Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [146]
Publicly and in private the two sides scourged each other as “Molochs,” “hyena-like personages,” “damned Skinflints,” “guerilla speculators.” Morse-ites routinely ridiculed O’Reilly as “the Great O’Reilly,” greatest humbugger of a humbugging age. O’Reilly-ites lampooned the wizened somber Kendall as “Old Amos,” “Amos the Pious,” or “Pope Amos.” F. O. J. Smith they impaled as “F. O. G. Smith” or simply “Fog”—names that stuck.
Morse abhorred the brawling and name-calling. But with the press sometimes identifying O’Reilly’s foes as “Morse & Co.,” he, too, came within the crossfire. “Notwithstanding my matters are all in the hands of agents and I have nothing to do with any of the arrangements,” he groaned, “I am held up by name to the odium of the public.” So recently a national hero, he saw himself become something like a national villain, “a target for every vile fellow to shoot at.” And he looked on as his invention, the so much praised wonder of the age, became derided and discarded.
O’Reilly had used Morse instruments on his west-moving lines. But he now began seeking out devices by other inventors to replace them. He favored the telegraph of a Vermonter named Royal House. It used a piano-like set of keys to transmit messages, one key per letter of the alphabet. The messages were reproduced at the receiving station by a type wheel that stamped the letters on a paper tape. Several newspapers highly praised House’s method. “Instead of an arbitrary character, like that which is used in Professor Morse’s machine, there is the letter of the alphabet,” reported the New York Herald; “It is … decidedly superior to any other telegraph ever used.” O’Reilly gave House money to develop his system, and secured rights to it for his western line. At the same time, he publicly belittled Morse’s telegraph, making known its supposed line breakdowns, errors in transmission, and other shortcomings. Morse and his associates had “diddled Uncle Sam out of $30,000,” he snickered; “There is more genius, twenty times, in House, than there is in Morse.”
House printing telegraph (Smithsonian Institution)
Morse examined a model of House’s invention at the Patent Office. He was certain that it infringed his patent and could be stopped in the courts or, if not, would prove to be “all humbug.” The printing of common letters seemed to him not only no advantage but a serious disadvantage. It called for twenty-eight keys instead of his one, and depended on a dense machinery of springs, magnetic coils, and clock trains, plus a hydraulic pump. Untested over long distances and slower than his own telegraph, it represented an “improvement backwards.” He lumped House with Cornell and others who were trying to capitalize on the success of his system, “to avail themselves of its popularity to make something for themselves.” Just the same, an editor of the New York Evening Post told him that after witnessing the device in operation he decided that its importance had been not exaggerated but underrated.
Though he thought House’s invention no more than a fussy gadget, Morse wished to protect himself against it. He filed a caveat with the Patent Office for a printing telegraph of his own. “I shall proceed to make it for curiosity’s sake, and to defeat these would-be infringers on their own ground.” But O’Reilly’s ground was always wide. He asked associates in Washington to speak with foreign diplomats and urge them to consider adopting some other telegraph than Morse’s for their countries. Morse