Finally, after some weeks delay, it was decided to introduce what has become the most familiar feature of the landscape of civilization, and string the wires on poles. There is little need to follow the enterprise further. Morse stayed with one instrument in the Capitol at Washington, and Vail carried another with him at the end of the line. Already the type-and-rule and all the symbols and dictionaries had been discarded, and the dot-and-dash alphabet was substituted. On April 23d, 1844, Vail substituted the earth for the metallic circuit as an experiment, and that great step both in knowledge and in practice was taken. Within an incredibly brief space the Morse Electric Telegraph had spread all over the world. No man's triumph was ever more complete. He passed to those riches and honors that must have been to him almost as a fulfilled dream. In Europe his progresses were like those of a monarch. He was made a member of almost all of the learned societies of the world, and on his breast glittered the medals and orders that are the insignia of human greatness. A congress of representatives of ten of the governments of Europe met in Paris in 1858, and it was unanimously decided that the sum of four hundred thousand francs--about a hundred thousand dollars--should be presented to him. He died in New York in 1872. [Illustration: PROF. HENRY'S ELECTROMAGNET AND ARMATURE] Yet not a single feature of the invention of Morse, as formulated in his caveat and described in his original patent, is to be found among the essentials of modern telegraphy. They had mostly been abandoned before the first line had been completed, and the arrangements of his associate, Vail, were substituted. Professor Joseph Henry had, in 1832, constructed an electromagnetic telegraph whose signals were made by sound, as all signals now are in the so-called Morse system. He hung a bar-magnet on a pivot in its center as a compass-needle is hung. He wound a U-shaped piece of soft iron with insulated wire, and made it an electro-magnet, and placed the north end of the magnetized bar between the two legs of this electro-magnet. When the latter was made a magnet by the current the end of the bar thus placed was attracted by one leg of the magnet and repelled by the other, and was thus caused to swing in a horizontal plane so that the opposite end of it struck a bell. Thus was an electric telegraph made as an experimental toy, and fulfilling all the conditions of such an one giving the signals by sound, as the modern telegraph does. It lacked one thing--the essential. [Footnote: The details of the construction of the modern telegraph line are not here stated. There are none that change, in principle, the outline above given.]