“You are on the wrong tack.  You don’t want either a ditch or a scraper.”

He took a pencil and in a few minutes outlined a machine, which he said would cut a trench two feet deep, lay the pipe at its bottom, and cover the earth in behind it.  The motive power need be only a team of oxen or mules.  These creatures had but to trudge slowly onward.  The machine would do its work faithfully behind them.

“Come, come, this is impossible!” cried editor Smith.

“I’ll wager my head it can be done, and I can do it,” replied inventor Cornell.

He laid a large premium on his confidence in his idea, promising that if his machine would not work he would ask no money for it.  But if it succeeded, he was to be well paid.  Smith agreed to these terms, and Cornell went to work.

In ten days the machine was built and ready for trial.  A yoke of oxen was attached to it, three men managed it, and in the first five minutes it had laid one hundred feet of pipe and covered it with earth.  It was a decided success.  Mr. Smith had contracted to lay the pipe for one hundred dollars a mile.  A short calculation proved to him that, with the aid of Ezra Cornell’s machine, ninety dollars of this would be profit.

But the shrewd editor did not feel like risking Cornell’s machine in any hands but those of the inventor.  He made him a profitable offer if he would go to Baltimore and take charge of the job himself.  It would pay better than selling patent ploughs.  Cornell agreed to go.

Reaching Baltimore, he met Professor Morse.  They had never met before.  Their future lives were to be closely associated.  In the conversation that ensued Morse explained what he proposed to do.  An electric wire might either be laid underground or carried through the air.  He had decided on the underground system, the wire being coated by an insulating compound and drawn through a pipe.

Cornell questioned him closely, got a clear idea of the scheme, saw the pipe that was to be used, and expressed doubts of its working.

“It will work, for it has worked,” said Morse.  “While I have been fighting Congress, inventors in Europe have been experimenting with the telegraphic idea.  Short lines have been laid in England and elsewhere, in which the wire is carried in buried pipes.  They had been successful.  What can be done in Europe can be done in America.”

What Morse said was a fact.  While he had been pushing his telegraph conception in America it had been tried successfully in Europe.  But the system adopted there, of vibrating needle signals, was so greatly inferior to the Morse system, that it was destined in the future to be almost or quite set aside by the latter.  To-day the Morse system and alphabet are used in much the greater number of the telegraph offices of the world.