The inventor found himself universally honored, and at last a very wealthy man. He married Miss Griswold of Poughkeepsie, and bought an estate of two hundred acres near that city. He was given degrees by American and European universities and societies, was made a member of the French Legion of Honor, received orders of knighthood from the rulers of Spain and Italy, Denmark, Turkey, and Portugal. In 1858 the Emperor of the French called a Congress in Paris to honor Morse, and the Congress awarded him a gift of 400,000 francs as a token of gratitude. In his eightieth year his statue in bronze was placed in Central Park, New York, and his countrymen did their utmost to show him their appreciation of his great achievement. He died in 1872, a short time after he had unveiled a statue of Benjamin Franklin in New York’s Printing-house Square. Morse was the inventor, but his partner Alfred Vail had a great share in making the present telegraph. He discarded the original porte-rule and type of the transmitter for the key or lever, moved up and down by hand to complete or break the circuit. He perfected the dot and dash code, he invented the device for embossing the message, and replaced the inking pen by a metal disc, smeared with ink, that rolled the dots and dashes on the paper. When it was found that the telegraph operators would read the signals from the clicking of the marking lever instead of from the paper, he made an instrument which had no marking device, and in which the signals were sounded by the striking of the lever of the armature against the metal stops. This “sounder” soon drove out the old Morse recorder. The present instrument is in its mechanical form far more the work of Vail than of Morse. XI McCORMICK AND THE REAPER 1809-1884 The same sturdy pioneer stock that gave America Daniel Boone and Lincoln, Robert Fulton and Andrew Jackson, produced the inventor of the reaper. He came of a line of resourceful, fearless Scotch-Irish settlers, bone of the bone and sinew of the sinew of those generations that laid the broad foundations of the United States. His great-grandfather had been an Indian fighter in the colony of Pennsylvania, his grandfather had moved to Virginia and fought in the Revolution, and his father had built a log-house and tilled a farm in that strip of arable Virginia land that lay between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains. He prospered, and added neighboring farms to his original holding; he had two grist-mills, two sawmills, a blacksmith shop, a smelting-furnace, and a distillery; he invented new makes of farm machinery, and in addition was a man of considerable reading, able to hold his own in discussion with the lawyers and the clergymen of the countryside. He was of that same well-developed type of countryman of whom so many were to be found in the thirteen original states and the borderlands to the west, that settler type which was the real backbone of the young country.