Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [108]
Morse learned that the Cooke-Wheatstone needle telegraph had been put in successful operation over thirteen miles on the Great Western Railway in England. More menacingly, the British partners were seeking an American patent for an improved version of their apparatus. Seemingly unaware of Morse’s lifelong distrust of English intentions toward America, they invited him to become their agent in the United States, obtaining the patent for them at his own expense in exchange for a half share in it. Oblivious also to Morse’s belief in the superiority of his own system, Wheatstone promised him more than financial profit: “you might have the merit of introducing into America the only invention of the kind of which the success has been put beyond all doubt.”
Stung and worried by the insensitive offer, Morse asked F. O. J. Smith for legal advice: “Does not our Patent secure us against foreign interference? Or are we to be defeated not only in England but in our own Country by the subsequent inventions of Wheatstone?” In fact, however, Morse had filed for but not yet received his patent. He wrote off inquiring about it to his friend Henry Ellsworth, Commissioner of Patents: “unless something is done to help me forward, the more wealthy Englishmen will have it in their power not merely to deprive me of the profit of my discovery in my own country, as they have already in their own, by a gross act of injustice, but … the Telegraph will be an English, not an American invention.” Ellsworth reminded him that the granting of the patent had been postponed at Morse’s own request, so that he could first secure European patents. Since the Patent Office had heard nothing further from him, it still had not issued the patent but would do so now.
There were vexing delays, however. The Office asked Morse to make several corrections in his drawings. It also belatedly discovered that he had neglected to fill in the date on his oath, requiring him to prepare a new affidavit, sworn before the mayor of New York. The certificate was finally issued on June 20, 1840, as U.S. patent No. 1647: “a new and useful Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals, by the application of Electro Magnetism.” Since the first U.S. patent statute had been signed into law by President Washington in 1790, the provisions had been several times revised. Present law protected Morse’s invention for a term of fourteen years, with the possibility of a seven-year extension.
Not only the English, but French telegraphers, too, were looking for business in America. Early in 1841, Congress received a memorial from M. Gonon, one of the two so-called Professors of Graphy whose demonstrations in America four years earlier had prompted Morse to first unveil his own telegraph. Gonon now offered to establish a line of twenty-seven semaphore stations connecting Washington with New York, for a total cost of $15,000. He submitted endorsements from businessmen and politicians who had seen his system. He also laid out for Congress the disadvantages of supposedly superior electrical telegraphs: unsolved problems in crossing rivers and swamps, vulnerability to vandalism, enormous expense, “and, after years of gigantic work to establish a line of little distance.” The House Committee on Commerce reported a bill for $5000 to test Gonon’s plan, an attractive saving over Morse’s petition for $30,000.
It was in part Morse’s resentment of English and French trafficking in America that brought him back to telegraphy—“sick at heart to perceive how easily others, foreigners, can manage our Congress and can contrive to cheat our country.” A stronger inducement came in a long letter he received the first week of August 1841 from a Washington lobbyist named Isaac Coffin. Coffin knew that Morse’s petition for an appropriation to test the Electro-magnetic Telegraph