Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [122]
Morse’s Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph line officially opened on May 24, 1844. For the inaugural transmission Vail brought his apparatus to the so-called upper depot in Baltimore, about a mile outside the city. Morse set up his instruments in the chamber of the United States Supreme Court.
Morse invited Annie Ellsworth, the commissioner’s daughter, to compose the first message. He spoke of her as “my dear young friend” and was rumored to be romantically interested. But the invitation, he explained, was a form of thanks. When Congress passed the appropriation bill, it was Annie who brought him the news. In thinking up an appropriate message she consulted her mother, who suggested the exclamation of the prophetic Balaam in Numbers 23:23: “What hath God wrought!”
Unfortunately, no graphic account of what transpired in the Supreme Court chamber survives. Morse tapped the message to Vail in Baltimore, who tapped it back to him. Next morning, Vail removed his apparatus to the railroad warehouse in the lower depot, within city limits. Morse again transmitted the same biblical text. He kept the line open for several hours, allowing the perhaps two dozen spectators in Washington and Baltimore to exchange names and send compliments to each other.
The now-famous transmission on May 24 attracted little more attention in the press than an item Morse himself wrote for the Observer, headed “The Electric Telegraph Triumphant.” The acclaim began three days later, as the Democratic convention convened at Baltimore’s Odd Fellows’ Hall, the city’s largest auditorium. Because of intense interest in the proceedings, the place was jam-packed. Delegates strenuously contested the nominations for president, one major issue being the annexation of Texas and what it would mean for the controversial extension of slavery. With the nomination deadlocked between Martin Van Buren and Lewis Cass, the convention picked the first presidential dark horse candidate, James K. Polk.
Morse generated enormous publicity by having Vail telegraph news of the raucous proceedings to Washington. Mobbed by people eager to watch the transmission, Vail had to keep the door locked so as to admit only fifteen or twenty spectators at a time. “Hundreds begged and pleaded to be allowed mearly to look at the instrument,” he told Morse. “They declared they would not say a word or stir and didn’t care whether they understood or not, only they wanted to say they had seen it.” At the same time, Morse in Washington found himself surrounded by politicians eager for results of the balloting. A Washington correspondent of the New York Herald reported that “little else is done here but watch Professor Morse’s Bulletin from Baltimore, to learn the progress of doings at Convention.”
Those seeking up-to-the-minute news of the convention were not disappointed. Vail’s dispatches to Morse, recorded in his detailed transcript of them, included the choice of Polk on the ninth ballot, and the rush of state delegations to change their vote in order to demonstrate loyalty to the party’s compromise choice:
V[ail] Mr. Brewster of Pa is speaking in favour of Buchanan M[orse] yes….
V Mr Brewster says his delegation go for VB but if VB’s friends desert them, the Delegation go for Buchanan…. The vote taken will be nearly unanimous for J K Polk & harmony & union are restored
M Is it a fact or a mere rumor
V Wait till the ballot comes…. Illinois goes for Polk … Mich goes for Polk. Penn asks leave to correct her error so as to give her whole vote for Polk….
M Intense anxiety prevails to … hear the result of last Balloting V Polk is unanimously nom
At this point Morse telegraphed back to Baltimore the effect on those around him of Polk’s nomination: