Something of Men I Have Known / With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective

by Adlai E. Stevenson

VIII THE FIRST POLITICAL TELEGRAM

SENATOR SILAS WRIGHT NOMINATED FOR VICE-PRESIDENT—WORD OF HIS NOMINATION SENT HIM BY THE MORSE TELEGRAPH—MORSE'S FIRST CONCEPTION OF AN ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH—OBSTACLES TO THE CARRYING OUT OF HIS INVENTION—A BILL APPROPRIATING $30,000 TO TEST THE VALUE OF HIS TELEGRAPH—EARLIER FORMS OF TELEGRAPHIC INTERCOURSE—A EULOGY ON THE INVENTOR BY MR. GARFIELD—ANOTHER, BY MR. COX—THE FIRST MESSAGE THAT EVER PASSED OVER THE WIRE—DR. PRIME'S PRAISE OF MORSE AFTER HIS DEATH.

By all odds, the most venerable in appearance of the Representatives in the forty-sixth Congress, was Hendrick B. Wright of Pennsylvania. After a retirement of a third of a century, he had been returned to the seat he had honored while many of his present associates were in the cradle. Of massive build, stately bearing, lofty courtesy; neatly appareled in blue broadcloth, with brass buttons appropriately in evidence, he appeared indeed to belong to a past generation of statesmen.

"And thus he bore without abuse
The grand old name of gentleman."

In one of the many conversations I held with him, he told me that he was the president of the Democratic National Convention which met in Baltimore in 1844. As will be remembered, a majority of the delegates to that convention were favorable to the renomination of Mr. Van Buren, but his recently published letter opposing the annexation of Texas had rendered him extremely obnoxious to a powerful minority of his own party. After a protracted struggle, Mr. Van Buren, under the operation of the "two-thirds rule," was defeated, and Mr. Polk nominated. The convention, anxious to placate the friends of the defeated candidate, then tendered the nomination for Vice-President to Senator Silas Wright, the close friend of Mr. Van Buren.

At the time the convention was in session, Samuel F. B. Morse was conducting in a room in the Capitol the electrical experiments which have since "given his name to the ages." Under an appropriation by Congress, a telegraph line had been recently constructed from Washington to Baltimore.

Immediately upon the nomination of Senator Wright, as mentioned, the president of the convention sent him by the Morse telegraph a brief message, the first of a political character that ever passed over the wire, advising him of his nomination, and requesting his acceptance. Two hours later he read to the convention a message from Senator Wright, then in Washington, peremptorily declining the nomination.

Upon the reading of this message to the convention, it was openly declared to be a hoax, not one member in twenty believing that a message could possibly have been received. The convention adjourned till the next day, first instructing its president to communicate with Senator Wright by letter. A special messenger, by hard riding and frequent change of horse, bore the letter of the convention to Wright in Washington, and returned with his reply by the time the convention had reassembled. As will be remembered, Wright persisting in his declination, George M. Dallas was nominated and duly elected.

Later, in conversation with the Hon. Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, he told me that he was in the room of the Capitol set apart for the experiments which Mr. Morse wished to make, and distinctly remembered the fact of the transmission of the message to and from Senator Wright, as stated.

The incident mentioned recalls something of the obstacles encountered by Morse in the marvellous work with which his name is inseparably associated. He first conceived the idea of an electro-magnetic telegraph on shipboard on a homeward-bound voyage from Europe in 1832. Before landing from his long voyage, his plans for a series of experiments had been clearly thought out. Having constructed his first recording apparatus, his caveat for a patent was filed five years later; and in 1838, he applied to Congress for an appropriation to enable him to construct an experimental line from Washington to Baltimore in order to demonstrate the practicability of his invention. His proposal was at first treated with ridicule —even with contempt; and for more than three years no favorable action was taken by Congress. With abiding faith, however, in the merits of his invention, his zeal knew no abatement during years of poverty and discouragement. At length in the Twenty-seventh Congress, Representative Kennedy of Maryland—at a later day Secretary of the Navy—introduced a bill appropriating thirty thousand dollars "to test the value of Morse's Electro-Magnetic Telegraph," to be expended under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury.

