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[[partial image of news story about Joseph Henry with area marked in red]]

man who ever officiated in this city- who suggested the use of steam applied to land carriages, [[red mark starts here]] and proved its practicability here in Philadelphia by a successful exhibition of the plan early in the present century. Then, after the lapse of years, when our population had spread across the continent to where California's golden gate "fronts the falling sun," and when, if ever, the idea of Montesquieu might be supposed to have appropriate application, there was another American scientists quietly at work in his laboratory in New Jersey, whose genius had anticipated this last emergency. For in 1834, as I myself witnessed, the practical working of the principle of the magnetic telegraph - afterwards so ingeniously utilized by Morse - was exhibited and explained in a series of successful experiments to the students of Princeton by their revered instructor, Joseph Henry, whose modesty is equalled only by his merits, the whole of whose useful and unselfish life has been devoted to scientific investigations, to "the diffusion of knowledge among men," and who deserves to be known as "the Franklin of the nineteenth century," so that thus by the genius of Americans, intelligence can be despatched and received across the continent in less time than was required in the days of our fathers for the post-boy to put on his jack-boots for a journey. But I have been led into a longer digression than I intended. To return to the topic of the Centennial.
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Besides the impulse which it will impart to the enterprising spirit and inventive genius of