Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [135]
Morse’s agreement did not cover the one-quarter interest in the patent owned by F. O. J. Smith, whose permission Kendall would need in order to convey the rights to others. Kendall planned to interest private capital, organize the investors into companies, and issue stock to the members. At the same time he intended to hold open the option of selling the patent outright to the government. In his first encounters with Smith, Kendall found him adamantly opposed to such a sale unless Washington paid for the Bartlett contract. “In matters of trade with the Government,” Smith said, “I would feign no patriotism.” Unlike Morse, Kendall could speak Smith’s own language as a capital insider and match him cynicism for cynicism. “I have the same object in view,” he replied, “to make the most money in the shortest time that we honestly can.”
Kendall was also tenacious in forceful, intelligent argument. He gave Smith a dozen reasons to keep government purchase a possibility. For one, although a million dollars might ultimately be made through private investment, doing so would take years of perplexing toil. But an outright sale to Washington would at once reap “all of wealth the human heart ought to desire.” He stressed to Smith the importance of working together: “It is only by harmony in action that we can do any thing, and to preserve it we must make concessions where we cannot agree in opinion.” Kendall managed to pacify Smith, but by no means to convert him into a team player. Smith worked only for Smith: “I have no idea of going ahead of my necessities,” he said, “to serve the wishes of other folks.”
For the first six months after his agreement with Kendall, Morse became little more than a bystander to the development of his invention. Kendall rapidly set to work forming or licensing companies to build new telegraph lines, with most of the capital raised in small amounts from people located along the routes. Three companies were especially important as representing the foundation of a national network, with New York City the hub. In May, Kendall organized a joint stock association called the Magnetic Telegraph Company—the nation’s first telegraph company. The Magnetic took subscriptions for carrying on the Baltimore-Washington line through Philadelphia to New York. Kendall himself served as the salaried president. The same month he concluded an agreement with some upstate operators of stagecoaches to form the New York, Albany & Buffalo Telegraph Company. Capitalized at $200,000, the company intended to build a line from New York City through Albany, Syracuse, and Rochester to Buffalo, with a link at Springfield, Massachusetts, to Smith’s New York–Boston line.
Ad for the Magnetic Telegraph Company (Washington Republic, February 1, 1852)
Kendall drew up his most far-reaching agreement in mid-June, with a Rochester group later called the Atlantic, Lake & Mississippi Telegraph Company. It was led by Henry O’Reilly (or O’Rielly, 1806–1886), a rosy-cheeked, chin-whiskered immigrant from County Monaghan, Ireland. Now forty years old, he had come to America at the age of ten with his mother and sister; his father remained behind, in debtor’s prison. Weighing only 124 pounds, he was a bantam dynamo, the prototype of the Go-ahead American driven more by the promise of gain and advancement than by the fading ideal of self-sacrificing republican virtue. By the age of twenty he had made himself editor of the Rochester, New York, Daily Advertiser, the first newspaper between the Hudson and the Pacific. Identifying his own and the city’s future, he served as its postmaster and president of its Young Men’s Association, worked to improve its public schools, and wrote a history of the place.
Henry O’Reilly (Rochester Historical Society)
He saw in himself the frontier spirit of western New York, “where Yankee enterprise,” he liked to say, “is quickened by the energies of a newer country.”
In his