Jasper County Democrat, Volume 17, Number 87, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 February 1915 — Makes Suggestion for Temple of Fame Recognition. [ARTICLE]

Makes Suggestion for Temple of Fame Recognition.

The Indianapolis Star of Thursday contained the following communication from Lewis S. Alter of Carpenter township, this county: I see a number of 'names suggested for a place in the Indiana Temple of Fame. Allow me to suggest the name of Dr. David Alter; While living in the town of Greenfield early in 1836 he put up and tested an electric telegraph and made it work successfully. This was about .six years before Prof. Morse applied for a patent for the same. Dr. Alter was as poor as a church mouse, and did not push his invention, and hence lest the honor and profits that should have come to him. His system was much more complicated than Prof. Morse’s, as he had a wire for each letter and used a keyboard similar to the common typewriter, while Morse used but one wire circuit, and used the dot and dash system, which is the one still used. As Morse did not get his ideas from Dr. Alter and it was not in public use, of course he could not keep Morse from getting I his patent. * Nearly twenty years later Dr. Alter discpvered the peculiarity of the lines in the spectroscope and developed the wonderful discovery known to science as spectrum analysis. The glass prism with which he made his experiments in that line is now in tlfe Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg, Pa. He discovered a method of extracting promine out of salt water, which greatly reduced the cost of that. important article. Several other in ventionsß»nd discoveries were made by him in optics, electricity, magnetism and chemistry. He died in Pennsylvania in 1881. In this connectibn I wish to mention Helena Alter, daughter of the Rev. John Alter and a neice of Dr. David Alter. She was one of the most remarkable women of Indiana. She was but a girl when she assisted her uncle in his first telegraph. Afterward she became a successful preacher in the United Brethren church, and later in the Methodist Protestant church, and was the first woman in the United" States regularly ordained as an elder. She died in 1876 in Jasper county, Indiana,