Morse's parents were already secured to him and his associates, and companies were soon formed for the erection of telegraph lines all over the United States. In the year 1847 he was compelled to defend his invention in the courts, and successfully vindicated his claims to be called the original inventor of the electro-magnetic recording telegraph. Thenceforward Morse's life was spent in witnessing the growth of his enterprise, and in gathering the honors which an appreciative public bestowed upon him. As years went by he received from the various foreign governments their highest distinctions, while in 1858 the representatives of Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Piedmont, Russia, the Holy See, Sweden, Tuscany, and Turkey appropriated the sum of 400,000 francs in recognition of the use of his instruments in those countries.
The telegraph is not the only great success with which the name of Samuel Morse is honorably connected. Having made the acquaintance of Daguerre in Paris, he studied with him the infancy of photography, and was the first to take sun pictures, or daguerreotypes, in America. Also it was he who made the first submarine electric cable. This was laid in New York Harbor; and from it he was the first to conceive that stupendous idea of the transoceanic telegraph. In the preparations for laying the first Atlantic cable he took an active part, though the attempt of 1857, in which he personally engaged, was not successful. He died April 2, 1872, at New York, where his statue in bronze now stands in the Central Park.[Back to Contents]
PETER COOPER[12]
By Clarence Cook
(1791-1883)
It may be said, without exaggeration, that few men in our time and country, not occupying official position, have been so widely and sincerely mourned as the late Peter Cooper. Other men have been as genuinely good as he, and have founded charitable institutions as worthy and as useful, in their way, as the one which is to be the lasting monument to his memory. But Peter Cooper held a place in the hearts of his fellow-citizens which belonged to him alone. A man, to outward seeming, in manners and conversation as plain and homespun as his name, he held unshaken from youth to old age—and to few men is it allotted to live in uninterrupted health and action to the age of ninety-two—the confidence, the respect and the affection of all sorts of people: the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the learned and the unlearned, people of all parties and of all religions. Character is the accumulation of little actions, and makes its deepest impression, of course, when these actions have been observed by great numbers of people during a long period of time. The whole of his ninety-two years, with the exception of a short time passed in his youth in its vicinity, were spent by Mr. Cooper in the city of New York. It was little more than a country town when he was born; it was already one of the great cities of the world when he died; and in all that time he had been associated with the business enterprises that had helped its growth, as one of the chief actors.
The fortune that he built up was both earned and expended here; the manner of its earning was known of all men, but the way in which it was expended was rather felt than known, for, like all great and generous benefactors, Mr. Cooper was without ostentation; but as he gave while he was alive and all the time that he was alive; and as he gave to the people among whom he lived, and not to outsiders, it naturally followed that his name, his person, his traits of character, became, as it were, a common possession to the people of New York; but few men upon whom such a glare of publicity had fallen for so many years would have been able to bear the scrutiny so well as Peter Cooper.
He was born on February 12, 1791, presumably in Little Dock Street, now Water Street, Coenties Slip, where his father, John Cooper, carried on the trade of a hatter. His shop was near the store of John Jacob Astor, from whom he bought the beaver-skins which he made up into hats. John Cooper had served in the war of the Revolution, and when it ended, he retired with the rank of lieutenant. He married Margaret, the daughter of John Campbell, who also had served in the Continental army, as quartermaster, and who now carried on the trade of potter and tile-maker on the spot where St. Paul's Chapel now stands.
To John and Margaret Cooper nine children were born, two daughters and seven sons, of whom Peter was the fifth, and was named after the apostle in the belief, as his father expressed it, that he would come to something. Following the fashion of the time, he was set to work at his father's trade as soon as he was old enough to work, as all his brothers had been before him: and in later years he described himself as a little boy, with his head just reaching the top of the table where he was set to pulling out the hairs from rabbit skins to use in making fur hats; and he was kept at the business until he was fifteen, when, as he used to tell, he had learned to make every part of a hat. So independent is business success of what is commonly called education, that it may be of interest to record that Peter Cooper never went to school for more than one year, and only in the half of each day of school: his parents were poor, and could not spare what his labor earned, and besides his health was delicate, and the confinement of school was thought more injurious to him than the work in the shop. In consequence of this restriction Peter Cooper grew to manhood with very little learning beyond reading, writing, and the rudiments of arithmetic, and while this was a source of regret to him all his life, it was in reality the spur that drove him to found an institution that should take away all excuses for ignorance from the coming generations of poor boys in his native city.
The elder Cooper would seem to have been a man of small practical capacity or staying power, for he moved about from place to place, changing his business in the hope of bettering his condition; now going to Peekskill to set up a brewery; thence to Catskill, where he added brick-making to making beer; then to Brooklyn to try hatting again; and finally to Newburgh, where he returned to brewing. In all these shiftings of home and business Peter remained with his father and gave him what help he could; he used in later life to recall his carrying about the beer-kegs to his father's customers; but at the age of seventeen, with his parents' consent, he came back to New York, and looked about for work on his own account. He had saved up from his small earnings, while with his father, the sum of ten dollars, and with this, he tells us, he bought a lottery ticket, which drew a blank. This seeming misfortune he turned to good account, for he then determined never to trust to luck again, but to be content to earn his bread in the appointed way: it was his first and last speculation. On reaching New York he had the usual difficulty in finding employment, but at length was accepted as an apprentice by a firm of carriage-makers, to whom, with his father's consent, he bound himself until he should come of age; his masters agreeing to pay him $25 a year and his board. His grandmother had a house on Broadway, in which she gave him the use of an upper room, and here in his spare hours he employed himself in wood-carving, in which he acquired some proficiency. In his business he worked so industriously, and made himself so valuable to his employers, that when his time expired they offered to lend him the money to go into business for himself; but he did not accept this generous offer, as he was determined never to be in debt. While with Messrs. Burtis and Woodward he had invented a machine for mortising wheel-hubs, thus giving the first evidence of an inventive faculty which, though never accomplishing great things, was often of considerable service both to himself and the community. On leaving the business of carriage-making Peter Cooper went to Hempstead, L. I., where he found work in a woollen factory. Here he invented and patented an improvement on the machine in use for shearing the nap of cloth; and as during the war of 1812 all commerce with England ceased, cloth-making in America flourished, and from the sale of his machines, which he could hardly make fast enough to supply the demand, young Cooper reaped a considerable profit. One of his first customers was the late Matthew Vassar, of Poughkeepsie, to whom he not only sold some of his machines, but also the right to dispose of them in Dutchess County. When he found that his earnings had enabled him to lay by the sum of $500, he thought himself justified in asking a young woman, Miss Sarah Bedel, whom he had met when in Hempstead, to become his wife; but before doing so, he determined to visit his parents in Newburgh, and inform them of his intention. He found them in great trouble, his father in debt and needing help; and without hesitation he placed his small savings at his disposal, paid the most pressing of the debts, and made arrangements for paying off the rest. His father was thus saved from bankruptcy by his son's devotion; but the action was characteristic of Peter Cooper, both in its unselfishness, and as indicative of his business integrity. He would never be in debt himself, and he was equally resolved to keep those belonging to him as free as himself. He took pride in the fact that neither he nor his father had ever failed in business; and this is the more remarkable, since in the course of his business life the country passed through no less than ten serious commercial panics.