He was apparently an adept in the art of caring for himself, one of the most successful worldings of his time, yet he wrote, thought, toiled incessantly, for his fellow men. He had little education obtained as it is supposed an education must be obtained. He was commonplace. No one has ever told of his "silver tongue," or remembered a brilliant after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer, a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him, that "time is money," that "credit is money"--which is the most prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good. Yet clear, keen, cold and inductive as was Franklin's mind, no vision reached him, in the moment of that triumph when he felt the lightning tingling in his fingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through which others of his countrymen were to girdle the world with a common intelligence, and yet others were to use in sprinkling night with clusters as innumerable and mysterious as the higher stars. The story of the Morse telegraph has been repeatedly told, and I have briefly sketched it in connection with the subject of the telegraph. But, unlike the original, scientifically lonely and independent Franklin, Morse had the best assistance of his times in the persons of men more skilled than himself and almost as persistent. The chief of these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which spells without letters or writing or types, that may be seen or heard or felt or tasted, that is adapted to any language and to all conditions, and that performs to this day, and shall to all time, the miracle of causing the inane rattle of pieces of metal against each other to speak to even a careless listener the exact thoughts of one a thousand miles away.