This was, so far as he knew at the time, a new thought. Gradually the conception took shape and system until at last it had assumed such a form that next morning, at the breakfast table, he communicated the plan by which he believed a recording telegraph could be serviceable.
Later on as the voyage was nearing its end, Mr. Morse, addressing the Captain, said “Well, Captain, should you hear of the telegraph one of these days as the wonder of the world, remember the discovery was made on board the good ship “Sully.”
He would now have devoted himself entirely to the elaboration of this new thought, but he had to betake himself to his work as an artist. He was poor and for three or four years following his return he had to travel much of the time to meet engagements in connection with his profession. Meanwhile, he devoted every spare moment to the perfecting of his apparatus.
In a letter to a friend Mr. Morse wrote: “Up to the autumn of 1837, my telegraphic apparatus existed in so crude a form that I felt reluctant to have it seen. My means were very limited—so limited as to preclude the possibility of constructing an apparatus of such mechanical finish as to warrant my success in venturing upon its public exhibition. I had no wish to expose to ridicule the representative of so many hours of laborious thought. Prior to the summer of 1837, at which time Mr. Alfred Vail’s attention became attracted to my telegraph, I depended upon my pencil for my subsistence. Indeed, so straightened were my circumstances, that in order to save time to carry out my invention, and to economize my scanty means, I had for months lodged and eaten in my studio, procuring my food in small quantities from some grocery, and preparing it myself to conceal from my friends the stinted manner in which I lived. I was in the habit of bringing my food to my room in the evenings, and this was my mode of life for many years.”
Under these distressing circumstances, Mr. Morse labored in perfecting his apparatus in which he finally succeeded. His caveat was filed in the patent office in Washington on October 6, 1837, but a patent was not obtained until 1840.
On the 8th of February, 1838, in response to an invitation from the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, Prof. Morse exhibited the new telegraph before the Committee of Science and Arts of that institution, who reported their gratification and expressed their desire that government would give the means of testing it on an extensive scale.
Mr. Morse, shortly after this, exhibited his apparatus before the President and his cabinet, and which gave great satisfaction, in reference to which he wrote his friend and partner Mr. Alfred Vail, as follows: “Everything looks encouraging, but I need not say to you that in this world a continued course of prosperity is not a rational expectation. We shall doubtless find troubles and difficulties in store for us, and it is part of true wisdom to be prepared for whatever may await us. If our hearts are right, we shall not be taken by surprise. I see nothing now but an unclouded prospect, for which let us pay to Him who shows it to us, the homage of grateful and obedient hearts, with most earnest prayers for grace to use prosperity aright.”
Morse now determined to ask Congress for aid to make a thorough test of his apparatus on an actual line to show its capacity and practicability; in this he was encouraged by his friends. On December 6, 1842, he wrote an exhaustive letter to the Hon. C. G. Ferris, an influential member of the House Committee on Commerce, in which he gave a minute history of the invention, stated fully the basis of his claims as the inventor, and asked that through his committee an appeal might be made to Congress for the means to erect an experimental line to prove its value. In response to this the Hon. John P. Kennedy, February 23, 1843, offered a resolution “That the Bill appropriating thirty thousand dollars to be expended under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury, in a series of experiments to test the expediency of the telegraph projected by Professor Morse should be passed.”
Mr. Morse sat in the gallery during the discussion which followed, a quiet but intensively anxious observer. For a time the project was made the subject of ridicule.
Irritated perhaps because the committee passed him in the control of the experiment, the Postmaster proposed to give half the sum appropriated by the bill to mesmeric experiments.