"If that is the case," said Morse, "why could not words and sentences be sent in the same way?"
"That's a good idea. It would be a great thing if we could send news as fast as lightning," said one of the passengers.
"Why can't we?" said Morse; "I think we can do it."
Very likely the rest of the passengers soon forgot all about that conversation, but Morse did not. During the remainder of the voyage he was very quiet and kept much to himself. He was thinking over what he had heard. Before the ship had reached New York he had worked out a plan of telegraphing. He proposed to carry the wire in tubes underground, and to use an alphabet of dots and dashes, the same that is used by telegraphers to-day.
When he went on shore Morse said to the captain: "Captain, if you should hear of the telegraph one of these days as the wonder of the world, remember that the discovery was made on board the good ship 'Sully.'"
"If I can make it go ten miles without stopping, I can make it go round the world," he said to a passenger.
But it is easier to think out a thing than to put it in practice. Poor Morse was more than ten years in working out his plans and getting people to help him in them. He got out of money and was near starving, but he kept at it. After three years he managed to send a message through seventeen hundred feet of wire. He could read it, but his friends could not, and no one was ready to put money in such a scheme. They looked at it as a toy to amuse children. Then he went to Europe and tried to get money there, but he found the people there as hard to convince as those in America.
"No one is in such a hurry for news as all that," they said. "People would rather get their news in the good old way. Your wires work, Mr. Morse, but it would take a great deal of money to lay miles of them underground, and we are not going to take such chances as that with our money."
Mr. Morse next tried to get Congress to grant him a sum of money. He wanted to build a wire from Baltimore to Washington and show how it would work. But it is never easy to get money from Congress, and he kept at it for five years in vain.
It was the 3d of March, 1843. At twelve o'clock that night the session of Congress would end. Morse kept about the Senate chamber till nearly midnight, in hopes his bill would pass. Then he gave it up in despair and went to his boarding house. He was sure his little bill would not be thought of in the crowd of business before Congress and was greatly depressed in consequence.