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Arago arranged for Morse to demonstrate his telegraph for the Chamber of Deputies. However the showing may have impressed the parliamentarians, it displeased the Revue Scientifique: “The way the signs are produced, the writing carried out at a distance, the … composing of the alphabet, all these elements are essentially defective [essentiallement defecteuses], and it will be necessary to abandon them.” Morse’s inconclusive visit to Paris left at least some hope that the French might adopt his system. On that chance he left behind a telegraph with the American minister, Robert Walsh—“witnesses for me in France should attempts be made to encroach on my invention.”

Concerning the most fascinating adventure of his telegraph in Europe, Morse unfortunately left no record. While he was abroad, the Continent was also being toured by his friend Charles Fleischmann, an agent of the U.S. Patent Office gathering information about foreign agriculture and mechanic arts. Morse gave Fleischmann one of his instruments, to show to bigwigs he might encounter. Fleischmann happened to arrive in Vienna around October, just when the Austrian government was considering whether to put up electrical telegraphs along its railroad routes. He thus managed to secure an audience with Prince Klemens von Metternich.

Metternich, of course, was Morse’s Devil-of-all-devils, mastermind of the Leopold Foundation for supporting Catholic missionaries in America, the super-reactionary he once called “the arch contriver of the plans for stifling liberty in Europe and throughout the world.” Interested in telegraphy, Metternich invited Fleischmann to set up Morse’s apparatus in his palace. There Fleischmann demonstrated it to the corps of foreign diplomats in Vienna—including the ambassador of the Pope, who transmitted a brief message.

Metternich expressed astonishment at the simplicity of Morse’s “beautiful Telegraph,” as he called it, and opened the way for Fleischmann to demonstrate it in November before the imperial family. In the red-velvet royal reception room, Metternich himself, speaking in Italian, explained the workings of Morse’s invention to Empress Maria Theresa. One can only imagine how Morse received the news, early in the new year, that the first European country to adopt his system, for a 320-mile line from Vienna to Prague, was to be Austria, that serpent entwined with the King of Rome to Jesuitize America.

*The development of the companies is comprehensively and brilliantly described in a classic work, Robert Luther Thompson’s Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1866 (1947).

TWELVE

Tantalus Still

(1846–1848)

RETURNING to America, Morse first gave his attention to completing the Magnetic company’s all-important line from New York to Washington. “The moment that is done,” Kendall told him, “the telegraph will be worth millions.” In Morse’s absence, Henry O’Reilly had nearly put up the Baltimore-Philadelphia section, and Vail and Cornell had nearly finished the leg from Philadelphia to New York. With Smith’s New York–Boston line almost completed too, the moment was exhilarating. Before spring, the Observer announced, it would be possible to speak by lightning directly from Boston to Washington.

A massive physical obstacle remained, however. The tail end of the line, the final link from Washington to New York, had to be stretched to upper Manhattan from a two-hundred-foot-high cliff in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and operate effectively across nearly two-thirds of a mile of the Hudson River. Cornell at first tried insulating the wire with india rubber and laying it across the river in pipes. He and Vail succeeded in communicating between the shores of New York and New Jersey. But a few weeks later, Morse tested the setup more rigorously by transmitting from Vail in Philadelphia, through Cornell in Fort Lee, to himself across the river in Manhattan. No current came through, as he frustratingly recorded:

At 11.25 reduced