Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [137]
Kendall admittedly found the work a great burden. “I do not know when I shall be with you again,” he wrote to his wife from New York. While in New York, unwell, he received appalling news. His twenty-two-year-old son, William, had been on a street in Washington joshing with a friend. The kidding deteriorated into a quarrel, during which William’s friend shot him dead. The calamity left Kendall uncertain whether he could continue his agency for Morse. But his piety and faith absorbed his agony: “thank Heaven,” he was able to say after a week, “I am resigned and have become calm.” The news came to him partly by telegraph, through the astounding electrical communication network now building across the United States.
Kendall’s agency gave Morse an unfamiliar sense of freedom. Surviving documents do not reveal his exact profits from the new telegraph companies, now or later. But after years of scrounging and borrowing, he stood in reach of financial security. For granting some group of businessmen rights to the patent, he and the other partners got a modest cash payment plus 50 percent of the stock issued. By taking patent fees in stock rather than cash, Kendall hoped to demonstrate confidence in the telegraph and encourage capitalists to invest. Looking further ahead, he believed that if the patentees retained half the voting stock in every company they would be able to promote unified policies and procedures that would bind the separate lines into a coherent and powerful national system.
At the moment Morse’s holdings represented future prospects, dependent on the success of telegraph entrepreneurs in making their stock pay dividends. But now or later he was the largest shareholder in the New York, Albany & Buffalo company, with 585 shares. He also held 256 shares in the Magnetic; most other shareholders had fewer than 20. He soon began to tithe his assets for “religious benevolent objects.” He donated stock certificates in Morse companies to Protestant churches of various denominations, and to such organizations as the American Tract Society, the Foreign Evangelical Society, the Cleveland Female Seminary, and the American Temperance Union. He also contributed $2000 in stocks to New York University and $1000 in cash to Yale.
With his budding telegraph empire under Kendall’s command, Morse returned to the idea of marketing his invention in Europe. His futile trip to England and France six years earlier had reinforced his sense that the Old World feared change, that he must confine his hopes to America. But his now-proven success had excited new interest abroad, bringing many feelers from European agents and governments. A “Dr. Bergman” offered to secure exclusive telegraph rights through the whole German confederacy. The French consul in Boston, named de Burgraff, advised him that the government was testing electric telegraphs and asked for the plans of his system. The Russian minister promised to write home in his favor and invited him to dine at the ministry in Washington. There Morse shared a twenty-five-foot-long table, all candelabra and flowers, with Daniel Webster and several Supreme Court justices.
Similar European enticements had once before come to nothing, but Morse anyway decided to take a short trip abroad. His departure gave Alfred Vail another reason to feel wronged. Vail was about to publish a monograph on the nature and history of Morse’s invention. “If the book comes out, I may as well stay at home,” Morse complained to him. He seems to have feared that Vail’s explanations and drawings might be used against him if he tried to secure foreign patents, as had happened years before in England. Vail had spent six months and more than $700 producing the work. He protested that chances of its being read in Europe were 100 to 1, and that everything in it was already well known, “explained to thousands, who have seen the instrument in operation;—and … published in the newspapers over