<p>In 1843 Ezra Cornell was a traveling salesman trying to sell plows. He met F.O.J. Smith and S.F.B. Morse in Maine while he was there. They had a contract for laying underground cable of wires between Baltimore and Washington to test Morse’s Telegraph invention. . . . Smith asked Cornell to help them and Cornell came up with a plow that would bury the pipe and cables in it.
The plow worked admirably, but with some ten miles of pipe laid it was found that, on account of defective insulation, all the work sofar was a wasted effort. To let this be known would prejudice the entire undertaking, and make it difficult to obtain additional appropriations from Congress; and one day Professor Morse, in great distress, called Ezra from his plow to ask him if he could suggest any way of suspending operations without giving the true reason. Ezra’s ingenuity made little of so slight a difficulty. Stepping back to the plow, he directed the teamsters to start up the mules; and watching for an opportunity, with simulated clumsiness canted the point of the plow into a ledge of rock and broke it to pieces. The next day it was reported in the newspapers that on accound of this "unfortunate accident’ the work would have to be suspended for a few weeks. The weeks dragged on while Professor Morse and Alfred Vail and F.O.J. Smith experimented with other methods of insulating the wires in the pipe. Meantime, Ezra spent his spare time boning up on electricity, and came to the conclusion that the simplest and cheapest way would be to abandon the underground system altogeather and string the wires seperately on poles, insuluating them at the cross bars by wrapping them around glass knobs . . . .
Having devised the method of stringing wires on poles, he entered into line construction in the East and the Midwest. He was founder, director, and for a time the largest stockholder of the Western Union Telegraph Company, which was formed in 1855 to end cutthroat competition in the field.
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<p>Ezra Cornell and Andrew D White were both New York State Senators. They were able to get the NY State Legislature to make Cornell the Land Grant College of the State of NY. I think it’s highly unlikely that NY State will abandon the close association it has had with Cornell since its’ beginning.http://www.suny.edu/Student/campuses_complete_list.cfm[/url] ”>http://www.suny.edu/Student/campuses_complete_list.cfm</a></p> ;