Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [126]
To its enthusiasts, this opening of the modern era of communication marked a new start, a dividing line between generations. According to the Herald, those who resisted it would count for nothing:
Steam and electricity, with the natural impulses of a free people, have made, and are making, this country the greatest, the most original, the most wonderful the sun ever shone upon…. Those who do not mix with this movement—those who do not become part of this movement—those who do not go on with this movement—will be crushed into more impalpable powder than ever was attributed to the car of Juggernaut. Down on your knees and pray.
Some Americans, of course, refused to pay tribute. To Henry David Thoreau, for one, it seemed that sender and receiver might have “nothing important to communicate.” Refining human instruments but not human beings, electromagnetic telegraphy represented only “improved means to an unimproved end.”
The social consequences of the telegraph, like those of every other technology, would of course depend on the people who owned and used it. It needs no saying that despite the vision of a national sensorium uniting the continent, the United States would soon implode in civil war. Nor that for all the techno-utopian hoopla about reduced crime and family values, lightning-fast information processing in the era of cyberspace might also be a boon to credit-card fraud, child pornography, and international terrorism.
In the “Lightning Man,” as they often referred to him, Morse’s fellow citizens discovered a new national hero, a second Benjamin Franklin:
On the same tablet with our FRANKLIN’S name,
Thine, MORSE, in blazing characters shall flame!
In Washington, a House member rose in Congress to say: “His name is immortalised and will remain as long as time shall endure.” “Fame will build a new Pillar in her Temple,” a fan wrote to him, “higher & more magnificent than all of the others, & on the top of it inscribe the name of Morse.” Newspapers such as the Southern Standard acquainted Americans with their hero’s appearance and manner:
This eminent individual—the inventor of the last and greatest wonder of the age—is under forty-five [actually fifty-two]. He is a little above the common height [actually, just under five feet ten], and rather thin; his hair slightly grey, complexion dark and sallow, eyes brilliantly black, with a peculiarly soft and gentle expression.
The Home Journal subjected Morse’s head to phrenological analysis. Its readers learned that his well-developed organs of Constructiveness and Ideality revealed him to be hard and soft: “forcible, persevering, almost headstrong, self-relying, independent, aspiring, good-hearted, and eminently social, though sufficiently selfish to look well to his own interests.”
Invitations, honors, and flattering requests poured in on Morse. The British minister asked him to dine. The French Académie de l’Industrie awarded him its silver medal. He was elected to membership in the literary society of Marshall College, the Belgian Academy of Archaeology, the National Institution for the Promotion of Science. Admirers importuned him to act as agent for the Syro-Egyptian Society; to speculate in a new photographic process; to lecture to the Irving Literary Association of Baltimore; to furnish material on his modus operandi for an engineering journal. They sought his permission to demonstrate the telegraph in classrooms, his instruction in operating the invention, his political endorsement, his advice, a job (“I am a sober industrious man & can give my reference”).
Morse had always longed to be a national figure, like Joseph Henry in science or James Fenimore Cooper in literature—as his father had been in geography. He fully understood that his position in the world had changed: “my praises,” he told Sidney, “ring from one end of the country to the other.” The homage made him think of