Once Sibley and the other American telegraph pioneers had spanned the continent, they began plans for spanning the globe. Their idea was to unite America and Europe by a line stretched through British Columbia, Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Siberia. Siberia had been connected with European Russia, and thus practically the entire line could be stretched on land, only short submarine cables being necessary. It was then seriously doubted that cables long enough to cross the Atlantic were practicable. The expedition started in 1865, a fleet of thirty vessels carrying the men and supplies. Tremendous difficulties had been overcome and a considerable part of the work accomplished when the successful completion of the Atlantic cable made the work useless. Nearly three million dollars had been expended by the Western Union in this attempt. Yet, despite this loss, its affairs were so generally successful and the need for the telegraph so real that it continued to thrive until it reached its present remarkable development.
While the line-builders were busy stretching telegraph wires into almost every city and town in the nation, others were perfecting the apparatus. Alfred Vail was a leading figure in this work. Already he had played a large part in designing and constructing the apparatus to carry out Morse's ideas, and he continued to improve and perfect until practically nothing remained of Morse's original apparatus. The original Morse transmitter had consisted of a porte-rule and movable type. This was cumbersome, and Vail substituted a simple key to make and break the circuit. Vail had also constructed the apparatus to emboss the message upon the moving strip of paper, but this he now improved upon. The receiving apparatus was simplified and the pen was replaced by a disk smeared with ink which marked the dots and dashes upon the paper.
As we have noticed, Morse took particular pride in the fact that the receiving apparatus in his telegraph was self-recording, and considered this as one of the most important parts of his system. But when the telegraph began to come into commercial use the operators at the receiving end noticed that they could read the messages from the long and short periods between the clicks of the receiving mechanism. Thus they were taking the message by ear and the recording mechanism was superfluous. Rules and fines failed to break them of the habit, and Vail, recognizing the utility of the development, constructed a receiver which had no recording device, but from which the messages were read by listening to the clicks as the armature struck against the frame in which it was set. Thus the telegraph returned in its elements to the form of Professor Henry's original bell telegraph.
With his bell telegraph and his relay Henry had the elements of a successful system. He failed, however, to develop them practically or to introduce them to the attention of the public. He was the man of science rather than the practical inventor. Alfred Vail, joining with Morse after the latter had conceived the telegraph, but before his apparatus was in practical form, was a tireless and invaluable mechanical assistant. His inventions of apparatus were of the utmost practical value, and he played a very large part in bringing the telegraph to a form where it could serve man effectively. After success had been won Morse did not extend to Vail the credit which it seems was his due.
Yet, though Morse made free use of the ideas and assistance of others, he was richly deserving of a major portion of the fame and the rewards that came to him as inventor of the telegraph. Morse was the directing genius; he contributed the idea and the leadership, and bore the brunt of the burdens when all was most discouraging.
Honors were heaped upon Morse both at home and abroad as his telegraph established itself in all parts of the world. Orders of knighthood, medals, and decorations were conferred upon him. Though he had failed to secure foreign patents, many of the foreign governments recognized the value of his invention, and France, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and some smaller nations joined in paying him a testimonial of four hundred thousand francs. It is to be noticed that Great Britain did not join in this testimonial, though Morse's system had been adopted there in preference to the one developed by Wheatstone.
In 1871 a statue of Morse was erected in Central Park, New York City. It was in the spring of the next year that another statue was unveiled, this time one of Benjamin Franklin, and Morse presided at the ceremonies. The venerable man received a tremendous ovation on this occasion, but the cold of the day proved too great a strain upon him. He contracted a cold which eventually resulted in his death on April 2, 1872.
While extended consideration cannot be given here to the telegraphic inventions of Thomas A. Edison, no discussion of the telegraph should close without at least some mention of his work in this field. Edison started his career as a telegrapher, and his first inventions were improvements in the telegraph. His more recent and more wonderful inventions have thrown his telegraphic inventions into the shadow. On the telegraph as invented by Morse but one message could be sent over a single wire at one time. It was later discovered that two messages' could be sent over the single wire in opposite directions at the same time. This was called duplex telegraphy. Edison invented duplex telegraphy by which two messages could be sent over the same wire in the same direction at the same time. Later he succeeded in combining the two, which resulted in the quadruplex, by which four messages may be sent over one wire at one time. Though Edison received comparatively little for this invention, its commercial value may be estimated from the statement by the president of the Western Union that it saved that company half a million dollars in a single year. Edison's quadruplex system was also adopted by the British lines.
Before this he had perfected an automatic telegraph, work on which had been begun by George Little, an Englishman. Little could make the apparatus effective only over a short line and attained no very great speed. Edison improved the apparatus until it transmitted thirty-five hundred words a minute between New York and Philadelphia. Such is the perfection to which Morse's marvel has been brought in the hands of the most able of modern inventors.