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At 25 min to 12 I wrote “I get nothing from you” and also gave

(26.) but received no indication.

At 5 to 12 reduced battery to 10 cups. No indications.

At 12 h 5 increased battery again to 26 cups. No indications.

1. PM tried the instrument as before and with the same result.

The failure, Morse speculated, might be due to broken or twisted wires, perhaps to faulty insulation in the pipes. In any event, Cornell’s submarine line was problematic. The pipe and wires might be broken at any moment by the anchors of vessels getting underway in the Hudson River.

Morse considered or tried other methods of bridging the two shores. The wires could be run on high masts erected on either side of the river, but they might be struck by lightning or blown down by wind. Morse and his assistants tried changing the locations, extending an insulated wire across the river from Jersey City to lower Manhattan. A promising solution, but after four days a vandal severed the wire. An experiment to make the Hudson itself carry the electricity, as had been done successfully on the Susquehanna, produced a current too feeble to move the instruments. “You may judge of my anxieties,” Morse said. “The river I think will be a serious hindrance to us.”

A different problem hindered the western line of O’Reilly’s Atlantic, Lake & Mississippi company. Receiving magnets sold to him by Cornell—that is, devices that switched-in telegraph stations along the main line—were defective in themselves and incompatible with other equipment, causing long delays. A register he bought from Cornell was also “botch-work,” he said, screws working loose, cogs failing to mesh. Morse discovered that Cornell had designed the equipment himself and was going into business as his competitor. Cornell offered a defense—that his instruments embodied improvements that would benefit all the patentees. But the argument was fraudulent. Privately he believed that the public expected more from Morse’s system than it could deliver and would react against it, opening a market for his own inventions. Kendall warned him that he was exposing himself to prosecution.

Morse felt doublecrossed and angry. “Cornell has so bewitched, and befouled every thing he has touched … that I have hard work to restrain my indignation.” He regarded Cornell’s receiving magnets as no more than a “ clumsification” of his own, using four magnets instead of one—sold without his permission, too, and without compensating him. Installing Cornell’s instruments on Morse lines would also corrupt the desired uniformity of operation. Telegraph companies would be hard put to replace defective parts and shift operators from one part of the country to another. Cornell’s treachery left Morse reeling, “almost sick,” he told Vail. “Let us get along as quietly as we can with the plague till we can cut loose from him.” He had learned a lesson, too. After years of keeping his own receiving magnet under wraps, he now took out a patent for the device, at last describing and diagramming it in a public document.

With whatever difficulties, the country’s powerful new communication system kept expanding. Several new lines were completed by early summer. Morse enjoyed a triumph on May 12, when the Baltimore Sun printed an exclusive—three full columns of President Polk’s address to Congress the day before, requesting a formal declaration of war against Mexico and authority to call up troops. Taking more than two and a half hours to transmit, the important speech was by far the lengthiest document ever sent by telegraph. Morse sent a copy of the Sun to his friend Arago in Paris. The Chamber of Deputies was debating whether the worth of the electrical telegraph had been proved enough to justify government construction of a line from Paris to Belgium. “In the United States the matter is settled irresistibly,” Arago told the Chamber; “here is the President’s message printed from the telegraph in two or three hours … it could not have been copied by the most rapid penman in a shorter time than it