense well knows," another replied. And yet they all stood watching for Fulton's signal to start the boat.

The signal is given. A slight tremor of motion and the boat is still. "There! What did I say?" cried one. "I told you so!" exclaimed another. "I knew the boat would not go," said yet another. But they spoke too soon, for after a little delay the wheels of the Clermont began to revolve, slowly and hesitatingly at first, but soon with more speed, and the boat steamed proudly off up the Hudson.

As she moved forward, all along the river people who had come from far and near stood watching the strange sight. When boatmen and sailors on the Hudson heard the harsh clanking of machinery and saw the huge sparks and dense black smoke rising out of her funnel, they thought that the Clermont was a sea-monster. In fact, they were so frightened that some of them went ashore, some jumped into the river to get away, and some fell on their knees in fear, believing that their last day had come. It is said that one old Dutchman exclaimed to his wife: "I have seen the devil coming up the river on a raft!"

The men who were working the boat had no such foolish fears. They set themselves to their task and made the trip from New York to Albany, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, in thirty-two hours. Success had at last come to the quiet, modest, persevering Fulton. After this trial trip the Clermont was used as a regular passenger boat between New York and Albany.

The steamboat was Fulton's great gift to the world and his last work of public interest. He died in 1815.

But the Clermont was only the beginning of steam-driven craft on the rivers and lakes of our country. Four years afterward (1811), the first steamboat west of the Alleghany Mountains began its route from Pittsburg down the Ohio, and a few years later similar craft were in use on the Great Lakes.

THE NATIONAL ROAD AND THE ERIE CANAL

But while steamboats made the rivers and lakes easy routes for travel and traffic, something was needed to make journeys by land less difficult. To meet this need, new highways had to be supplied, and this great work of building public roads was taken up by the United States Government. Many roads were built, but the most important was the one known as the National Road.

It ran from Cumberland, on the Potomac, through Maryland and Pennsylvania to Wheeling, West Virginia, on the Ohio River. From there it was extended to Indiana and Illinois, ending at Vandalia, which at that time was the capital of Illinois. It was seven hundred miles long, and cost seven million dollars.

This smooth and solid roadway was eighty feet wide; it was paved with stone and covered with gravel. Transportation became not only much easier but also much cheaper. The road filled a long-felt need and a flood of travel and traffic immediately swept over it.

Another kind of highway which proved to be of untold value to both the East and the West, was the canal, or artificial waterway connecting two bodies of water.

The most important was the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie, begun in 1817. This new idea received the same scornful attention from the unthinking as "Fulton's Folly." By many it was called "Clinton's Ditch," after Governor DeWitt Clinton, to whose foresight we are indebted for the building of this much-used waterway. The scoffers shook their heads and said: "Clinton will bankrupt the State"; "The canal is a great extravagance"; and so on.

But he did not stop because of criticism, and in 1825 the canal was finished. The undertaking had been pushed through in eight years. It was a great triumph for Clinton and a proud day for the State.

When the work was completed the news was signalled from Buffalo to New York in a novel way. As you know, there was neither telephone nor telegraph then. But at intervals of five miles all along the route cannon were stationed. When the report from the first cannon was heard, the second was fired, and thus the news went booming eastward till, in an hour and a half, it reached New York.

Clinton himself journeyed to New York in the canal-boat Seneca Chief. This was drawn by four gray horses, which went along the tow-path beside the canal. As the boat passed quietly along, people thronged the banks to do honor to the occasion.

When the Seneca Chief reached New York City, Governor Clinton, standing on deck, lifted a gilded keg filled with water from Lake Erie and poured it into the harbor. As he did so, he prayed that "the God of the heaven and the earth" would smile upon the work just completed and make it useful to the human race. Thus was dedicated this great waterway, whose usefulness has more than fulfilled the hope of its chief promoter.

Trade between the East and the West began to grow rapidly. Vast quantities of manufactured goods were moved easily from the East to the West, and supplies of food were shipped in the opposite direction. Prices began to fall because the cost of carrying goods was so much less. It cost ten dollars before the canal was dug to carry a barrel of flour from Buffalo to Albany; now it costs thirty cents.

