Historic Inventions

by Rupert Sargent Holland

In return for this news Morse promised that Miss Ellsworth should send the first message when his telegraph line was opened. That same day he wrote to Alfred Vail that the bill “was reached a few minutes before midnight and passed. This was the turning point in the history of the telegraph. My personal funds were reduced to the fraction of a dollar, and, had the passage of the bill failed from any cause, there would have been little prospect of another attempt on my part to introduce to the world my new invention.”

It had been decided to construct an underground line between Washington and Baltimore, the conductor being a five-wire cable laid in pipes, but after several miles had been laid from Baltimore the insulation broke down. A very large part of the government grant had been spent, and the situation looked very dubious. But after some discussion it was determined to carry the wire by poles, as this could be done much more rapidly and at smaller expense.

The National Whig Convention, to nominate candidates for President and Vice-President, met at Baltimore on May 1, 1844. The overhead wire had been started from Washington toward Baltimore, and by that day twenty-two miles of it were in working order. The day before the convention met Morse had arranged with Vail that certain signals should mean that certain candidates had been nominated. Henry Clay was named for President, and the news was carried by railroad to the point where Morse had stretched his wire. He signaled it to Washington, and the Capitol heard it long before the first messages arrived by train.

On May 24, 1844, the line was completed, and Miss Ellsworth was invited to send the first message from the room of the United States Supreme Court to Baltimore. She chose the Biblical words “What hath God wrought?” and this was sent over the telegraph. Vail received the message in Baltimore, and the first demonstration was a complete success. The younger man had added an improvement of his own; instead of the dots and dashes being indicated by the markings of a pen or pencil they were embossed on the paper with a metal stylus.

An incident in connection with the Democratic Convention, which was then in session in Baltimore for the purpose of nominating presidential candidates, added to the public interest in Morse’s telegraph. The Democrats had named James K. Polk for President and Silas Wright for Vice-President. The news was sent by wire to Washington, and Mr. Wright sent his message declining the honor over the telegraph. The chairman of the meeting, Hendrick B. Wright, received the message. In a letter to Benson J. Lossing he says, “As the presiding officer of the body I read the despatch, but so incredulous were the members as to the authority of the evidence before them that the convention adjourned over to the following day to await the report of the committee sent over to Washington to get reliable information on the subject.” The committee returned with word that the telegraph message had been correct. Then, all but the convention committee being excluded from the telegraph room in Baltimore, message after message was sent over the wire by Vail to Morse and Silas Wright in Washington. The committee used many arguments to urge Wright’s acceptance; he answered them all, persisting in his refusal; and finally this decision was reported to the convention, which nominated Mr. Dallas in his place. The story of the part the new invention had played quickly spread abroad, and added to the intense public interest now focussed on it.

On April 1, 1845, the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore was opened for general use. Congress had appropriated $8,000 to maintain it for the first year, and placed it under the direction of the Postmaster-General. The official charge was one cent for every four characters transmitted. The receipts of the first four days were one cent, for the fifth day twelve and a half cents, for the seventh sixty cents, for the eighth one dollar and thirty-two cents, for the ninth one dollar and four cents. Morse offered to sell his invention to the government for $100,000, but the Postmaster-General declined the offer, stating in his report that the service “had not satisfied him that under any rate of postage that could be adopted its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures.”

With the public opening of the line between Washington and Baltimore the practical success of the new electric telegraph was assured. The Magnetic Telegraph Company was formed to carry a wire from New York to Philadelphia, and thence another line was run to Baltimore in 1846. The telegraph being an accomplished fact, pirates of the patent now appeared, and for a course of years Morse and his partners had to fight for their rights. Henry O’Reilly, who had been employed in building the first lines, contracted to construct another from Philadelphia to St. Louis, and when that was finished he formed a company known as the People’s Line, to run to New Orleans. He claimed to use instruments entirely different from those patented by Morse, and so to be free from the payment of royalties. Morse applied for an injunction, and on appeal the Federal Supreme Court decided in his favor. Other similar suits followed, and in each one the decision justified Morse’s contention. The conclusion was that even though other men had known of the possibilities by experiment, it was the fact that he had first put the matter into practical form directed toward a specific purpose, and hence was to be regarded in law as the inventor.

The telegraph grew with the country. The Western Union Company followed the stage-coach across the plains to California, and soon the frontier towns were linked to the large cities of the East. Other men took up the work in other lines, and in 1854 Cyrus W. Field formed the Atlantic Telegraph Company to lay a cable between America and Europe. As Morse had said when he first began seriously to study the subject on board the Sully, “If it will go ten miles without stopping I can make it go around the globe.”

The inventor found himself universally honored, and at last a very wealthy man. He married Miss Griswold of Poughkeepsie, and bought an estate of two hundred acres near that city. He was given degrees by American and European universities and societies, was made a member of the French Legion of Honor, received orders of knighthood from the rulers of Spain and Italy, Denmark, Turkey, and Portugal. In 1858 the Emperor of the French called a Congress in Paris to honor Morse, and the Congress awarded him a gift of 400,000 francs as a token of gratitude. In his eightieth year his statue in bronze was placed in Central Park, New York, and his countrymen did their utmost to show him their appreciation of his great achievement. He died in 1872, a short time after he had unveiled a statue of Benjamin Franklin in New York’s Printing-house Square.

Morse was the inventor, but his partner Alfred Vail had a great share in making the present telegraph. He discarded the original porte-rule and type of the transmitter for the key or lever, moved up and down by hand to complete or break the circuit. He perfected the dot and dash code, he invented the device for embossing the message, and replaced the inking pen by a metal disc, smeared with ink, that rolled the dots and dashes on the paper. When it was found that the telegraph operators would read the signals from the clicking of the marking lever instead of from the paper, he made an instrument which had no marking device, and in which the signals were sounded by the striking of the lever of the armature against the metal stops. This “sounder” soon drove out the old Morse recorder. The present instrument is in its mechanical form far more the work of Vail than of Morse.