Mr. Morse’s struggles were now over. The telegraph became a wonderful success and he was honored by presidents, kings, and princes with medals, stars, crosses, and other decorations. The inventor now turned his attention to running telegraph lines under water, and laid a cable under New York harbor. About twenty years later another man, Cyrus W. Field, succeeded in connecting America with Europe by laying a cable beneath the Atlantic Ocean. So S. F. B. Morse’s words were realized: “If I can make the telegraph work ten miles, I can make it go around the globe.” He really made true these words of Puck, one of Shakespeare’s fairies: “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes.” Men soon began trying to talk without connecting wires. Marconi invented the radio-telegraph in 1896 and the radio-phone followed. Now it is possible to send wireless messages almost around the world. CYRUS H. M’CORMICK AND THE STORY OF THE REAPER When little Abraham Lincoln was three days old in Kentucky, Cyrus H. McCormick was born in Virginia. When the McCormick boy was seven he used to go out to a shed and watch his father working at a machine to take the place of the scythe which was then used in cutting grain. Father McCormick was never satisfied, the neighbors said. He was “always fussing and trying to invent and improve something.” After working for years to make a machine to harvest grain, Farmer McCormick gave it up, saying that it could not be done. Meanwhile young Cyrus, who had inherited his father’s inventive turn of mind, went to the fields to work with the men. He found it very hard to keep up with them, so he invented a cradle, or improved scythe, which made his work so much easier that he was able to do as much as a grown man. When he was twenty-two, Cyrus McCormick had invented a plough that would throw up a furrow on whichever side the farmer desired. Two years later he made the first self-sharpening plough. Although the neighbors had laughed at his father for being so foolish as to wish to invent a labor-saving machine for harvesting, and in spite of his father’s warnings that such a thing could never be made, the idea of a reaper haunted the young man’s mind. He began to work at it as a boy and kept it up until he was a grown man. He had improved the cradle and his two ploughs without much difficulty, but the reaping machine was a hard problem. It was more difficult because the grain is often lodged, or matted down, and it is necessary not only to cut it but to lay it in even rows, so that it can be bound in sheaves ready for threshing.