Entering the office of the "Maine Farmer" again, he found "Mr. Smith on his knees in the middle of his office floor, with a piece of chalk in his hand, the mould-board of a plow lying by his side, and with various chalk-marks on the floor before him."
Mr. Smith arose and grasped him cordially by the hand, saying, "Cornell, you are the very man I want to see. I have been trying to explain to neighbor Robertson a machine that I want made, but I cannot make him understand it. I want a kind of scraper, or machine for digging a ditch for laying our telegraph pipe under ground. Congress has appropriated thirty thousand dollars to enable Professor Morse to test the practicability of his telegraph on a line between Washington and Baltimore. I have taken the contract to lay the pipe at one hundred dollars a mile."
Mr. Cornell's ready brain soon saw what kind of a machine was needed, and he sketched a rough diagram of it.
Without much hope of success, Smith said, "You make a machine, and I will pay the expense whether successful or not; if successful, I will pay you fifty dollars, or one hundred, or any price you may name."
Mr. Cornell at once went to a machine shop, made the patterns for the necessary castings, and then the wood-work for the frame. The trial of the new machine was made at Mr. Smith's homestead, four yoke of oxen being attached to the strange-looking plow, which cut a furrow two and one-half feet deep, and one and one-fourth inches wide, and laid the pipe in the bottom at the same time. It worked successfully, and Mr. Cornell was asked to take charge of the laying of the pipe between Baltimore and Washington. He accepted, for he believed the telegraph would become a vast instrument in civilization. The loss of a position at the Beebe mill proved the opening to a broader world; his energy had found a field as wide as the universe.
It was decided to put the first pipe between the double tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. With an eight-mule team, horses being afraid of the engines, nearly a mile of pipe was laid each day. Soon Professor Morse came hurriedly, and calling Mr. Cornell aside, said, "Can you not contrive to stop this work for a few days in some manner, so the papers will not know that it has been purposely interrupted? I want to make some experiments before any more pipe is laid."