America's first great electrician in some way descended to Samuel
Morse.

He received an unusual education. At the age of seven he was sent to a
school at Andover, Massachusetts, to prepare him for Phillips Academy.
At the academy he was prepared for Yale College, which he entered when
fifteen years of age. With the knowledge of science so small at the
time, collegiate instruction in such subjects was naturally meager in
the extreme. Jeremiah Day was then professor of natural philosophy at
Yale, and was probably America's ablest teacher of the subject.
His lectures upon electricity and the experiments with which he
illustrated them aroused the interest of Morse, as we learn from the
letters he wrote to his parents at this time.

One principle in particular impressed Morse. This was that "if the
electric circuit be interrupted at any place the fluid will become
visible, and when it passes it will leave an impression upon any
intermediate body." Thus was it stated in the text-book in use at Yale
at that time. More than a score of years after the telegraph had been
achieved Morse wrote:

The fact that the presence of electricity can be made visible
in any desired part of the circuit was the crude seed which
took root in my mind, and grew into form, and ripened into the
invention of the telegraph.

We shall later hear of the occasion which recalled this bit of
information to Morse's mind.

But though Yale College was at that time a center of scientific