A hundred years ago practically nothing was known of electricity. Persons now living were born into a world that had never seen an electric telegraph, a telephone, an electric car, or an electric light. We are living in the morning of electrical knowledge, and what the day may bring no one can imagine. Americans have given the world many of the greatest inventions, and in the field of electricity they have given it nearly everything of value. It is to American ingenuity that civilization is indebted for the electrical telegraph, the sub-marine cable, the telephone, the electric light, and the electric car. The names of Morse, Vail, Field, Bell, Brush, Gray, Edison, and Sprague--all American electrical inventors--will always be prominent in the list of the world's great benefactors. If you will rub a stick of sealing wax briskly with a woolen cloth, you will find that the stick of wax will attract to itself bits of bran, small shreds of paper, and the like. This is the simplest experiment in electricity. In the same way, by rubbing amber with silk, Thales, a Greek philosopher who lived in the sixth century before Christ, is thought to have discovered electricity. The Greek word for _amber_ is _elektron_. Because of the supposed discovery of electricity in amber by Thales, the English word _electricity_ was "coined" and used for the first time by William Gilbert, a British physician and scientist, who lived during the reigns of Elizabeth and James. For nearly twenty-five centuries, reaching from the time of Thales to the opening of the nineteenth century, the world learned practically nothing about electricity. The start in modern electrical knowledge was made by Galvani, an Italian scientist, born in 1737, who just before the last century dawned showed that electricity can be produced by the contact of metals with fluids. The term _galvanic_, used in connection with electricity, comes from the name of this investigator. Galvani's experiments suggested the electric battery to Volta, another Italian scientist who was born in 1745. The electrical word _voltaic_ is in honor of Volta. In 1752 Benjamin Franklin flew his kite into the thunderstorm and proved that lightning is electricity. A little later Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish investigator, pointed out the relation between electricity and magnetism. In the early part of the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday, an eminent English physicist, discovered the possibility of producing electric currents through the motion of a magnet. Faraday's discovery led to the electric dynamo machine, the source of modern power over electricity. The oldest and greatest of electrical inventions is the telegraph. _Tele_ is a Greek adverb meaning "afar." _Graph_ comes from the Greek verb "to write." _Telegraph_ therefore means "to write afar."