Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [111]
The same day, Morse gave a private demonstration of his telegraph for the Nautical Committee of the American Institute. He tried to send a message underwater from the tip of Manhattan to Governors Island, a distance of about a mile, using copper cabling insulated with tarred thread. His battery proved too weak, however, so that he had to exchange it for Colt’s large battery—“neither entire failure,” the Herald remarked, “nor entire success.”
Morse’s public demonstration the next day, however, left no doubt. The Herald promised a major event, bound to convince those who questioned the power of Morse’s telegraph: “All such may now have an opportunity of fairly testing it. It is destined to work a complete revolution in the mode of transmitting intelligence throughout the civilized world.” A crowd gathered at the Battery to watch Morse send a message electrically through a mile of water. He got off several characters, but without warning the transmission went dead. A merchantman had been getting underway, and its anchor fouled the submerged cable. As Morse looked on, the ship’s crew hauled in two hundred feet of his carefully insulated copper wire and severed it. The crowd at the Battery scattered—with jeers, by one account. Humiliated by his abrupt and complete failure in public, Morse was unable to sleep.
Morse’s new campaign to influence Congress brought other discouragements. He had hoped to personally exhibit his system in Washington, but learned that the House was in bad humor. By midsummer he stopped hearing from the lobbyist Isaac Coffin. He supposed that Coffin had rejected the partners’ offered terms, and had abandoned the idea of representing him: “Well so be it.” He felt deserted by his partners, too. During the year several entrepreneurs proposed plans to him for raising private capital to build a telegraph line. But his partners squandered the opportunities in slow, endless consultation by mail—Maine, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans—and by their unwillingness to meet with him in New York. “I find myself without sympathy or help from any who are associated with me,” he complained to Smith. One time when Smith came to New York to advise on some legal matters, he promised to call on Morse but did not. Nor did he say where he was staying, leaving Morse to search at several hotels without finding him. Ahead, Morse saw only more delay, “another year of anxious suspense.”
The worst of it was that his partners contributed no money to the enterprise. While he spent his every last cent perfecting the system, often unable to pay everyday expenses, they claimed to be suffering from the long economic depression. Alfred Vail spoke of being “awfully poverty stricken”; his brother George pleaded that “my means are nothing at the present time.” Morse told Smith that without some financial assistance from someone, he would be compelled to return to painting, “and if I get once engaged in my proper profession again, the Telegraph and its proprietors will urge me from it in vain.”
A turning point for Morse came through the efforts of a New York City congressman, Charles Ferris, a member of the Committee on Commerce. To him had been referred the resolution introduced in the House by William Boardman of Connecticut, calling on the Committee to explore the possible usefulness to the country of communication by electromagnetic telegraphs. Ferris was excited about Morse’s invention and eager for the government to back it. When they spoke in New York, he asked Morse for an account of the system to use in winning over the Commerce Committee. He apparently also suggested that Morse support his efforts by demonstrating the telegraph in Washington.
Morse did both. He wrote