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By Root 1431 0

to subcontract the trenching to a different excavator, Ezra Cornell (1807–1874). Born to a Quaker family in Westchester, New York, but now settled upstate in Ithaca, Cornell had had a rural upbringing and little education. Like Morse, he had scrambled for a living—in his case for a wife and nine children. Off and on he had worked as a potter, carpenter, sheep raiser, machinist, millwright, and real estate speculator. Having recently bought the rights to a new sort of plow, he traveled the country to market it, sometimes doing forty miles a day on foot. In Portland, Maine, he met F. O. J. Smith, who persuaded him to design a machine for laying pipe underground. Cornell saw Morse’s telegraph enterprise as his financial salvation. If the new line worked, lines would be laid all over the country, and his trenching machine would be worth a fortune.

Morse went to Portland for a few days to inspect Cornell’s machine, liked it, and authorized its use. In essence the machine was a combination plow and cart, drawn by a team of eight mules. The plowshare, rather like a hatchet blade, cut a deep narrow slit in the earth. Atop the cart stood a large drum wound with lead pipe containing the wire circuits. As the plow advanced, tubing was at the same time fed behind it into the just-dug trench. The narrow furrow collapsed into itself, covering the tube with earth. Almost simultaneously, the machine cut the trench, laid the pipe, and buried it.

The trenching got under way at eight o’clock on the morning of October 21, three weeks behind Morse’s schedule. Working from Baltimore toward Washington, Cornell began laying the ten miles of Serrell pipe from a hill on which stood the depot of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Because of the city terrain, he and his men had to entrench the first two thousand feet by hand. Once outside the depot area, early in November, Cornell set to work with his machine. He discovered that while the mule team could lay from half a mile to one mile a day, the plumbers who soldered together the drum-length sections could join no more than a quarter of a mile. As a result, the two crews worked out of step, the time lag increasing day by day. Morse applied to Washington for permission to hire extra solderers. But to his grief, the new pipe manufacturer, Tatham & Company, announced that they were running late and could not produce the rest of the tubing before early December.

Existing documents leave the sequence of events during the first few weeks in December unclear. By then Cornell had laid the Serrell pipe from the Baltimore depot to a point about ten miles outside the city. But Morse’s troubles were piling up, money running out, winter coming on. “I shall need driving able faithful men,” he lamented, “men capable of bearing the cold weather if it should so happen.” This excluded Leonard Gale, who fell ill; too thin and weak to work outdoors, he resigned. Worse, a section of the entrenched Serrell pipe was found, ominously, to contain water.

Much worse, when the new pipe from Tatham & Company arrived, the insulated circuits inside turned out to be severely damaged. Unlike Serrell, Tatham had shaped the lead tubes from hot rather than cold ingots. The heat had in many places charred the varnished cotton that insulated the wire. Morse blamed Fisher, having carefully instructed him to visit Tatham’s New York manufactory to examine the tubing and test the wires before they were shipped. Believing that Fisher had simply neglected to do so, Morse discharged him—reluctantly, since he felt grateful to Fisher for his help in Washington the year before.

Sometime in early December, Morse suspended the trenching in order to study his deteriorating situation. Thirty years later, Ezra Cornell recalled that Morse took him aside and confided that he did not want the newspapers to know that work had been deliberately stopped; he needed an excuse. Cornell said he could manage that. Stepping back to his machine he called out “hurrah boys whip up the mules.” His teamsters cracked their whips. As the mules started off, Cornell grasped