Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [131]
As usual, Vail also experimented on his own. Among other things, he tried substituting a permanent magnet for the electromagnet, making a railroad track serve as a conductor, and using the earth itself to generate a galvanic current. He also devised a method of operating two independent circuits with one battery. “My mind has become so entirely engrossed in all that relates to the Telegraph,” he said, “that I almost feel unfit for anything else.” He also felt, however, that although his research had reduced the expense and difficulty of operating Morse’s system, it went unacknowledged and unappreciated. “With all these improvements, I got no credit from Professor Morse,” he told his brother. He intended to keep his current experiments to himself, and later make their results public: “Not even Professor Morse knows what I have in my possession.” But his family believed they knew—and they would long remember.
With Congress not in session, Morse left Washington for a few days in May to see his daughter, Susan. She came to New York from Puerto Rico, bringing his first grandchild, a boy named Charles. The reunion does not seem to have gone very well. Susan had developed chronic health problems. She spoke of her move to Puerto Rico as a “great sacrifice” and hoped to return permanently to the United States. Although her husband, a sugar merchant, had made a lot of money as sugar prices advanced, he lost much of it in speculations. And Morse seems to have treated his grandson with no more warmth or finesse than he had shown to his children. He left Susan feeling “sometimes sad,” she said, to think that he had been disappointed in the boy and found him unhandsome. Returned to Washington, Morse wrote to Sidney, asking his brother to reassure her—if the comment can be called reassuring—that while he considered his grandson handsome indeed, “I think more of disposition which is of most consequence and he appears to have a fine disposition.”
Whether or not his grandson Charles disappointed Morse, Charles his son certainly did. Now about twenty years old, the young man had done poorly at Yale—his father’s and grandfather’s alma mater—finding algebra and other subjects difficult and getting harder. He told his father he wanted to quit college and become a farmer. Morse consented, although “almost heart broken” by his son’s dropping out of school. Gradually, however, he came to think the move desirable for Charles’ health. And if Charles had a farm it might provide something like a home for Finley, who was showing an interest in gardening.
Sidney Morse vigorously publicized his brother’s telegraph system in the Observer. He himself had contrived a method of printing maps by engraving on wax—“cerography”—that Morse considered no less valuable than the telegraph. “It is rare,” he told Sidney, “that two of a family should be so favored, as to be the instruments of bringing before the world, such important revolutionizing inventions.” The two brothers also stood together in opposing the ever-noisier crusade against slavery. Sidney published a pamphlet, Letter on American Slavery, assailing the radical tactics of the Abolitionists. Morse said he agreed—“demons in human shape,” he called the Abolitionists; “a more wretched, disgusting, hypocritical crew, have not appeared on the face of the earth since the times of Robespierre.”
By contrast with the robust Sidney, Morse’s bookish brother Richard went on enumerating his plague of ailments—“indigestion, tendency of blood to the head, wakefulness, needless anxieties.” Married and the father of ten children, he had withdrawn from partnership in the Observer, doing no more for the paper than light writing and translating. Meanwhile he wandered in restless desolation from upstate