2. With new discoveries of gold and the increasing population on the Pacific coast, means of rapid communication were urgently needed. 3. In 1869 the Union Pacific Railway was completed. 4. 4. Settlers in large numbers entered the new West; agriculture on the great plains developed rapidly. 5. Farmers crowded on the dry slopes and plateaus and irrigation projects were aided by the government. 6. In California, when free deposits of gold became hard to find, the gold seekers became farmers. 7. First a leading wheat state, California then became the leading fruit-growing state. 8. Great cities grew up along the coast. 9. The Spanish-American War brought home to Americans the urgent necessity for a short route by water between the east and the west coasts. IO. The United States took up the work of building a canal at Panama, buying the rights of a French company which had started the work and had failed. II. George Washington Goethals given position of chief engineer. 12. Educated at West Point, Goethals served as chief of engineers in the Spanish-American War. 13. The Canal was completed in 1914 and Goethals was appointed first governor of the Canal Zone, a strip of land ten miles wide along the course of the Canal. 14. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition was held at San Francisco in 1915 to celebrate the opening of the Canal. Study Questions. I. How did the gold seekers reach the Pacific Coast? 2. What demand did the increasing population in the West bring? 3. What was the name of the first railway across the mountains to the Pacific coast? 4. How many railways cross the mountains to-day? 5. What did the railways bring about? 6. How did this affect the Indians? 7. How did the government aid the farmers in the dry areas? 8. What happened in California when the free gold deposits gave out? 9. What great cities grew up along the Pacific coast? IO. What was happening in the plains east of the Rockies? II. What first brought home to Americans the urgent need of a canal across the Isthmus? 12. Who began a canal at Panama? 13. Why did the French not succeed? 14. Who was put in charge of the work of the Americans? 15. Where did Goethals study engineering? 16. In what war did he serve? 17. When was the Canal completed? 18. How was the event celebrated? His parentage Suggested Readings. Wright, Children's Stories of American THOMAS A. EDISON, THE GREATEST INVENTOR OF 199. The Wizard of the Electrical World. Thomas A. Edison was born in 1847 at Milan, Ohio. His father's people were Dutch and his mother's were Scotch. When he was seven years of age his parents removed to Port Huron, Michigan. Edison owed his early training to his mother's care. At the age of twelve he was reading such books as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hume's History of England, Newton's Principia, and Ure's Dictionary of Science. The lastnamed book was too full of mathematics for him. A tireless reader That Edison was a great reader is proved by his resolution to read all the books in the Detroit Free Library! He did finish "fifteen feet of volumes" before any one knew what he was doing. In 1862 General Grant fought the terrible battle of Pittsburg Landing. Everybody wanted to hear the news. Edison bought a thousand newspapers, boarded a train, and the engineer allowed him a few minutes at each station to sell papers. As the first station came in sight, Edison looked ahead and saw a wild crowd of men. He grabbed an armful of papers, rushed out, and sold forty before the train left. At the next station the platform was crowded with a yelling mob. He raised the price to ten cents, but sold rience as one hundred fifty. Finally he reached Port Huron. The station was a mile from town. Edison seized his papers. He met the crowd coming just as he reached a church where a prayer meeting was being held. The prayer meeting broke up, and though he raised his price to twenty-five cents he "took in a young fortune." His expe a news boy Edison began very early to make experiments in elec- Experitricity. After rigging up a line at home, hitching the menting wire to the legs of a cat, and rubbing the cat's back in elecvigorously, he saw the failure of his first experimentthe cat would not stand! tricity life and receives At Mt. Clemens, one day, young Edison saw a child Saves a playing on the railroad with its back to an on-coming freight train. He dashed at the child, and both tumbled lessons in to the ground at the roadside. For this act of bravery telegthe telegraph operator gave him lessons in telegraphy. raphy 200. Begins to Study Electricity. He studied ten Makes days, then disappeared. He returned with a complete a set of set of telegraphic instruments made by his own hand! telegraphic After his trade was learned he began a period of wandering instruas a telegraph operator. For many boys still in their ments teens this would have been a time of destruction, but Edison neither drank nor smoked. He wandered from Becomes Adrian to Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Mem a tramp telegra pher Repairs electric machinery and gains a situation THOMAS ALVA EDISON After a photograph from life phis, and Boston, stopping for shorter or longer periods at each place. By the time he was twenty-two he had invented and partly finished his plan of sending two dispatches along the same wire at the same time. This was equal to doubling the number of wires in use. Edison was a poor boy and was two or three hundred dollars in debt. He went from Boston to New York. The speculators in Wall Street were wild with excitement, for the electric machinery had broken down. Nobody could make it work. Edison pushed his way to the front, saw the difficulty, and at once removed it. All were loud in their praise of Edison. On the next day he was engaged to take charge of all the electric machinery at three hundred dollars per month. After a time he joined a company and gave his time to working out inventions. The company finally sent a Receives number of men to ask Edison how much he would take for his inventions. He had already decided to say five thousand dollars. But when the men came he said that for his in- he did not know. He was dumfounded when they offered ventions him forty thousand dollars! forty thousand dollars 201. Edison's Inventions. In 1873 Edison established lishes his first laboratory or workshop in Newark, New Jersey. EstabHere he gathered more than three hundred men to turn his first out the inventions pertaining to electricity which his workbusy brain suggested. They were all as enthusiastic shop over the inventions as Edison himself. No fixed hours of labor in this shop! When the day's work was done the men often begged to be allowed to return to the More shop to complete their work. inven Many telegraph and telephone inventions were made tions in this laboratory. There were forty-five inventions all told. They brought in so much money that Edison decided they must have a better place to work. He Builds a built at Menlo Park, New Jersey, twenty-four miles new from New York City, the finest laboratory then in the laboraworld. On instruments alone he spent $100,000. In tory and the great laboratory at Menlo Park Edison gathered one a fine of the finest scientific libraries that money could buy. library This library was for the men in the factory-to help them in their inventions and to give them pleasure. gathers Invents the micro The microphone is one of Edison's inventions. Its purpose is to increase sound while sending it over the wire. The passing of a delicate camel's-hair brush is magnified so as to seem like the roar of a mighty wind in a forest of giant pines. Next came the megaphone, an instrument to bring faraway sounds to one's hearing. By means of this instrument, persons talking a long megadistance apart are able to hear each other with ease. phone THE PHONOGRAPH phone The |