were produced and something was learned of conductors.

Benjamin Franklin sent aloft his historic kite and found that
electricity came down the silken cord. He demonstrated that frictional
and atmospheric electricity are the same. Franklin and others sent the
electric charge along a wire, but it did not occur to them to endeavor
to apply this to sending messages.

Credit for the first suggestion of an electric telegraph must be given
to an unknown writer of the middle eighteenth century. In the _Scots
Magazine_ for February 17, 1755, there appeared an article signed
simply, "C.M.," which suggested an electric telegraph. The writer's
idea was to lay an insulated wire for each letter of the alphabet.
The wires could be charged from an electrical machine in any desired
order, and at the receiving end would attract disks of paper marked
with the letter which that wire represented, and so any message could
be spelled out. The identity of "C.M." has never been established, but
he was probably Charles Morrison, a Scotch surgeon with a reputation
for electrical experimentation, who later emigrated to Virginia. Of
course "C.M.'s" telegraph was not practical, because of the many wires
required, but it proved to be a fertile suggestion which was followed
by many other thinkers. One experimenter after another added an
improvement or devised a new application.

A French scientist devised a telegraph which it is suspected might
have been practical, but he kept his device secret, and, as Napoleon
refused to consider it, it never was put to a test. An Englishman
devised a frictional telegraph early in the last century and
endeavored to interest the Admiralty. He was told that the semaphore
was all that was required for communication. Another submitted a