Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [130]
Staying in Washington, Morse used the time for important new experiments. He and Vail worked at slimming the bulky Grove battery that powered the Washington-Baltimore line. They succeeded in reducing the necessary number of cups from eighty to twenty, promising great savings in the cost of material and maintenance. Morse looked into the possibility of dispensing with batteries altogether by using the “magneto-electrical machine,” a primitive generator designed by Charles Page, Chief Examiner of the Patent Office. Page’s device proved its enormous potential when it successfully operated the line in a test on Christmas Day, without the clutter of acid and plates and cups. Morse kept Page on as an adviser but did not alter the power supply in his system, probably because of the expense of manufacturing as many magnetos as he would need to replace his batteries.
Morse and Vail again addressed the problem of river crossings, a difficulty that at some time would have to be decisively faced and overcome. Morse had twice before attempted to conduct electricity underwater: by wire in New York harbor, inconclusively; and successfully across the eighty-foot-wide Susquehanna Canal, using the water alone as a conductor. At the canal he had been assisted by James Fisher, the New York University colleague he hired, then fired. Distrusting Fisher’s results, he decided to repeat the experiment, now aided by Vail and Cornell. On one bank of the canal they stretched a wire four hundred feet long, parallel to a wire of the same length on the opposite bank. To the four ends of the wires they attached copper plates, which they immersed in the canal. When a battery connected to the wire on the near shore was activated, it moved a galvanometer connected to the wire on the far shore, proving that current had been conducted through the water from one pair of plates to the other. In one of many further tests, Vail and Henry Rogers, Morse’s newly hired assistant, sent a current wirelessly across the Susquehanna River at Havre de Grace, a distance of nearly a mile.
Morse’s experiments made news, as did his fanciful suggestion that a telegraph line might be constructed along the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound, electromagnetically linking all the neighboring towns “without the necessity of any other connection but the water of the Sound. It is even hoped,” the Journal of Commerce reported, “that a telegraphic communication may be made with Europe, and at no very great expense.” Despite the impressive trials and the fanfare, Morse wondered whether a more practical way of traversing rivers might be to stretch wire circuits across the water on lofty spars.
Morse and his assistants also tried to learn how telegraph lines might be affected by electrical storms. During one test, in a Washington office, a terrific lightning flash outside roiled the apparatus, spattering liquid mercury and shooting jets of snapping sparks. Onlookers were alarmed, and the dangerous accident found its way into the press. Morse and his crew said little, concerned that such reports might warn off insurance companies and scare landlords, whose permission was required before planting telegraph poles near their buildings. The indoor fireworks had a benefit, too. They led Morse and his helpers to devise a lightning arrester to protect the instruments and operators.
Hoping to improve the operators as well, Morse directed Vail to experiment with transmission speeds. Vail could telegraph 20 letters per minute; Morse, working as fast as possible, once managed to send 48 (or, in another trial, 122 s’s). But excitement over the invention was beginning to attract