The Committee on Commerce to whom the subject was referred, have had the same under consideration, and report:
On the 3d of February, 1837, the House of Representatives passed a resolution requesting the Secretary of the Treasury to report to the House, at its present session, upon the propriety of establishing a system of telegraphs for the United States.
In pursuance of this request, the Secretary of the Treasury, at an early day after the passage of said resolution, addressed a circular of inquiry to numerous scientific and practical individuals in different parts of the Union; and, on the 6th of December last, reported the result of this proceeding to the House.
This report of the Secretary imbodies many useful suggestions on the necessity and practicability of a system of telegraphic despatches, both for public and individual purposes; and the committee cannot doubt that the American public is fully prepared, and even desirous, that every requisite effort be made on the part of Congress to consummate an object of so deep interest to the purposes of Government in peace and in war, and to the enterprise of the age.
Amid the suggestions thus elicited from various sources, and imbodied in the before-mentioned report of the Secretary of the Treasury, a plan for an electro magnetic telegraph is communicated by Professor Morse, of the University of the city of New York, pre-eminently interesting, and even wonderful. [See Report, No. 2.]
This invention consists in the application, by mechanism, of galvanic electricity to telegraphic purposes, and is claimed by Professor Morse and his associates as original with them; and being so, in fact, as the committee believe, letters-patent have been secured, under the authority of the United States, for the invention. It has, moreover, been subjected to the test of experiment, upon a scale of ten miles distance, by a select committee of the Franklin Institute of the city of Philadelphia, and reported upon by that eminently high tribunal in the most favorable and confident terms. An abstract from the report thus made is hereunto annexed. [No. 7].
In additional confirmation of the merits of his proposed system of telegraphs, Professor Morse has exhibited it in operation (by a coil of metallic wire measuring about ten miles in length, rendering the action equal to a telegraph of half that distance) to the Committee on Commerce of the House of Representatives, to the President of the United States, and the several heads of Departments, to members of Congress generally, who have taken interest in the examination, and to a vast number of scientific and practical individuals from various parts of the Union; and all concur, it is believed, and without a dissenting doubt, in admiration of the ingenious and scientific character of the invention, and in the opinion that it is successfully adapted to the purposes of telegraphic despatches, and in a conviction of its great and incalculable practical importance and usefulness to the country, and ultimately to the whole world.
But it would be presumptuous in any one, (and the inventor himself is most sensible of this,) to attempt, at this stage of the invention, to calculate in anticipation, or to hold out promises of what its whole extent of capacity for usefulness may be, in either a political, commercial, or social point of view, if the electrical power upon which it depends for successful action shall prove to be efficient, as is now supposed it will, to carry intelligence through any of the distances of 50, 100, 500, or more miles now contemplated. No such attempt, therefore, will be indulged in this report. It is obvious, however, that the influence of this invention over the political, commercial, and social relations of the people of this widely-extended country, looking to nothing beyond, will, in the event of success, of itself amount to a revolution unsurpassed in moral grandeur by any discovery that has been made in the arts and sciences, from the most distant period to which authentic history extends, to the present day. With the means of almost instantaneous communication of intelligence between the most distant points of the country, and simultaneously between any given number of intermediate points which this invention contemplates, space will be, to all practical purposes of information, completely annihilated between the States of the Union, as also between the individual citizens thereof. The citizen will be invested with, and reduce to daily and familiar use, an approach to the high attribute of ubiquity, in a degree that the human mind until recently, has hardly dared to contemplate seriously as belonging to human agency, from an instinctive feeling of religious reverence and reserve on a power of such awful grandeur.
Referring to the annexed report of the Franklin Institute, already adverted to, and also to the letters of Professor Morse, marked 2, 8 and 9, for other details of the superiority of this system of telegraphs over all other methods heretofore reduced to practice by any individual or Government, the committee agree, unanimously, that it is worthy to engross the attention and means of the Federal Government, to the full extent that may be necessary to put the invention to the most decisive test that can be desirable. The power of the invention, if successful, is so extensive for good and for evil, that the Government alone should possess the right to control and regulate it. The mode of proceeding to test it, as suggested, as also the relations which the inventor and his associates are willing to recognise with the Government on the subject of the future ownership, use, and control of the invention, are succinctly set forth in the annexed letters of Professor Morse, marked 8 and 9.
The probable outlay of an experiment upon a scale equal to fifty miles of telegraph, and equal to a circuit of double that distance, is estimated at $30,000. Two-thirds of this expenditure will be for material, which, whether the experiment shall succeed or fail, will remain uninjured, and of very little diminished value below the price that will be paid for it.