TO HENRY SIBLEY, ESQ., HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.

With full page of engravings High Speed on the Ocean Sibley College Lectures.

* SIBLEY COLLEGE LECTURES.

On appearing for the first time before this Association, which, as I am informed, comprises the faculty and the entire body of students of the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering and the Mechanic Arts, a reminiscence of the founder of this College suggests itself to me, in the relation of which I beg first to be indulged.

In the years 1847-8-9 I lived in Rochester, N.Y., and formed a slight acquaintance with Mr. Sibley, whose home was then, as it has ever since been, in that city.

Nearly twelve years afterward, in the summer of 1861, which will be remembered as the first year of our civil war, I met Mr. Sibley again.

" This describes the conversation which Mr. Sibley and I had.

Mr. Sibley talked, and I listened.

Some years before, Mr. Sibley had created the Western Union Telegraph Company.

Hiram Sibley, a man of the people, a resident of an inland city, of only moderate fortune, alone grasped the situation.

With Mr. Sibley, to be convinced was to act; and so he set about the task of carrying this vast scheme into execution.

By his immense energy, the magnetic power with which he infused his own convictions into other minds, the direct, practical way in which he set about the work, and his indomitable perseverance, Mr. Sibley attained at last a phenomenal success.

Here again Mr. Sibley had seen that which was hidden from others.

Then Mr. Sibley had been dependent on the aid and co-operation of many persons; and this he had been able to secure.

Mr. Sibley found himself alone.

If Mr. Sibley had advocated a line to the moon, they would hardly have seen in it greater evidence of lunacy.

Without help from any one, for every man who claimed a right to express an opinion upon it scouted the project as chimerical, and no capitalist would put a dollar in it, Hiram Sibley built the line of telegraph to San Francisco, risking in it all he had in the world.

There was the practicability, and there was the demand and the business to be done, and yet no living man could see it, or could be made to see it, except Hiram Sibley.

WILD, PAYSON SIBLEY, JR.

Payson Sibley Wild, Jr. (A); 1Nov61; R284226.

SEE Sibley, Carroll.

SEE Sibley, Carroll.

This was then a tremendous undertaking, and when Mr. Sibley proposed that the Western Union should undertake the construction of such a line he was met with the strongest opposition.

But Sibley had faith; he was possessed of Morse's vision and Morse's courage.

"If there were a dog," he replied, "with a tail long enough to reach from here to Calcutta, and you pinched his tail here, wouldn't he howl in Calcutta?" Once Sibley and the other American telegraph pioneers had spanned the continent, they began plans for spanning the globe.