Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [114]
Once Morse got the appropriation, including annual salaries for a staff, his partners returned happily, even greedily. He assigned each a particular task. For a salary of $1000, Vail would make and help operate the instruments. Gale, returned from New Orleans, would receive $1500 and oversee the pipe—inspecting the metal for defects, checking the soldering joints, testing the effects of the soil on the lead. Smith would handle the legal work. He would draw no salary, but profit by contracting for the tubing and trenching, besides his one-quarter share in hoped-for profits from the patent. Morse also invited his Washington assistant James Fisher to join the team, for $1500, to superintend the preparation of the wire from its manufacture to its placement in the tubes. Morse as overall superintendent would receive $2000—more money than he had seen in years.
The superintendence burdened Morse with endless paperwork. The appropriation required him to submit to the Secretary of the Treasury a detailed monthly account of expenses, and keep all vouchers in duplicate (more than eight hundred, it turned out). He had to register weekly salaries for lab assistants, brass and iron workers, varnishers, solderers, a battery man, assorted mechanicians and laborers. He also had to account for elephantine quantities of material: 160 miles of No. 16 copper wire, weighing five tons; 25 dozen glazed stone cups to hold mercury for the batteries; 200-pound bales of twine; 70,500 yards of lead pipe—not to mention screws, stationery, and other incidentals. Morse meticulously documented every payment and purchase, well served by having earlier submitted to his father penny-for-penny accounts of his school expenses. The drudgery of bookkeeping was perhaps offset by pleasure in sporting a new title. He now routinely signed himself “Superintendent of the Electromagnetic Telegraph.”
Morse planned to begin the trenching no later than October 1, hoping to proceed at the rate of two and a half to three miles a day. Before that, contractors had to manufacture the insulated wire circuits and lead tubing. The production of the circuits went smoothly, except for minor delays owing to an imperfect batch of solder or weak vinegar. By late July, Morse had 160 miles of wire, insulated by windings of colored cotton thread and two coats of varnish. He decided to test it, once more taking on the old problem of the action of galvanic electricity through long wires. Twenty years earlier, the English electrician Peter Barlow had made experiments which showed that the current along a wire diminishes approximately as the square root of its distance from the battery. He concluded that a long-distance telegraph was theoretically impossible. Morse believed, however, that his still-under-wraps relay system overcame the problem.
Early in August, Morse invited several prominent scientists to witness an experiment in long-distance telegraphy, at a ropewalk on the outskirts of New York City. He used a so-called Grove battery, recently invented, consisting of a hundred cells of nitric acid, one pair of its plates being made of platinum. By far the strongest battery available, it sent Morse’s current effectually through all 160 miles of wire, even when he reduced the number of cells by half. The wire came in two-mile units on eighty spools. In a further experiment, Morse joined the units to make not a single 160-mile circuit, but several circuits of different lengths. He used them to test and compare the lifting