The region through which the canal ran was at that time mostly wilderness, and for some years packets carrying passengers as well as freight were drawn through the canal by horses travelling the tow-path along the bank.

When travelling was so easy and safe, the number of people moving westward to this region grew larger rapidly. Land was in demand and became more valuable. Farm products sold at higher prices. Villages sprang up, factories were built, and the older towns grew rapidly in size. The great cities of New York State--and this is especially true of New York City--owe much of their growth to the Erie Canal.

THE RAILROAD

The steamboat, the national highways, and the canals were all great aids to men in travel and in carrying goods. The next great improvement was the use of steam-power to transport people and goods overland. It was brought about by the railroad and the locomotive.

In this country, the first laying of rails to make a level surface for wheels to roll upon was at Quincy, Massachusetts. This railroad was three miles long, extending from the quarry to the seacoast. The cars were drawn by horses.

Our first passenger railroad was begun in 1828. It was called the Baltimore and Ohio and was the beginning of the railroad as we know it to-day. But those early roads would seem very strange now. The rails were of wood, covered with a thin strip of iron to protect the wood from wear. Even as late as the Civil War rails of this kind were in use in some places. The first cross-ties were of stone instead of wood, and the locomotives and cars of early days were very crude.

In 1833, people who were coming from the West to attend President Jackson's second inauguration travelled part of the way by railroad. They came over the National Road as far as Frederick, Maryland, and there left it to enter a train of six cars, each accommodating sixteen persons. The train was drawn by horses. In this manner they continued their journey to Baltimore.

In the autumn of that year a railroad was opened between New York and Philadelphia. At first horses were used to draw the train, but by the end of the year locomotives, which ran at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, were introduced. This was a tremendous stride in the progress of railroad traffic.

To be sure, the locomotives were small, but two or more started off together, each drawing its own little train of cars. Behind the locomotive was a car which was a mere platform with a row of benches, seating perhaps forty passengers, inside of an open railing. Then followed four or five cars looking very much like stage-coaches, each having three compartments, with doors on each side. The last car was a high, open-railed van, in which the baggage of the whole train was heaped up and covered with oilcloth. How strange a train of this sort would look beside one of our modern express-trains, with its huge engine, and its sleeping, dining, and parlor cars!

You will be surprised that any objection was raised to the railroad. Its earliest use had been in England, and when there was talk of introducing it in this country some people said: "If those who now travel by stage take the railroad coaches, then stage-drivers will be thrown out of work!" Little could they foresee what a huge army of men would find work on the modern railroad.

In spite of all obstacles and objections, the railroads, once begun, grew rapidly in favor. In 1833 there were scarcely three hundred and eighty miles of railroad in the United States; now there are more than two hundred and forty thousand miles.

MORSE AND THE TELEGRAPH

The next stride which Progress made seemed even more wonderful. Having contrived an easier and a quicker way to move men and their belongings from one place to another, what should she do but whisper in the ear of a thinking man: "You can make thought travel many times faster." The man whose inventive genius made it possible for men to flash their thoughts thousands of miles in a few seconds of time was Samuel Finley Breese Morse.

He was born in 1791, in Charlestown, Massachusetts. His father was a learned minister, who "was always thinking, always writing, always talking, always acting"; and his mother was a woman of noble character, who inspired her son with lofty purpose.

When he was seven he went to Andover, Massachusetts, to school, and still later entered Phillips Academy in the same town. At fourteen he entered Yale College, where from the first he was a good, faithful student.

As his father was poor, Finley had to help himself along, and was able to do it by painting, on ivory, likenesses of his classmates and professors, for which he received from one dollar to five dollars each. In this way he made considerable money.

At the end of his college course he made painting his chosen profession and went to London, where he studied four years under Benjamin West. Though for some years he divided his time and effort between painting and invention, he at last decided to devote himself wholly to invention. This change in his life-work was the outcome of an incident which took place on a second voyage home from Europe, where he had been spending another period in study.

On the ocean steamer the conversation at dinner one day was about some experiments with electricity. One of the men present said that so far as had been learned from experiment electricity passes through any length of wire in a second of time.

"Then," said Morse, "thought can be transmitted hundreds of miles in a moment by means of electricity; for, if electricity will go ten miles without stopping, I can make it go around the globe."

