While the idea appeared to his fellow-passengers as chimerical, yet, as we have seen, his earnestness made so deep an impression that when, several years afterwards, he exhibited to some of them a completed model, they, like Captain Pell, instantly recognized it as embodying the principles explained to them on the ship.
Without going deeply into the scientific history of the successive steps which led up to the invention of the telegraph, I shall quote a few sentences from a long paper written by the late Professor E.N.

Horsford, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and included in Mr.Prime's biography:-- "What was needed to the _original conception_ of the Morse recording telegraph?
"1.

A knowledge that soft wire, bent in the form of a horseshoe, could be magnetized by sending a galvanic current through a coil wound round the iron, and that it would lose its magnetism when the current was suspended.
"2.

A knowledge that such a magnet had been made to lift and drop masses of iron of considerable weight.
"3.

A knowledge, or a belief, that the galvanic current could be transmitted through wires of great length.
"These were all.