[Illustration: ONE KIND OF TELEGRAPH.] Suppose you take a straight and stiff piece of wire as long as your desk and fasten it in the middle so that the ends will swing easily. Next tie a pencil tight to each end; then put a sheet of paper under the point of each pencil. Now, if you make a mark with the pencil nearest to you, you will find that the pencil at the other end of the wire will make the same kind of mark. Such a wire would be a kind of telegraph, because it would make marks or signs at a distance. Mr. Morse said: I will have a wire a mile long with a pencil, or something sharp-pointed like a pencil, fastened to the further end; the wire itself shall not move at all, but the pencil shall, for I will make electricity run along the wire and move it. Mr. Morse was then a professor or teacher in the University of the City of New York. He put up such a wire in one of the rooms of the building, sent the electricity through it, and found that it made the pencil make just the marks he wanted it should; that meant that he had invented the _electric telegraph_; for if he could do this over a mile of wire, then what was to hinder his doing it over a hundred or even a thousand miles? [Illustration: PROFESSOR MORSE AT WORK MAKING HIS TELEGRAPH.] [Footnote 3: Telegraph (tel'e-graf): this name is made up of two Greek words, the first of which means _far off_, and the second _to write_.] 223. How Professor Morse lived while he was making his telegraph.--But all this was not done in a day, for this invention cost years of patient labor. At first, Mr. Morse lived in a little room by himself: there he worked and ate, when he could get anything to eat; and slept, if he wasn't too tired to sleep. Later, he had a room in the university. While he was there he painted pictures to get money enough to buy food; there, too (1839), he took the first photograph ever made in America. Yet with all his hard work there were times when he had to go hungry, and once he told a young man that if he did not get some money he should be dead in a week--dead of starvation. [Illustration: A COPY OF THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH MADE IN AMERICA. (The tower of the Church of the Messiah, in New York. The church is no longer standing.)]