TELEGRAPHING BEFORE MORSE.
There is a great fallacy in the judgment of mankind about the method of the coming of new things. People imagine that new things come all at once, but they do not. Nothing comes all at once; that is, no thing. In the facts of the natural world, that is, among visible phenomena of the landscape, the judgment of people is soon corrected. There it is seen that everything grows. The growth is sometimes slow and sometimes rapid; but everything comes gradually out of its antecedents. No tree or shrub or flower ever came immediately. No living creature on the face of the earth begins by instantaneous apparition. The chick gets out of its shell presently, but even that takes time. Every living thing comes on by degrees from a germ, and the germ is generally microscopic! Nature is, indeed, a marvel!
The facts of human life, whether tangible or intangible, have this same method. For example, there has not been an invention known to mankind that has not come on in the manner of growth. The antecedents of it work on and on in a tentative way, producing first this trial result and then that, always approaching the true thing; and even the true thing when it comes is not perfect. It is made perfect afterward. There was never an instantaneous invention, and there was never a complete one! It is doubtful whether there is at the present time a single complete, that is perfect or perfected, invention in the world. They are all of partial development. They show in their history their origin, their growth, their gradual approximation to the perfect form.
All of the marvelous contrivances which, fill the arena of our civilization, making it first vital and then vocal, have come by the evolutionary process. Every one of them has a history which is more and more obscure as we follow it backward to its source. In every case, however, there comes a time when a given discovery, manifesting itself in a given invention, takes a sort of spectacular character, and it is then rather suddenly revealed to the consciousness of mankind.
Of this general law the telegraph affords a conspicuous example. The whole world knows the story of the telegraph of Morse. It was in 1844 that the work of this great inventor was publicly demonstrated to the world. Then it was that the electro-magnetic telegraph in its first rude estate began to be used in the transmission of messages and other written information.
It has come to pass that "telegraph" means virtually electric telegraph. The people of to-day seem to have forgotten that the telegraph is not necessarily dependent on the electrical current. They have forgotten that back of the Morse invention other means had been employed of transmitting information at a distance. They have forgotten that it was by the most gradual and tedious process that the old telegraphic methods were evolved into the new. Note with wonder how this great invention began, and through what stages it passed to completion.
There is a natural telegraphy. Whoever stands in an open place and calls aloud to his fellow mortal at a distance telegraphs to him. At least he telephones to him; that is, sounds to him at a distance. The air is the medium, the vocal cords in vibration the source of the utterance, and the ear of the one at a distance the audiphonic receiver. This sort of telegraphy is original and natural with human beings, and it is common to them and the lower animals. All the creatures that have vocality use this method. It were hard to say how humble is the creeping thing that does not rasp out some kind of a message to its fellow insect. Some, like the fireflies, do their telegraphing with a lantern which they carry. The very crickets are expert in telegraphy, or telephony, which is ultimately the same thing.
After transmitted sound the next thing is the visible signal, and this has been employed by human beings from the earliest ages in transmitting information to a distance. It is a method which will perhaps never be wholly abandoned. Observe the surveyors running a trial line. Far off is the chain bearer and here is the theodolite. The man with the standard watches for the signal of the man with the instrument. The language is seen and the message understood, though no word is spoken. Here the sunlight is the wire, and the visible motion of the hands and arms the letters and words of the message.
The ancients were great users of this method. They employed it in both peace and war. They occupied heights and showed signals at great distances. The better vision of those days made it possible to catch a signal, though far off, and to transmit it to some other station, likewise far away. In this manner bright objects were waved by day and torches by night. In times of invasion such a method of spreading information has been used down to the present age. Nor may we fail to note the improved apparatus for this kind of signaling now employed in military operations. The soldiers on our frontiers in Arizona, New Mexico, and through the mountainous regions further north, are able to signal with a true telegraphic language to stations nearly a hundred miles away.
Considerable progress was made in telegraphy in the after part of the eighteenth century. This progress related to the transmission of visible messages through the air. In the time of the French Revolution such contrivance occupied the attention of military commanders and of governing powers. A certain noted engineer named Chappe invented at this epoch a telegraph that might be properly called successful. Chappe was the son of the distinguished French astronomer, Jean Chappe d'Auteroche, who died at San Lucar, California, in 1769. This elder Chappe had previously made a journey into Siberia, and had seen from that station the transit of Venus in 1761. Hoping to observe the recurring transit, eight years afterward, he went to the coast of our then almost unknown California, but died there as stated above.
The younger Chappe, being anxious to serve the Revolution, invented his telegraph; but in doing so he subjected himself to the suspicions of the more ignorant, and on one notable occasion was brought into a strait place—both he and his invention. The story of this affair is given by Carlyle in the second volume of his "French Revolution." One knows not whether to smile or weep over the graphic account which the crabbed philosopher gives of Chappe and his work in the following extract:
"What, for example," says he, "is this that Engineer Chappe is doing in the Park of Vincennes? In the Park of Vincennes; and onward, they say, in the Park of Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau, the assassinated deputy; and still onward to the Heights of Ecouen and farther, he has scaffolding set up, has posts driven in; wooden arms with elbow-joints are jerking and fugling in the air, in the most rapid mysterious manner! Citoyens ran up, suspicious. Yes, O Citoyens, we are signaling; it is a device, this, worthy of the Republic; a thing for what we will call far-writing without the aid of postbags; in Greek it shall be named Telegraph. 'Telégraphê sacre,' answers Citoyenism. For writing to Traitors, to Austria?—and tears it down, Chappe had to escape and get a new legislative Decree. Nevertheless he has accomplished it, the indefatigable Chappe; this his Far-writer, with its wooden arms and elbow-joints, can intelligibly signal; and lines of them are set up, to the North Frontiers and elsewhither. On an Autumn evening of the Year Two, Far-writer having just written that Condè Town has surrendered to us, we send from the Tuileries Convention-Hall this response in the shape of a Decree: 'The name of Condè is changed to Nord-Libre (North Free). The Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the country.' To the admiration of men! For lo! in some half-hour, while the Convention yet debates, there arrives this new answer: 'I inform thee (Je t'annonce), Citizen President, that the Decree of Convention, ordering change of the name Condè into North Free; and the other, declaring that the Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the country, are transmitted and acknowledged by Telegraph. I have instructed my Officer at Lille to forward them to North Free by express.' Signed, Chappe."
