Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [112]
Morse journeyed to Washington early in December, putting up at a Missouri Avenue boarding house. How he financed the trip is unknown, perhaps by borrowing from Sidney. No help came from his partners. As a former congressman, F. O. J. Smith might have been especially useful; he promised to show up but did not. Vail did not come either; obtaining the necessary funds, he said, was “out of my power.” But Morse found Ferris, Boardman, and several other congressmen working energetically on his behalf, as well as his Yale chum, Commissioner Henry Ellsworth. However grown used to failure, he felt hopeful.
The enthusiastic response to Morse’s demonstrations justified his hope. With Alfred Vail unable to assist, he had brought along a colleague from the University, James Cogswell Fisher, Leonard Gale’s replacement as Professor of Chemistry. Over a few weeks they set up and performed three related tests. Stretching a wire circuit between the rooms of the House Committee on Commerce and the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, they sent and received messages for any who cared to see and hear. They also showed that two or more currents could be made to pass at the same time on the same wire—a discovery they had made shortly before leaving New York, hinting at the possibility of multiplex telegraphy. And they successfully demonstrated submarine transmission. According to Morse, during a sleepless night following his mortifying failure in New York harbor, he devised a new method of crossing water. Fisher assisting, he tried it out on Washington’s Susquehanna River Canal. He immersed a pair of large copper plates on one bank, facing a similar pair immersed on the opposite bank, and successfully used the water itself to conduct the electrical current.
Morse believed that everyone who saw the tests admired them, a judgment confirmed by rave reviews in the Washington press. “This invention has truly been placed among the greatest of this or any other age,” the National Intelligencer commented. “The mind is scarcely prepared to pursue even in speculation the mighty results which are soon to follow its practical demonstration.”
On December 30, in the wake of Morse’s demonstrations, Charles Ferris submitted to Congress a five-page recommendation on behalf of the Committee on Commerce. It praised Morse’s telegraph as “decidedly superior to any other now in use.” Developing his system would lay no burden on the people, for the revenue to be derived from it would far outrun the building costs. Equally at stake were fairness to Morse and national pride:
Your committee are of opinion that it is but justice to Professor Morse, who is alike distinguished for his attainments in science and excellence in the arts of design, and who has patiently devoted many years of unremitting study, and freely spent his private fortune, in inventing and bringing to perfection a system of telegraphs which is calculated to advance the scientific reputation of the country, and to be eminently useful, both to the Government and the people, that he should be furnished with the means of competing with his European rivals.
Ferris bolstered the Committee’s case by including the impressive endorsements Morse had received from Joseph Henry, the American Institute, and Alphonse Foy, administrator of the French telegraph system. The report closed with the language of the appropriation bill itself, calling for a grant of $30,000 to Morse so that he might “test the Practicability of establishing a System of Electro-Magnetic Telegraphs