I am, dear sir, as ever your friend and servant,
SAML. F. B. MORSE.
J. FENIMORE COOPER, ESQ.
All this is interesting, but, of course, has no direct bearing on the actual date of invention. It is more than probable that Morse did, while he was studying the French semaphores, and at an even earlier date, dream vaguely of the possibility of using electricity for conveying intelligence, and that he gave utterance among his intimates to these dreams; but the practical means of so utilizing this mysterious agent did not take shape in his mind until 1832. An inchoate vision of the possibility of using electricity is far different from an actual plan eventually elaborated into a commercial success.
Another extract from Mr. Habersham's reminiscences, on a totally different subject, will be found interesting: "I have forgot to mention that one day, while in the Rue Surenne, I was studying from my own face reflected in a glass, as is often done by young artists, when I remarked how grand it would be if we could invent a method of fixing the image on the mirror. Professor Morse replied that he had thought of it while a pupil at Yale, and that Professor Silliman (I think) and himself had tried it with a wash of nitrate of silver on a piece of paper, but that, unfortunately, it made the lights dark and the shadows light, but that if they could be reversed, we should have a facsimile like India-ink drawings. Had they thought of using glass, as is now done, the daguerreotype would have been perhaps anticipated—certainly the photograph."
This is particularly interesting because, as I shall note later on, Morse was one of the pioneers in experimenting with the daguerreotype in America.
Among the paintings which Morse executed while he was in Paris was a very ambitious one. This was an interior of one of the galleries in the Louvre with carefully executed miniature copies of some of the most celebrated canvases. Writing of it, and of the dreadful epidemic of cholera, to his brothers on May 6, 1832, he says:—
"My anxiety to finish my picture and to return drives me, I fear, to too great application and too little exercise, and my health has in consequence been so deranged that I have been prevented from the speedy completion of my picture. From nine o'clock until four daily I paint uninterruptedly at the Louvre, and, with the closest application, I shall not be able to finish it before the close of the gallery on the 10th of August. The time each morning before going to the gallery is wholly employed in preparation for the day, and, after the gallery closes at four, dinner and exercise are necessary, so that I have no time for anything else.
"The cholera is raging here, and I can compare the state of mind in each man of us only to that of soldiers in the heat of battle; all the usual securities of life seem to be gone. Apprehension and anxiety make the stoutest hearts quail. Any one feels, when he lays himself down at night, that he will in all probability be attacked before daybreak; for the disease is a pestilence that walketh in darkness, and seizes the greatest number of its victims at the most helpless hour of the night. Fifteen hundred were seized in a day, and fifteen thousand at least have already perished, although the official accounts will not give so many.
"May 14. My picture makes progress and I am sanguine of success if nothing interferes to prevent its completion. I shall take no more commissions here and shall only complete my large picture and a few unfinished works.
"General Lafayette told me a few weeks ago, when I was returning with him in his carriage, that the financial condition of the United States was a subject of great importance, and he wished that I would write you and others, who were known as statistical men, and get your views on the subject. There never was a better time for demonstrating the principles of our free institutions by showing a result favorable to our country."