Personal Highlights:

• Gotham—which in old Anglo-Saxon means “Goats’ Town”—was (and still is) a real village in the English county of Nottinghamshire, not far from Sherwood Forest. But...
• forests with towering stands of walnut, cedar, chestnut, maple, and oak. Orchards bore apples of incomparable sweetness and “pears larger than a fist.” Every spring...
• That they made better hosts than the inhabitants of the seaboard was confirmed as the Halve Maen sailed down “that side of the River that...

Personal Highlights:

• If all four cables were to fail, he said, the main span would not collapse. It would sag at the center, but it would not fall.
• Niagara was how to get a wire over the gorge and its violent river. Ellet solved that nicely by offering five dollars to the first...
• Once the kite string was across, a succession of heavier cords and ropes was pulled over, and in a short time the first length of wire went on its way.