Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [139]
And as in Wheatstone’s earlier apparatus, the jerking needles had to be observed or their meaning lost. “The advantage of recording is incalculable,” Morse noted, “and in this I have the undisputed advantage.” In Hamburg he learned, for the first time, that Wheatstone’s system could not accommodate additional instruments along a route, as his own system could by using receiving magnets. “If anything is done in the way of Telegraphs,” he decided, “I think there is little doubt mine will be adopted.” He also learned that Wheatstone had become aware of his presence abroad and was putting down his telegraph as inferior—“as indeed impracticable!! and absurd!! Is not this truly laughable?”
Laughable or not, Morse made no headway for his system in England. While in London he managed to interest a start-up British association, the General Commercial Telegraph Company. He offered his invention to them for a thousand pounds sterling, plus a return on receipts. They required that he obtain an English patent, but he believed he could now secure one by treating his relay system—still undescribed in print—as an integral part of the apparatus. The group delayed making a decision, however, and the possible deal expired in brusque letters between lawyers for both sides.
Morse was anxious to get on to Paris, where a government commission was determining which one of several electrical telegraphs should be adopted in France. Besides, he wanted to get out of England. The tense dispute over title to Oregon had created more than the usual prejudice against America. In the outfitting of some naval expedition or fortifying of some dockyard he believed he saw signs of preparation for war. If so, the British would find it hard going: “we are better prepared than they have any idea of.” Whereas he always felt alien in England, the French made him feel welcome. “How deep this welcome may be I cannot say,” he added, “but if one must be cheated I like to have it done in a civil and polite way.”
Morse was well positioned to present his telegraph in France. In shifting from the old Chappe system of semaphores to electrical telegraphs, the government was using for its first trials Wheatstone’s needle apparatus. But the head of the government commission was Morse’s good friend Arago, Secretary of the Académie des Sciences. Morse wrote to Arago before coming to Paris, saying he had examined “the English system” and could confidently affirm that his own was much simpler, far more efficient, and less expensive. As used in the French trials, Wheatstone’s apparatus had been redesigned by a scientific-instrument maker named Louis Bréguet, whose grandfather had assisted Chappe. (Wheatstone, Morse noted with pleasure, “may crow on his own dunghill, but the French cock crows here.”) An experimental line of the Wheatstone-Bréguet telegraph had been installed on the Paris-Rouen railroad—the first electrical telegraph line in France.
On the last day of October Morse went to inspect the line, accompanied by Bréguet himself. He took careful notes and made drawings of the stubby ten-foot-high posts and the dial-plate receiver, whose needles registered incoming signals in a code adapted from the old Chappe semaphores. Like some other British and continental instruments, Bréguet’s seemed to him beautifully made. Where his own functional-looking equipment had the spare concentration on essentials of his neo-Calvinist portraits, Bréguet’s and the others had fancy dial faces and handsomely carved wooden cabinets. And like them, too, it seemed to him inefficient. In one minute it could display about twelve signals transiently; in the same time, his own telegraph could record permanently “at least 120!!!” Moreover, Bréguet’s Chappe-like code was no less hectically complex than Wheatstone’s. A day after inspecting the line, Morse penned a nineteen-page letter to Arago, recommending that the French government substitute his own system: “with simpler