A brief sketch of the difficulties attending the making of the first practical telegraph line will be interesting as showing how much and how little men knew of practical electricity in 1843. [Footnote: There was no possibility of their knowing more, notwithstanding that, viewed from the present, their inexperienced struggles seem almost pathetic. So, also, do the ideas of Galvani and the experiments and conclusions of all except Franklin, until we come to Faraday. It is one of the features of the time in which we live that, regardless of age, we are all scholars of a new school in which mere diligence and behavior are not rewarded, and in which it is somewhat imperative that we should keep up with our class in an understanding of _what are now the facts of daily life_, wonders though they were in the days of our youth.] To begin with, it was a "metallic circuit;" that is, two wires were to be used instead of one wire and a "ground connection." They knew nothing of this last. Vail discovered and used it before the line was finished. The two wires, insulated, were inclosed in a pipe, lead presumably, and the pipe was placed in the ground. Ezra Cornell, afterwards the founder of Cornell University, had been engaged in the manufacture and sale of a patent plow, and undertook to make a pipe-laying machine for this new telegraph line. After the work had been begun Vail tested and united the conductors as each section was laid. When ten miles were laid the insulation, which had been growing weaker, failed altogether. There was no current. Probably every schoolboy now knows what the trouble was. The earth had stolen the current and absorbed it. The modern boy would simply remark "Induction," and turn his attention to some efficient remedy. Then, there was consternation. Cornell dexterously managed to break the pipe-laying machine, so as to furnish a plausible excuse to the newspapers and such public as there may be said to have been before there was any telegraph line. Days were spent in consultation at the Relay House, and in finding the cause of the difficulty and the remedy. Of the congressional appropriation nearly all had been spent. The interested parties even quarreled, as mere men will under such circumstances, and the want of a little knowledge which is now elementary about electricity came near wrecking forever an enterprise whose vast importance could not be, and was not then, even approximately measured. [Illustration: ALFRED VAIL.]