By the untiring efforts of Mr. Kennedy and other Representatives, the bill was finally brought before the House for consideration near the close of the session. In the light of events, the discussion that immediately preceded the vote is of interest, and in no small degree amusing, to this generation. On February twenty-first, 1843, Mr. Johnson of Tennessee wished to say a word upon the bill. As the present Congress had done much to encourage science, he did not wish to see the science of Mesmerism neglected and overlooked. He therefore proposed that one-half of the appropriation be given to Mr. Fisk to enable him to carry on experiments as well as Professor Morse. Mr. Houston thought that Millerism should also be included in the benefits of the appropriation. Mr. Stanley said he should have no objection to the appropriation for Mesmeric experiments provided the gentleman from Tennessee was the subject. Mr. Johnson said he should have no objection provided Mr. Stanley was the operator. Several gentlemen now called for the reading of the amendment, and it was read by the clerk as follows: "Provided that one-half of the said sum shall be appropriated for trying Mesmeric experiments under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury."

Mr. Mason arose to a question of order. He maintained that the amendment was not bona fide, and that such amendments were calculated to injure the character of the House. He appealed to the Chair, the House being then in committee of the whole, to rule the amendment out of order.

The Chairman said that it was not for him to judge of the motives of members who offered amendments, and that he could not therefore undertake to pronounce the amendment not bona fide. Objection might be raised to it on the ground that it was not sufficiently analogous in character to the bill under consideration; but, in the opinion of the Chair, it would require a scientific analysis to determine how far the magnetism of mesmerism was analogous to that employed in telegraphs. He therefore ruled the amendment in order.

The amendment was rejected. The bill was subsequently reported favorably to the House, and two days later passed by the close vote of eighty-nine to eighty-three.

The bill then went to the Senate, and was placed upon the calendar. A large number of bills were ahead of it, and Mr. Morse was assured by a kindly Senator that there was no possible chance for its consideration. All hope seemed to forsake the great inventor, as, from his seat in the gallery, he was a gloomy witness of the waning hours of the session. Unable longer to endure the strain, he sought his humble dwelling an hour before final adjournment. On arising the next morning, a little girl, the daughter of a faithful friend, ran up to him with a message from her father, to the effect that in the hurry and confusion of the midnight hour, and just before the close of the session, the Senate had passed his bill, which immediately received the signature of the President.

With the sum thus appropriated at his command, Morse now earnestly resumed the experiments, which a few months later resulted so successfully. Referring to the homeward voyage from Europe, in 1832, his biographer says:

"One day Dr. Charles S. Jackson of Boston, a fellow passenger, described an experiment recently made in Paris by means of which electricity had been instantaneously transmitted through a great length of wire; to which Morse replied, 'If that be so, I see no reason why messages may not instantaneously be transmitted by electricity.'"

The key-note was struck, and before his ship reached New York the invention of the telegraph was virtually made, and even the essential features of the electro-magnetic transmitting and recording apparatus were sketched on paper. Of necessity, in reaching this result, Morse made use of the ideas and discoveries of many other minds. As stated by his biographer:

"Various forms of telegraphic intercourse had been devised before; electro-magnetism had been studied by savants for many years; Franklin even had experimented with the transmission of electricity through great lengths of wire. It was reserved for Morse to combine the results of many fragmentary and unsuccessful attempts, and put them, after many years of trial, to a practical use; and though his claims to the invention have been many times attacked in the press and in the courts, they have been triumphantly vindicated alike by the law and the verdict of the people, both at home and abroad. The Chief Justice of the United States in delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court in one of the Morse cases, said: 'It can make no difference whether the inventor derived his information from books or from conversation with men skilled in the science; and the fact that Morse sought and obtained the necessary information and counsel from the best sources and acted upon it, neither impairs his right as an inventor, nor detracts from his merits.'"

It will be remembered that soon after his first successful experiment, Morse was harassed by protracted litigation, and that many attempts were made to deprive him of the just rewards of his great invention. True, he had been preceded along the same lines by great discoveries. This fact no man recognized more unreservedly than himself. He was the inventor, his work, that of gathering up and applying the marvellous discoveries of others to the practical purposes of human life. As stated by Mr. Garfield:

"His to interpret to the world that subtle and mysterious element with which the thinkers of the human race had so long been occupied. As Franklin had exhibited the relation between lightning and the electric fluid, so Oersted exhibited the relation between magnetism and electricity. From 1820 to 1825, his discovery was further developed by Davy and Sturgeon of England, and Arago and Ampere of France. The electro-magnetic telegraph is the embodiment, I might say the incarnation, of many centuries of thought, of many generations of effort to elicit from Nature one of her deepest mysteries. No one man, no one century, could have achieved it. It is the child of the human race, the heir of all ages. How wonderful are the steps that led to its creation! The very name of this telegraphic instrument bears record of its history—Electric, Magnetic.