This successful telegraph of Engineer Chappe was not an electric telegraph, but a sunlight telegraph. Is it in reality any more wonderful to use the electrical wave in the transmission of intelligible symbols than to use a wave of light? Such seems to have been the opinion of mankind; and the coming of the electric telegraph was long postponed. The invention was made by slow approaches. In our country the notion has prevailed that Morse did all—that others did nothing; but this notion is very erroneous.
We are not to suppose that the Chappe method of telegraphing became extinct after its first successful work. Other references to what we suppose to be the same instrument are found in the literature of the age. The wonder is that more was not written and more accomplished by the agency of Chappe's invention. In the fall of the year 1800, General Bonaparte, who had been in Egypt and the East, returned to Europe and landed at Frejus on his way to Paris, with the dream of universal dominion in his head. In the first volume of the Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, his secretary M. de Bourrienne, writing of the return to France says:
"We arrived in Paris on the 24th Vendemiaire (the sixteenth of October). As yet he (Napoleon) knew nothing of what was going on; for he had seen neither his wife nor his brothers, who were looking for him on the Burgundy Road. The news of our landing at Frejus had reached Paris by a telegraphic despatch. Madame Bonaparte, who was dining with M. Gohier when that despatch was communicated to him, as President of the Directory, immediately set off to meet her husband," etc. We should be glad to know in what particular form that "telegraphic despatch" was delivered! But such are Bourrienne's words!
To the American reader the name of Karl Friedrich Gauss may have an unfamiliar sound. Gauss was already a youth of fourteen when Morse was born, though the latter outlived the German mathematician by seventeen years. Gauss was a professor of Mathematics at Göttingen, where he passed nearly the whole of his life. In the early part of the century he distinguished himself in astronomy and in other branches of physical science. He then became interested in magnetic and electrical phenomena, and in 1833, with the assistance of Wilhelm Eduard Weber, one of his fellow-professors, who died in 1891, he erected at Göttingen a magnetic observatory. There he began to experiment with the subtle agent which was soon to be placed at the service of mankind.
The observatory was constructed without the use of iron, in order that the magnetic phenomena might be studied under favorable conditions. Humboldt and Arago had previously constructed laboratories without using iron—for iron is the great disturber—and from them Gauss obtained his hint. Weber was also expert in the management of magneto-electrical currents. Gauss, with the aid of his co-worker, constructed a line of telegraph, and sent signals by the agency of the magnetic current to a neighboring town. This was nearly ten years before Morse had fully succeeded in like experimentation.
It appears that the German scientists regarded their telegraph as simply the tangible expression or apparatus to illustrate scientific facts and principles. It was for this reason, we presume, that no further headway was made at Göttingen in the development of telegraphy. It was also for the additional reason that men rarely or never accept what is really the first demonstration and exemplification of a new departure in scientific knowledge. Such is the timidity of the human mind—such its conservative attachment to the known thing and to the old method as against the new—that it prefers to stay in the tumble-down ruin of bygone opinions and practices, rather than go up and inhabit the splendid but unfamiliar temple of the future.
Gauss and Weber were left with their scientific discovery; and, indeed, Morse in the New World of practicality and quick adaptations, was about to be rejected and cast out. The sorrows through which he passed need not here be recounted. They are sufficiently sad and sufficiently humiliating. His unavailing appeals to the American Congress are happily hidden in the rubbish of history, and are somewhat dimmed by the intervention of more than half a century. But his humiliation was extreme. Smart Congressmen, partisans, the ignorant flotsam of conventions and intrigues, heard the philosopher with contempt. A few heard him with sympathy; and the opinion in his favor grew, as if by the pressure of shame, until he was finally supported, and in a midnight hour of an expiring session of Congress, or rather in the early morning of the fourth of March, 1843, the munificent appropriation of $30,000 was placed at his disposal for the construction of an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore.
The one thing was done. A new era of instantaneous communication between men and communities at a distance the one from the other was opened—an era which has proved to be an era of light and knowledge. Nor may we conclude this sketch without noting the fact that, not a few of the members of the House of Representatives who voted the pittance for the construction of the first line of actual working telegraph in the world, went home to their constituents and were ignominiously beaten for re-election—this this for the slight service which they had rendered to their country and the human race!
When in New York City, turn thou to the west out of Fifth avenue into Twenty-second street, to the distance of, perhaps, ten rods, and there on a little marble slab set in the wall of a house on the north side of the street, read this curious epitaph:
"In this house lived Professor S.F.B, Morse for thirty years and died!"