%412.  The Telegraph.%—­Think, again, what would be our condition if every telegraph line in the world were suddenly pulled down.  Yet the telegraph, like the reaper and the sewing machine, was introduced slowly.  Samuel F. B. Morse got his patent in 1837; and for seven years, helped by Alfred Vail, he struggled on against poverty.  In 1842 he had but thirty-seven cents in the world.  But perseverance conquers all things; and with thirty thousand dollars, granted by Congress, the first telegraph line in the world was built in 1844 from Baltimore to Washington.  In 1845 New York and Philadelphia were connected; but as wires could not be made to work under water, the messages were received on the New Jersey side of the Hudson and carried to New York by boat.  By 1856 the telegraph was in use in the most populous states.  Some forty companies, but one of which paid dividends, competed for the business.  This was ruinous; and in 1856 a union of Western companies was formed and called the Western Union Telegraph Company.  To-day it has 21,000 offices, sends each year some 58,000,000 messages, receives about $23,000,000, and does seven eighths of all the telegraph business in the United States.

%413.  India Rubber.%—­The same year (1844) which witnessed the introduction of the telegraph saw the perfection of Goodyear’s secret for the vulcanization of India rubber.  In 1820 the first pair of rubber shoes ever seen in the United States were exhibited in Boston.  Two years later a ship from South America brought 500 pairs of rubber shoes.  They were thick, heavy, and ill-shaped; but they sold so rapidly that more were imported, and in 1830 a cargo of raw gum was brought from South America for the purpose of making rubber goods.  With this C. M. Chaffee went to work and succeeded in producing some pieces of cloth spread with rubber.  Supposing the invention to be of great value, a number of factories[1] began to make rubber coats, caps, wagon curtains, of pure rubber without cloth.  But to the horror of the companies the goods melted when hot weather came, and were sent back, emitting so dreadful an odor that they had to be buried.  It was to overcome this and find some means of hardening the gum that Goodyear began his experiments and labored year after year against every sort of discouragement.  Even when the secret of vulcanizing, as it is called, was discovered, five years passed before he was able to conduct the process with absolute certainty.  In 1844, after ten years of labor, he succeeded and gave to the world one of the most useful inventions of the nineteenth century.

[Footnote 1:  At Roxbury, Boston, Framingham, Salem, Lynn, Chelsea, Troy, and Staten Island.]

%414.  The Photograph; the Discovery of Anaesthesia.%—­But there were other inventions and discoveries of almost as great or even greater value to mankind.  In 1840 Dr. John W. Draper so perfected the daguerreotype that it could be used to take pictures of persons and landscapes.  Till then it could be used only to make pictures of buildings and statuary.