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Morse offered a trade. He would permit immediate publication of the work, in exchange for all of Vail’s contractual interest in overseas rights to the telegraph. Vail scoffed at the lopsided proposal—another case of his former teacher still seeing him as an undergraduate. “None of your nonsense Professor Morse,” he griped to his brother George; “I have some of my eye teeth cut now…. No you don’t.” While Morse was in Europe, the well-known Philadelphia house of Lea & Blanchard published Vail’s two-hundred-page monograph, entitled The American Electric Telegraph. Morse was not wrong in expecting it to cause trouble.

For demonstrations Morse took with him overseas two telegraphs. He planned to spend time in London and Paris, then go on to Stockholm and beyond. In preparation for a visit to St. Petersburg he gathered letters of introduction to American merchants in the city who could put him in touch with “Christian friends” there, and from Secretary of State James Buchanan. His prospects in Russia, however, once more proved phantasmal. During his three months abroad he got no farther north than Hamburg, Germany, and toured for a while in Holland as well.

In setting out, Morse centered his hopes on England. “If our Telegraph can be once successfully established on a line in England,” he told Vail, “we command the Continent also.” England mattered most because it had produced the only serious rival to his own system—the needle telegraph of the British inventor-scientist Charles Wheatstone, which several European countries had begun to adopt. The priority and comparative virtues of the two systems were at the moment subjects of cultural warfare in the British and American press. The rancor was intensified by competing national claims to the Oregon Territory, which for nearly forty years had been jointly occupied by both countries.

London journals such as the Globe and the Literary Gazette declared that everything accomplished by Morse in his Washington-Baltimore line had been done earlier and better by Wheatstone. “The English reader need scarcely be informed,” said the London Mechanics Magazine, “that Mr. Morse has … only re discovered what was previously well known in this country.” American newspapers fought back in articles typically entitled “The Magnetic Telegraph—American and British,” making the same claims for Morse: “the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph of Prof. Morse is the first realization of a practicable Telegraph on the Electric principle,” one wrote; “thefts of new inventions and bold plagiarisms of whole works, the offspring of American minds, have been so common in England, that we deem it almost a matter of course that no acknowledgement will ever be made in English works of indebtedness for any thing of the kind to America.”

Morse had inspected the British telegraph when he visited Wheatstone at King’s College, London, in 1838. Now he carefully observed it in public operation at railway stations and ticket offices in London and Hamburg, and along a ten-mile route in Holland between Haarlem and Amsterdam. What he saw confirmed his earlier sense of the superiority of his own system. Wheatstone had simplified his apparatus, reducing the number of needles from five to two. But transmission remained complicated. As part of a description in the London Pictorial Times suggests, it demanded a sort of bifocal gymnastics:

The left hand needle moving to the left twice gives a, three times b, once to the right and once to the left c…. The order is then taken up by the right hand needle, moving once to the left for h, twice for i, three times for k, once to the right and once to the left for l…. The remaining signs are made by the two needles working conjointly, so that the simultaneous movement of the two, once to the left, indicates r, twice for s, three times for t, once to the right and once to the left for u, once to the right for w, twice for x, and three times for y.

Cooke-Wheatstone double-needle telegraph (The Science Museum, London)

At the Paddington Station in London, Morse gave the