Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [121]
On May 1, Morse staged a dramatic stunt that gave the public a peek at what was to come. The Whig national convention was meeting in Baltimore to choose candidates for President and Vice President. Morse stationed Vail at Annapolis Junction, a train stop some twenty-two miles from Washington. There Vail would intercept the results of the balloting as they were being forwarded to Washington by railroad. Vail would then telegraph the results to him, so that the much-awaited news would reach the capital an hour and a quarter before arriving by train. Vail reported by wire that the Whig delegates had nominated Henry Clay for President and Theodore Frelinghuysen for Vice President. As the news spread through the capital, Morse found himself “over run” with visitors. Some asked him to have Vail transmit their names, which they could say had been written down in Washington by someone at Annapolis Junction.
As the line neared Baltimore over the next three weeks, Morse arranged other means of “exciting wonder.” He again had Vail intercept the train, this time to send on to Washington items from New York or Philadelphia newspapers, and short sentences by the passengers. Messages flew back and forth, Morse beamed, “with the rapidity almost of common conversation.” While sending the messages, he and Vail tried to improve their transmission of the still unfamiliar code. “Separate your words a little more,” Morse instructed him in one case. “Strike your dots firmer, and do not separate the two dots of the O so far apart. Condense your language more; leave out ‘the’ when ever you can, and when h follow t, separate them so that they shall not be 8.”
As public curiosity and excitement swelled, Morse’s mood, never very stable, fluctuated wildly. “He changes oftener than the wind,” Vail complained. “Now he is elated up to the skies, then he is down in the mud.” Vail said he had his hands full trying to keep his employer from becoming ill: “Professor Morse is a complete granny.” Some of Morse’s downswings may have been brought on by F. O. J. Smith. He kept pressing Morse to persuade the Secretary of the Treasury to settle with him and his brother-in-law for the unfinished trenching, even though the Secretary had made it clear that he lacked authority to do so. Morse scoffed at Smith’s demand as a “hallucination.” But Smith had bought a half interest in Cornell’s pipe-laying machine, and now was also miffed by Morse’s decision to string the wire on posts. He chafed like “a wild boar,” Morse said, determined to be “as ugly as he can.”
Register used in the Baltimore-Washington trials (Smithsonian Institution)
During the last week of construction, Morse petitioned the mayor of Baltimore for the right to plant twenty-five or thirty posts within city limits. The system now nearly in place differed beyond recognition from the printer’s composing stick and crude frame-stretcher that Morse had cobbled together a dozen years earlier. Vail had reinvented the cumbrous port-rule, replacing it with the simple classic telegraph key that opened and closed the circuit, sending a sequence of dots and dashes. After much experiment, Morse or Vail or both together had also transformed the unwieldy register into a compact clockwork machine that embossed incoming signals on a paper tape.
Telegraph key of the 1840s (Smithsonian Institution)
Morse powered his instruments by a bulky Grove battery, eighty cups of nitric acid. The use of an overhead line allowed him to at last introduce his relays. He also installed his so-called receiving magnets. Kept hidden from the general public until now, these relay-like devices actuated registers at