• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Morse wrote up his experiments for Benjamin Silliman’s American Journal of Science—his one substantial piece of published research, and a bid for scientific respectability. Professor John Draper, his former partner in daguerreotyping, appended a mathematical analysis of the results. They illustrated, Draper wrote, “the law of the conducting power of wires”: as the length of the wire increased, the diminution in electrical effect decreased and at a certain point became insignificant. Thus if Morse’s telegraph could operate over 160 miles, it could also transmit over far greater distances: “It is … possible to conceive a wire to be a million times as long as another, and yet the two shall transmit quantities of electricity not perceptibly different.”

In reporting his long-distance experiments to the Secretary of the Treasury, Morse invoked Draper’s “law” to prophesy the future. He had become fond of making such predictions, and in this case, as he would often point out, he was not mistaken: “a Telegraphic communication on my plan may with certainty be established across the Atlantic! Startling as this may seem now, the time will come when this project will be realised.”

While the insulated wire worked nicely, serious problems developed with the lead tubing. F. O. J. Smith had contracted for its manufacture with a young New Yorker named James Serrell. In Serrell’s patented process, lead was first cast into eighteen-inch ingots, through which ran a lengthwise hole. The ingots were threaded on a mandril (a cylindrical rod) and passed between rollers that pressed the lead around the mandril, shaping it into half-inch tubes. But in August, with the wire insulated and ready to be inserted in the tubing, Serrell failed to deliver—“not one foot,” Morse moaned. Serrell explained that an unusual rainstorm had flooded the basement in which he manufactured his pipe. To Morse, however, the problem seemed to be that the young man lacked drive, “a yankee contriving go ahead management.” A few weeks later, Serrell reported that he was halted again, this time by damage to the furnace that powered his steam engine. In the end he admitted that he could produce no more than ten of the forty miles of pipe that Morse required.

Badly set back in his schedule, Morse had Smith hire a different manufacturer for the remaining thirty or so miles. Smith contracted with Benjamin Tatham & Company, which agreed to deliver all of the tubing, in three installments, before November 20. Morse had planned to demonstrate his Baltimore-Washington line when Congress convened in December. Tatham’s delivery date would at least allow him to demonstrate it before Congress closed, at the beginning of March—though the timing would be close and meant working into the early winter. He got Tatham to use a hollow mandril that he and James Fisher had invented. The insulated wires could be laid in the mandril beforehand and inserted into the tubes at the moment they were shaped from the lead ingots. Morse appointed Fisher to inspect the results at Tatham’s New York manufactory, using an air pump to make sure the tubing was free of leaks and cracks before shipment by schooner to Baltimore.

To get things moving, Morse decided to put down the existing ten miles of pipe. The trenching—the last of the three major steps in constructing the line—gave no less trouble than the manufacture of the tubing. To excavate the forty-mile-long trench, Smith contracted with a New Yorker named Levi S. Bartlett, who happened to be his wife’s brother. Morse objected, not because of the nepotism but because Bartlett’s rate of $153 per mile exceeded the estimate he had given the government. He had stayed painstakingly within his budget. He hoped to produce the Baltimore-Washington line for the government and the country as cheaply as possible. What most threatened the future of his telegraph, he believed, was that it might be seen as an extravagance.

Smith took offense, but arranged for his brother-in-law