"The first, named from the bit of yellow amber whose qualities of attraction and repulsion were discovered by a Grecian philosopher twenty-four centuries ago, and the second, from Magnesia, the village of Asia Minor where first was found the lodestone, whose touch turned the needle forever toward the north. These were the earliest forms in which that subtle, all-pervading force revealed itself to men. In the childhood of the race men stood dumb in the presence of its more terrible manifestations. When it gleamed in the purple aurora, or shot dusky-red from the clouds, it was the eye-flash of an angry God before whom mortals quailed in helpless fear."

More than three centuries ago, Shakespeare put into the mouth of one of his creations the words,

"I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes."

The words spoken in jest were in the nature of a prophecy. After the passing of many generations, in a country unknown to the great bard, Morse, in the words of Mr. Cox, one of the most eloquent of his eulogists—

"Gave to the universal people the means of speedy and accurate intelligence, and so stormed at once the castles of the terrible Giant Doubt and Giant Despair. He has saved time, shortened the hours of toil, accumulated and intensified thought by the rapidity and terseness of electric messages. He has celebrated treaties. Go to the uttermost parts of the earth; go beneath the deep sea; to the land where snows are eternal, or to the tropical realms where the orange blooms in the air of mid-winter, and you will find this clicking, persistent, sleepless instrument ready to give its tireless wing to your purpose."

It was my good fortune to serve in the House of Representatives with Mr. Stephens of Georgia, and Mr. Wood of New York, both of whom more than a third of a century before had given their votes in favor of the appropriation that made it possible for Morse to prosecute experiments fraught with such stupendous blessing to our race. The member who reported back the bill from the Committee on Commerce, with favorable recommendations, and then supported it by an eloquent speech upon the floor of the House, was Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts. No public man I have ever known impressed me more favorably than did Mr. Winthrop. He had been the close friend of Everett, Choate, Webster, and Clay. He was the last survivor of as brilliant a coterie of party leaders and statesmen as our country has ever known. On a visit he made to the House of Representatives, of which he had many years before been the Speaker, business was at once suspended, and the members from all parts of the Great Hall gathered about him. In a letter to the Morse Memorial meeting in Boston, Mr. Winthrop stated that he was present in the Capitol while the first formal messages were passing along the magic cords between Washington and Baltimore. He referred to the declination read by Senator Wright in his presence, of the nomination to the Vice-Presidency tendered him, and added:

"All this gave us the most vivid impression, not only that a new kind of wire-pulling had entered into politics, but that a mysterious and marvellous power of the air had at length been subdued and trained to the service of mankind."

It is an interesting fact in this connection, to note that the little girl, Miss Ellsworth, who brought to Mr. Morse the joyful tidings of the passage of the bill on that early May morning in 1843, was rewarded by being requested by the great inventor to write the first message that ever passed over the wire. When she selected,

"What hath God wrought,"

words to find utterance by all tongues—she builded better than she knew, for in the words of Speaker Blaine:

"The little thread of wire placed as a timid experiment between the national capital and a neighboring city grew, and lengthened, and multiplied with almost the rapidity of the electric current that darted along its iron nerves, until, within his own lifetime, continent was bound to continent, hemisphere answered through ocean's depths to hemisphere, and an encircled globe dashed forth his eulogy in the unmatched eloquence of a grand achievement."

Words of praise, spoke by Dr. Prime, of the great inventor just after he had passed from the world, to which he left such a heritage, can never lose their interest:

"Morse in his coffin is a recollection never to fade. He lay like an ancient prophet or sage such as the old masters painted for Abraham, or Isaiah. His finely chiselled features, classical in their mould and majestic in repose, and heavy flowing beard; the death calm upon the brow that for eighty years had concealed a teeming brain, and that placid beauty that lingers upon the face of the righteous dead, as if the freed spirit had left a smile upon its forsaken home—these are the memories that remain of the most illustrious and honored private citizen that the New World has yet given to mankind."