The rank and file of humanity had no definite idea of the plan, or of the results that would follow if it were successful. In reality no one cared. It was Morse's enterprise exclusively--a crank's fad alone. There has been no period in the history of society when the public, as a body, was interested in any great change in the systems to which it was accustomed. There is always enmity against an improver. In reality, the question of how much money Morse should make by inventing the electric telegraph was the question of least importance. Yet it was regarded as the only one. He is dead. His profits have gone into the mass, his honors have become international. The patents have long expired. The public, the entire world, are long since the beneficiaries, and the benefits continue to be inconceivably vast. Nothing in all history exceeds in moral importance the invention of the telegraph except the invention of printing with movable types. [Illustration: AN ELECTRO-MAGNET OF MORSE'S TIME.] After eight years of waiting, and the repeated instruction of the entire Congress of the United States in the art of telegraphy, that body was finally induced to make an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars to be expended in the construction of an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. And now begins the actual strangeness of the story of the Telegraph. After many years of toil, Morse still had learned nothing of the efficient construction of an electro-magnet. The magnet which he attempted to use unchanged was after the pattern of the first one ever made--a bent U-shaped bar, around which were a few turns of wire not insulated. The bar was varnished for insulation, and the turns of wire were so few that they did not touch each other. The apparatus would not work at a distance of more than a few feet, and not invariably then. Professor Leonard D. Gale suggested the cause of the difficulty as being in the sparseness of the coils of wire on the magnet and the use of a single-cell battery. He furnished an electro-magnet and battery out of his own belongings, with which the efficiency of the contrivance was greatly increased. The only insulated wire then known was bonnet-wire, used by milliners for shaping the immense flaring bonnets worn by our grandmothers, and when it finally came to constructing the instruments of the first telegraphic system the entire stock of New York was exhausted. The immense stocks of electrical supplies now available for all purposes was then, and for many years afterwards, unknown. Previous to the investigations of Professor Henry, in 1830, only the theory of causing a core of soft iron to become a magnet was known, and the actual magnet, as we make it, had not been made. Morse, in his beginnings, had not money enough to employ a competent mechanic, and was himself possessed of but scant mechanical skill or knowledge of mechanical results. Persistency was the quality by which he succeeded.