When once he began to think about this great possibility, the thought held him in its grip. In fact, it shut out all others. Through busy days and sleepless nights he turned it over and over. And often, while engaged in other duties, he would snatch his notebook from his pocket in order to outline the new instrument he had in mind and jot down the signs he would use in sending messages.

It was not long before he had worked out on paper the whole scheme of transmitting thought over long distances by means of electricity.

And now began twelve toilsome years of struggle to plan and work out machinery for his invention. All these years he had to earn money for the support of his three motherless children. So he gave up to painting much time that he would otherwise have spent upon his invention. His progress, therefore, was slow and painful, but he pressed forward. He was not the kind of man to give up.

In a room on the fifth floor of a building in New York City he toiled at his experiments day and night, with little food, and that of the simplest kind. Indeed so meagre was his fare, mainly crackers and tea, that he bought provisions at night in order to keep his friends from finding out how great his need was.

During this time of hardship all that kept starvation from his door was lessons in painting to a few pupils. On a certain occasion Morse said to one of them, who owed him for a few months' teaching: "Well, Strothers, my boy, how are we off for money?"

"Professor," said the young fellow, "I am sorry to say I have been disappointed, but I expect the money next week."

"Next week!" cried his needy teacher; "I shall be dead by next week."

"Dead, sir?" was the shocked response of Strothers.

"Yes, dead by starvation!" was the emphatic answer.

"Would ten dollars be of any service?" asked the pupil, now seeing that the situation was serious.

"Ten dollars would save my life," was the reply of the poor man, who had been without food for twenty-four hours. You may be sure that Strothers promptly handed him the money.

But in spite of heavy trials and many discouragements, he had by 1837 finished a machine which he exhibited in New York, although he did not secure a patent until 1840.

Then followed a tedious effort to induce the government at Washington to vote money for his great enterprise. Finally, after much delay, the House of Representatives passed a bill "appropriating thirty thousand dollars for a trial of the telegraph."

As you may know, a bill cannot become a law unless the Senate also passes it. But the Senate did not seem friendly to this one. Many believed that the whole idea of the telegraph was rank folly. They thought of Morse and the telegraph very much as people had thought of Fulton and the steamboat, and made fun of him as a crazy-brained fellow.

Up to the evening of the last day of the session the bill had not been taken up by the Senate. Morse sat anxiously waiting in the Senate Chamber until nearly midnight, when, believing there was no longer any hope, he left the room and went home with a heavy heart.

Imagine his surprise the next morning, when a young woman, Miss Ellsworth, congratulated him at breakfast upon the passage of his bill. At first he could scarcely believe the good news, but when he found that she was telling him the truth his joy was unbounded, and he promised her that she should choose the first message.

By the next year (1844) a telegraph-line, extending from Baltimore to Washington, was ready for use. On the day appointed for trial Morse met a party of friends in the chambers of the Supreme Court at the Washington end of the line and, sitting at the instrument which he had himself placed for trial, the happy inventor sent the message selected by Miss Ellsworth: "What hath God wrought!"

The telegraph was a great and brilliant achievement, and brought to its inventor well-earned fame. Now that success had come, honors were showered upon him by many countries. At the suggestion of the French Emperor, representatives from many countries in Europe met in Paris to decide upon some suitable testimonial to Morse as one who had done so much for the world. These delegates voted him a sum amounting to eighty thousand dollars as a token of appreciation for his great invention.

In 1872 this noble inventor, at the ripe age of eighty-one, breathed his last. The grief of the people all over the land was strong proof of the place he held in the hearts of his countrymen.

SOME THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

1. Tell all you can about John Fitch's steamboats.

2. Give examples which indicate young Fulton's inventive gifts. Imagine yourself on the banks of the North River on the day set for the trial of the Clermont, and tell what happened.

3. What and where was the National Road?

4. In what ways was the Erie Canal useful to the people?

5. Describe the first railroads and the first trains.

6. Tell what you can about Morse's twelve toilsome years of struggle while he was working out his great invention. How is the telegraph useful to men?

7. What do you admire about Morse?

8. Are you making frequent use of your map?