Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [143]
Morse’s new revelations of the networked future also swelled his list of honors. “The nation’s idol,” as a friend described him, was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society and awarded an LL.D. degree by Yale, its first honorary degree for work in science or invention. The twenty-six-year-old Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Mejid, conferred on him the country’s Nishan Iftichar, or Order of Glory. Morse had made two instruments especially to be taken to Turkey by the president of the American Scientific Association, Professor John Laurence Smith, headed there to advise on the country’s mining resources. Smith demonstrated the telegraph at the Sultan’s palace on the Bosporus, running a wire from its main entrance to the royal harem. Morse’s Order of Glory represented the first and only decoration the Sultan had bestowed on an American. As will appear, it took a year arriving.
Morse was further rewarded in seeing the many newspaper columns now headed “By Magnetic Telegraph.” In fact, his invention was beginning to transform news gathering and to reshape American journalism. With the completion of the New York-Washington line, New Yorkers who bought the morning edition of James Gordon Bennett’s popular Herald could read southern news telegraphed from Washington the evening before. Bennett planned to establish permanent bureaus of reporters and editors in Buffalo and Boston to promptly report the latest eastern and western news as well.
To the press and the public, Morse’s ever-lengthening lines gained a more urgent importance with the onset of the Mexican War, in May 1846. Americans eagerly waited to learn about troop movements in Texas and Mexico. News from the front arrived in Washington by pony express and steamboat, where it was tapped out over the wires. As Superintendent of the line Morse drew up regulations to ensure that all interested parties had equal access to the incoming dispatches, which could be copied at the rate of two words for one cent. Among eastern papers, competition to get out the war news first was intense and wasteful. Bennett agreed with the editors of five other New York papers to receive the news in common and share the expense of transmitting it—the beginnings of the Associated Press.
Morse stayed aloof from the business problems of his developing empire, living most of the time in Washington as Superintendent of the original line, “pleasantly situated,” he said. He boarded in a room across from one occupied by the social reformer Robert Dale Owen, whom he got to know. An amiable man, he thought, but in his efforts to improve society without reference to Christianity, a “subject of pity.” Morse invented a useful device for locating breaks in the lines, experimented with using not one but several electromagnets in his register so that several pens could record messages at the same time. Other inventors submitted ideas to him, many of them harebrained: plans for suspending telegraph wires across rivers by balloons, transmitting “Grammalogues” through a “Phono-Magnetic Alphabet,” rendering people weightless by means of the “anti-gravitating power.”
Despite Morse’s distaste for the marketplace, events forced him back into its push and shove. The trouble began, in the late fall of 1846, with a clash between F. O. J. Smith and Henry O’Reilly. O’Reilly, to recall, had contracted to build two mammoth lines from the eastern United States to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. He also built separately for the Magnetic company the Baltimore to Philadelphia segment of the Washington-New York line. The segment had cost $4000 more and taken longer than O’Reilly planned—results of using iron instead of copper wire, and of the many rivers and creeks to be crossed. The delays set back his work on the western lines for six months to a year. Always quick to scent an advantage, Smith claimed that