Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [124]
Into the late evening, Vail had the tallies announced out the window of his Washington office. Morse cautioned him to give only official results, not mere rumors, and in announcing them to leave no impression of political partisanship. Vail estimated the number of Whig and Democrat voters gathered outside at three to four thousand: “their shouts go up like peals of thunder,” he said. “It is royal sport to see the breathless interest felt just before the telegraphic communication is announced…. Then the 3 cheers from one party or the other as the case may be.”
In proving the efficiency and usefulness of his invention, Morse revealed the coming into being of a remarkable new technology. His telegraph was the subject of relatively as much discussion in the newspapers and magazines of the mid-1840s as the Internet became in the mass media of the 1990s. Americans could not read enough about his “Lightning Line,” as they began calling it. The press published his dot-dash code in full; explained in elementary terms his conductors and galvanic batteries; offered capsule histories of the discovery of electromagnetism—matters little if at all known to American readers. “Is this mysterious power a substance or an effect?” asked the New York Daily Times. When Morse tried to explain his invention to several members of Congress, a bystander observed, they looked blank, “as if he had spoken in Hebrew.”
Bafflement was the common reaction to Morse’s system. It seemed to operate by “an almost supernatural agency,” one newspaper said; “we stand wonder-stricken and confused.” Americans compared it to a bottle-imp, a spell, a classical myth, something from the Arabian Nights. The wonderment stemmed in part from the awesome harnessing of power they believed the telegraph represented. Most conceived the electric current in Morse’s circuits not in terms of batteries but in terms of lightning. In many minds, he had “chained the very lightning of heaven,” commanding his wires to program and propel the most destructive force in Nature. Marveling at his invention as the “climax of all human might,” they experienced something of the all-transforming awakening that later accompanied the dawn of the atomic age.
Just as bafflingly, Morse’s telegraph “annihilated space and time.” No other description of his device was so often and so widely repeated. Through his before-unthinkable lightning-wires, information could hurtle across forty miles instantaneously (actually, at nearly the speed of light). Better than that: given the difference in clock-time between cities, a message could arrive at one before being sent from the other, transmitted in “less than no time.” Americans conceived telegraphic transmission not so much as communication, however, than as a sort of teleportation. Morse had transmuted Thought, abstract human Thought, into metal strips and jars of acid. A congressional report on the telegraph noted: “If machinery don’t think, it does that which nothing but severe and prolonged thinking can do, and it does it incomparably better.” Americans spoke of creating a “new species of consciousness” separated from the body, a discorporate electronic telepresence. Dizzyingly, Mind could be at one place but also at another: “this extraordinary discovery leaves … no elsewhere—it is all here.”
For the United States, the annihilation of space was as much a political as a scientific achievement. From the beginning, the spread of the American people over so large a territory had raised doubts about whether the Republic could be governed. Such concerns became acute as the population increased during the first half of the nineteenth century by about 450 percent, and the nation expanded westward across the continent. And the five years after the opening of the Washington-Baltimore line would enlarge the problem. Into the Union would come Texas, the huge Oregon Territory, and the