A Scotchman named James Watt was one of the first of these magicians whom we call inventors. Watt had watched a boiling kettle on the stove and noticed that the steam lifted the lid. This gave him an idea that steam might lift other things as well as the lid of a tea-kettle. So he made a machine in which steam lifted a lid called a piston in such a way as to turn a wheel. This was the first steam-engine. Watt’s steam-engine moved wheels and other things, but it didn’t move itself. An Englishman named Stephenson put Watt’s engine on wheels and made the engine move its own wheels. This was the first locomotive. Soon funny-looking carriages drawn by funny-looking engines were made to run on tracks in America. At first these trains ran only a few miles out from such cities as Baltimore and Philadelphia. Then a young fellow named Robert Fulton thought he could make a boat go by putting Watt’s engine on board and making it turn paddle-wheels. People laughed at him and called the boat he was building “Fulton’s Folly,” which means “foolishness.” But the boat worked, and Fulton had the laugh on those who had laughed at him. He called his boat the _Clermont_, and it made regular trips up and down the river. No one had ever before been able to talk to another far off until the telegraph was invented. The telegraph makes a clicking sound. Electricity flows through a wire from one place to another place which may be a long distance off. If you press a button at one end of the wire you stop the electricity flowing through the wire, and the instrument at the other end makes a click. A short click is called a dot, and a long click is called a dash. These dots and dashes stand for letters of the alphabet, so you can spell out a message by dots and dashes. A is . -- dot-dash B is -- ... dash-dot-dot-dot E is . dot H is .... dot-dot-dot-dot T is -- dash An American painter named Morse invented this wonderful little instrument. He built the first telegraph line in America between Baltimore and Washington, and this was the first message he clicked across it: “What hath God wrought!” A school-teacher named Bell was trying to find some way of making deaf children hear, and in doing so he invented the telephone. The telephone carries words as the telegraph carries clicks. You do not have to know a special alphabet or spell out words by dots and dashes as you do on the telegraph. With the telephone any one can talk from one side of America to the other. Many inventions now in every-day use have been partly invented by several people, so that it is hard to say just which one thought of the invention first. Several people thought of a way to run a machine by feeding it electricity. This was the electric motor. Then others thought of a way to run a machine by exploding gas. This was the motor used in automobiles.