A list of the electrical inventors of this country would be very long. Many of the names are, in the mass and number of inventions, almost lost. It happens that many of the practical applications described in this volume, indeed most of them, are the work of citizens of this country. In previous chapters I have referred briefly to Franklin, Morse, Field, and others. These men have left names that, without question, may be regarded as permanent. Their chiefest distinguishing trait was originality of idea, and each one of them is a lesson to the American boy. In a sense the greatest of all these, and in the same sense, the greatest American, was Benjamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring, indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered; a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote: Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning while repeating Franklin's experiment.] His genius lay in a power of swift inductive reasoning. His common sense and his sense of humor never forsook him. He uttered keen apothegms that have lived like those of Solon. He was a philosopher like Diogenes, lacking the bitterness. He wrote the "Busy-Body," and annually made the plebeian and celebrated "Almanac," and the "Ephemera" that were not ephemeral, and is the author of the story of "The Whistle," that everybody knows, and everybody reads with shamefacedness because it is a brief chapter out of his own history.