Davy, Henry, and Faraday, and a long list of others, such suggestions would have remained as little likely to be realised as the Bishop of Llandaff’s notions of a flying-machine, or the crude theories of the alchemists. He who first produces a practical result--something which, however imperfect, gives a result to be seen and felt, and appreciated by the senses--is the true [Greek: poiêtês ποιἡτης]--the maker and inventor, whom the world should recognise, no matter how much may be done by others to improve his work, each of those improvers being, after his kind, deserving of recognition for what he does. A year before Professor Morse wrote the letter to Mr. Spencer, he took some steps to show that which he prophesied was practicable. In the autumn of the year 1842 he stretched a submarine cable from Castle Garden to Governor’s Island in the harbour of New York, demonstrated to the American Institute the possibility of effecting electric communication through the sea, and submitted that telegraphic communication might with certainty be established across the Atlantic. Later in the same year he sent a current across the canal at Washington. But that was not the first current transmitted under water, for as early as 1839, Sir W. O’Shaughnessy, the late Superintendent of Electric Telegraphs in India, hauled an insulated wire across the Hooghly at Calcutta, and produced electrical phenomena at the other side of the river. In 1846, Col. Colt, the patentee of the revolver, and Mr. Robinson, of New York, laid a wire across the river from New York to Brooklyn, and from Long Island to Coney Island. In 1849, Mr. Walker sent messages to shore through two miles of insulated wire from a battery on board a steamer off Folkestone.